Pipe Mania (DS)

 1990's Pipe Dream was a favourite of mine among the games inclided in the thirty-two game Game Boy multicart I had as a kid and I know there's probably been a ton of updates and sequels and so on, with or without the approval of the original developers, but this one (which does seem to be official) is the only one I've played. It's something of a mixed bag, being a true sequel in the sense that it builds upon the game's concept with a lot of new ideas that really add to the formula, but it also implements some more modern structural ideas of which I'm less fond. And somewhere in the middle is an idea that makes the game worse (though it's mostly optional). In case you're not familiar with the concept, you have to lay down pieces of pipe in different shapes (randomly given to you like the pieces in Tetris), to direct the flow of a liquid from one place to another, usually with a quota of spaces it has to pass through first.

 

To get the good stuff out of the way first, there's generous helpings of it. In the game's main mode, the stages are split into different areas, each with its own aesthetic and its own substance whose flow you have to direct: whether it's chemicals through pipes, trains on tracks, electricity through coils, toys on factory conveyor belts, or data through cables, they all look great, each having their own unique and appeallingly-drawn pixel art tilesets. Each area has their own set of mechanical gimmicks, too: teleporters, switches to redirect the flow, gates to split or re-combine the flow, and so on, and they all work to add variety and legitimate challenge to the stages. There were definitely a few points where I got a little frustrated, but I never felt like the game was unfairly designed, just that I was failing to solve the puzzles, and as a result: when I did get through those moments, it was as satisfying as it should be. I can't really fault this aspect of the game. Except, there's a boss fight for each area, where as well as the regular puzzle, you have a character sending various attacks to destroy or change the pipes you've laid. These parts are no fun, but luckily, you can progress through the game without bothering with them.

 

There's a couple of other modes to play, too. Arcade is one that plays with the format a little. Instead of static single-screen stages, this mode has autoscrolling stages, in which you have to keep the flow onscreen as well as in the pipes. It's an interesting idea, but I found it too stressful to really enjoy. There's also the slightly misnamed classic mode, which just has a whole bunch of traditional single screen A-to-B stages without the heavy gimmickry of the main mode. This is a perfectly decent mode to play, though it takes a more modern structure where each stage is played in isolation and also scored as such. It might sound like nitpicking to some, but the name "classic" had me hoping for a mode similar to the original game, where you play stage-to-stage until you get a game over or reach the ending, building up a singular score as you go.

 

That's a small issue, and the biggest downside of the game are the optional bossfights, but there's one more negative I have to bring up. While the game looks great while you're playing it, with the aforementioned beautiful pixels, all the menus and character designs are a world away from that. They're all this kind of incredibly cheap-looking simple vector art, that I assume were created with easy scalability in mind, since as well as the DS, there are versions of this game on PS2, PC, PSP, and Wii. Despite the few flaws I've pointed out, though, I still really enjoyed pipe Mania. I prefer the structure of the original Pipe Dream, so I'd recommend that one before Pipe Mania, but Pipe Mania is still a great time, and still worth playng.

Building Crush! (Playstation)

 This is a hard post to write, and one I really hoped I wouldn't have to. The reason it's a hard post to write is because Building Crush! is an awful game, and everytime I loaded it up, I dreaded actually playing it. The reason I hoped that I wouldn't have to write it is because I'd originally planned to write about a differrent Playstation game, Buckle Up. Buckle Up is a pretty interesting semi-open world driving game that I think is kind of inspired by Dukes of Hazzard? But unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get past the first mission, so here's Building Crush! instead.

 

Building Crush! is a colour-matching puzzle game themed around the idea of competitive building demolition (or crushing, if you will). You and your opponent each stand on a window-washer's platform in front of a tall building. The buildings are made of cubes in various colours, most with windows on them. The windows are constantly opening and closing, and you have to throw bombs into them when they're open, then detonate them. When you destroy a cube in this way, any cubes touching it that are the same colour will also explode. Furthermore, the cubes above will fall down, and if they do so in a manner that creates a formation of four or more touching cubes of the same colour, those formations will then explode, creating the traditional competitive puzzle game chain reactions. 

 

So far it doesn't sound too bad, right? The main problem is that the game is incredibly slow. Moving around is slow and throwing the bombs is slow (and made worse when a window closes and your bomb just falls down uselessly). The only way to win a round is to destroy every last cube of which your building is composed, so rounds take several long minutes to finish, and each stage is a best-of-three match. Making things worse is that some cubes don't have windows, and can only be destroy either by linking them to same-coloured ones that do, or by repeatedly (and slowly) hitting them with many bombs until they eventually crack and disappear. And no matter how well you plan things, you'll always end up with at least one of these at the end of a round.

