Suho Jeonsa (Master System)

 Pretty much every block-breaking game that's less than thirty-five years old has some kind of special gimmick. Looking at the two games I consider to be the best of the genre, Prism Land Story has its crazy stacking power-ups, and Puchi Charat has the competitive element and the general application of (a modified version of) the Puzzle Bobble 2 rules, for example. Suho Jeonsa (also known as Suho Cheonsa and Power Brick)'s got a few ideas up its sleeve, and it somehow manages to have a similar structure to a more well-known game from a few years later.

 

Bascially, the stages in Suho Jeonsa are split into to halves: the first half has you breaking bricks in the time-worn manner (though for some reason, instead of being at the bottom of the screen, you're on the left side f it?), though the aim isn't to break every block, but to break one specific double-sized block in the centre of the screen. Every block, centre or otherwise, takes two hits to break, which is annoying, but they did at least put a little bit of charm into this element. Every stage has a theme, like animals, or cakes, or whatever. There's even an emoji stage, which is surprising in a game from 1994! But anyway, the first time you hit a block, it changes somehow, in keeping with the theme, like the animal blocks fall over, with their feet pointing at the camera, tubes of paint get squeezed out, and so on.

 

The second half of each stage has you fighting a boss, which will appear in the form of a big weird thing (still sticking to the theme of the stage, though), that randomly hovers around the screen, occasionally shooting an instant death shot. You kill the bosses just by hitting them with the ball a bunch of times, and they don't really ever get any harder. Their presence does make Suho Jeonsa kind of feel like a weird primitive version of Psikyo's 2001 arcade game Gunbarich. While the bosses never get harder, the actual stages do, though in an annoying, unfair-feeling way: they gradually start with rows of blocks closer and closer to the left edge of the screen, giving you a smaller and smaller amount of space to work with.

 

There's not much else to say about Suho Jeonsa, except maybe that the aforementioned "Power Brick" version was released only in Australia as part of a four-in-one cartridge, that contained three other Korean-developed games. But Suho Jeonsa was the first version of the game I found, and there's no text in there anyoway, other than the intro, so I stuck with it. As for whether the game is worth playing, eh, it's okay. I wouldn't pay big money for it (being a decades-old unlicensed cartridge, I'm assuming it's probably at least fairly rare, in any of its forms), but it's a decent enough block-breaking game, on a system that doesn't have many, so it's worth a look via emulation if you're curious.