Simple 2000 Series Ultimate Vol. 17 Taisen! Bakudan Poi Poi (PS2)

Some of you might remember the two Poy Poy/Poitter's Poit games on the original Playstation, which had a (very) small cult following in the west at the time. If not, then they were a pair of multiplayer action games, where a bunch of characters in a small field tried to be the last one standing in a game of chucking objects at each other. They had a very distinct visual style, with brightly coloured, very low poly graphics even by the standards of the time. Taisen! Bakuden Poi Poi is at the very least, a spiritual successor to those games. It might be an actual sequel, though because the titles are only similar, not the same, and the fact that I can't find any companies involved in those games and this one.

As well as the Poy Poy games, it's also a kind of modern reimagining of the 1987 arcade game Butasan. While Poy Poy had players throwing rocks and logs and so on to damage each other, Bakudan Poi Poi is all about running around throwing time bombs at each other, just like Butasan. Though Butasan was about cartoonish anthropomorphised pigs in muddy fields, while this game is about realistic humans in a modern day (or at least, early 2000s) Japanese setting. The reaslistic setting actually makes the game feel a lot sillier, as you have schoolgirls, policemen, soldiers, and so on, running around parking lots and suburban wastelands holding big round bombs above their heads and chucking them at each other.

There aren't just normal bombs, either: there's also a rugby ball-shaped bomb that bounces around wildly after being thrown, a landmine, and a UFO-looking bomb that creates a slow movement field when it explodes. There's also a few power-ups. Normal ones, like health refills and invincibility, and stranger ones, like a potion that makes you fall asleep, and an orb that turns you into a bomb, allowing you to lie in wait until another player picks you up before exploding.

Single player mode has you going through a short series of missions as each character. The missions are mostly just to kill a certain quota of opponents before time runs out or you get killed yourself. So it could be "kill 10 policemen", or "kill 30 of any opponent", for example. The final stage for each character is a boss fight against an opponent who has three hit points like you, and can even pick up the healing items like you can.

It's a pretty fun game, all told. It gets repetitive pretty quickly, but the all-round zaniness and the chaos of the constant explosions alleviates that a fair bit. Pretty much perfect for a Simple 2000 game, and it doesn't have any of the pointless grinding that drags down so many of its stablemates, either. If you stumble across a copy at any time, and assuming it still carries an appropriately low price tag, it's definitely worth a try.