 

Another complication comes in the form of random objects that sometimes fall down from the 'bove. If they hit you, they actually slow things down in two ways! First, you're momentarily stunned. Then, a witch will fly onscreen and change one of the windowed cubes onscreen into an unwindowed cube. It's all a shame, as I'm sure the basic concept of the game could have been fun. It needed to be a lot faster, louder and more manic, and maybe have a lot bigger explosions and maybe some numbers flying around the place when you score big chains. As it is, it really feels like the developers were anxious about possibly over-stimulating players or something, like they might have had a good idea once, but stripped away all the fun and excitement, chasing some theoretical puzzle game player that won't play anything that isn't sedate. That's all conjecture on my part, of course. I doubt there's ever been or will ever be a developer interview related to a low budget Japan-only console-exclusive puzzle game from 1996.

 

Obviously, I don't recommend Building Crush! That exclamation mark at the end of its name is the most exciting thing about it. I guess it's also worth mentioning that your character has a little animated facepic thing that appears (and blocks your view) when you're doing well, and you actually make the face using a little photofit-type thing before you play. That's mildly impressive. Also one of the stage backgrounds is a photo of some people (presumably the developers) having a nice time in a nightclub, which is the kind of thing you don't really see in commercial videogames anymore.

Burger Kitchen (Game Gear)

 

 This is the first game I've played from Habit Soft, who've physically released a bunch of newly developed games for a variety of old consoles! With the exceptiong of a URL on the title screen, it really looks, sounds and feels like it could have come from the Game Gear's actual heyday (in contrast to something like M2's GG Aleste 3 from 2020, that pushes the hardware to its absolute limit, making a game that would have seemed impossible on the home consoles of the early nineties, let alone the humble Game Gear). Even the cutified burger restaurant theming calls to mind the fascination Japanese pop culture had with McDonalds (and similar chains) for a couple of years, as seen in things like Project A-ko 3 and Space Fantasy Zone.

 

How it works is that you've got a playfield that's four spaces high and eight spaces tall. Into the field will fall horizontal pairs of burger layers, being the burgers themselves, the top or bottom halves of the breadcake, or slices of cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, bacon (that looks more like salami), and that weird egg slab that only exists in burger restaurants. You lose when all the pieces pile up to cover the top space of either of the two middle columns. If two identical pieces are placed atop each other, they disappear, but you score no points.

 

To actually score points, you've got to construct burgers according to various recipes. There's got to be bottom bread on the bottom, a certain collection of ingredients in the middle, and a top bread on top. Then the whole thing will disappear, and you'll score the "price" of that particular recipe, or half the price if the ingredients were right, but in the wrong order. You'll have a quota of certain specific recipes to make a few times to clear each stage, but you still get points for non-quota burgers you make.

 

There's two game modes, the first of which being mission, where, upon completing a stage's quota, you go onto the next stage with a shiny new empty playing field, and which ends after five stages. The other is endless, where filling a quota will immediately start the next one, but since you can make any burgers for points, you really just need to have remembered all of the recipes and make what you can, when you can. Endless mode never clears out your playing field, and once you get to its equivalent of stage five, the quota has an infinity symbol, and the game just continues until you get a game over.

 

The game's cute and it's decently fun, and I do keep going back to it. But there is a frustrating little problem. Every recipe has to have a bottom bread on the bottom to be valid, and it's pretty often the case that there'll be no bottom bread pieces in the first few pairs that drop. Now, you can hold one for later, like in most modern Tetris games, but it's still frustrating that you can't even start putting things together for the first few drops. I'm ot sure exactly how I'd fix this, except for maybe eliminating the bottom bread piece and having a permanent layer of them beneath the playing field? It's not a massive problem, but it does bother me a little, especially since it's there every time you play,pretty much.

 

Burger Kitchen is a game that's cute, but very flawed, but also one to which I keep returning despite those flaws. It's really difficult to decide whether or not it gets my recomendation! I guess I'll say: it's fine? Play it if you want?

Card Captor Sakura: Clow Card Magic (Playstation)

 While there's a very well known Playstation puzzle game that's a Cardcaptor Sakura tie-in (Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura Eternal Heart), but this one, which is an entirely orignal game, rather than a themed re-skin of an existing one, is not so celebrated. Having now played it, I can see a few reasons for that. Not that it's necessarily a bad game, but it definitely doesn't have the broad appeal that "Tetris with characters you love" does. 

