Kirby Dedede and Nightmare

Entry for 's contest, Game Bosses.

I had this scene from "Kirby's Nightmare in Dreamland" GBA version in my head when I read the contest info, because for the longest time, I though King Dedede was the bad guy in this whole game (after all, he was the final boss in "Kirby in Dreamland" for the GameBoy). Nope, he's just a simple antagonist-penguin-duck-bird-thingie to Kirby, and this apparently star-filled ball with Mr. Nightmare innit was the ultimate evil.

This is the funny part: I always laugh when King Dedede and Kirby panics for five seconds -- "Oh, no! Oh, no! Whaddawe do?! Whaddawe do?!" -- when the ball-thing comes out after Kirby inserts the Star Rod into the fountain of dreams... then Dedede swallows Kirby and the Rod whole and spits 'em out into the stratosphere, "GO FIX THIS MESS, DAMMIT!"

And that was the time when I THOUGHT I'd beaten the damn game, but then I was thrown, literally, into another final-final two-part boss battle. So I thought this was rather epic back then, challenge-wise, and I was still a noob at video games at that time.

Hence why I chose this render for the contest.

Done in Photoshop CS4, royalty-free textures collected from outside the DASphere -- just can't remember where...

Characters Kirby, King Dedede and the Nightmare Ball-Thingie (C) Nintendo
Image (C) Mira K. Hall