 

The biggest problem the game has is something I'll get to later, but the second biggest is that upon first playing it, it's not really clear what you're supposed to do. You choose to play as either Xiaolang or Sakura, and each stage sees your chosen character walking along a long transparent grid-marked road in the sky. Ahead of you, you'll see spinning Clow Cards in four colours: red, green, blue, and yellow. You shoot magic at them, and they disappear. Sometimes, you'll shoot one card, and a whole bunch of them will disappear, awarding you points.

 

What's happening here is that there's a kind of rock-paper-scissors circle involving the four colours, whereby shooting one colour will cause adjacent cards of the next colour in the cycle to disappear too, and they trigger the next colour, and so on. The cycle goes Red-Green-Yellow-Blue. In easy mode, it doesn't matter which button you press to shoot at a card, while in normal mode, each of the four face buttons is assigned a colour. If you shoot the wrong colour at a card in normal mode, it spawns a card of that colour. So, if you're smart (and dextrous), you can strategically place new card among the pre-existing formations to link together massive chain reactions and get many more points.

 

There's also a bit of a meta element to the game: each stage also has a meter for each of the four colours. The meters fill up as you vanish cards of their respective colour, and when filled to the top, you capture one of the Clow cards. Capture all four cards in a stage and afterwards you'll also get a fifth one. Get all the cards across the ten stages in story mode and you go on to play the extra eleventh stage and see the real ending (unfortunately, all the story scenes are the same with both characters).

 

Now, onto that biggest problem previously mentioned. What it is is that there's no playable modes other than the story mode (in which the stage layouts are identical every time), in easy or normal difficulty. I think it's a game that would have really benefitted from an endless score attack mode, or maybe even some kind of competitive mode. But you'll play through what there is in a few hours at most, and there's not much else in there, which is a shame. If you can read Japanese, there is some extra value in the very extensive Clow Card Uranai mode, which allows you to have your fortune read by various characters from the show, on a variety of subjects, using the Clow cards for cartomancy rather than the tarot.

 

Clow Card Magic is an incredibly cute game, and it's definitely worth the time of any Cardcaptor Sakura fan, since it does such a great job of capturing (ho ho) the look and feel of the show and its world. For anyone else, though, it probably won't hold your interest, and the re-themed Tetris is probably a better bet for you. (Apparently, the mode that appears in later Tetris games that builds on the ideas of that game is considered one of the great monumental challenges for Tetris players!)

Olivia's Mystery (SNES)

 

 Ages ago, I tried to review a Saturn game entitled Cube Battler, but for some reason, I just couldn't get into it at all, and couldn't force myself to play it enough to write a review of it. I was a puzzle game, that saw you moving and rotating cubes around to make a jigsaw puzzle, which was an animated FMV constantly looping in little bits on the faces of the cubes. Olivia's Mystery predates Cube Battler, and the pieces are 2D rectangular tiles rather than 3D cubes, but it is also a game about solving jigsaw puzzles in which the pieces all have a little bit of animation looping on them.

 

From what I remember, Cube Battler also had some kind of competitive element to it, too, which Olivia's Mystery doesn't have. Instead, Olivia's Mystery tells a story. The game's structure is incredibly simple: you read a passage of text telling a part of the story, then you solve a jigsaw puzzle depicting a little animated scene from that chapter. And that's the whole game! You can pick up the pieces, move them around, and flip them horiontally and vertically. There's also doubles of some of the pieces in each stage, and when you place a fake one in the correct position on the board, it explodes and vanishes.

 

Of course, this only wastes a few seconds, as you can just pick up and place the identical remaining piece and put it in the same place. It's actually pretty helpful, as when a piece explodes, you know you're going in the right direction, since they only explode in the right position and orientation. The start of each stage can feel a little overwhelming, with all the pieces scattered around at random, all playing their little loops discordantly. 

 

The story is pretty whimsical and episodic, feeling a little like it's being made up on the fly by a particularly imaginative child. It concerns a kindgom facing a water shortage, but you find water on the moon, along with an abandoned civilisation, but the moon water contains parasites that make the princess ill, and so on. There's apparently three endings, with the amount of time you take to get through the game determining which one you get.

 

This is an okay, mildly interesting game. I can't imagine anyone who isn't a massive jigsaw enthusiast buying at full price on release, and I'm sure there's no-one on earth who could muster up the enthusiasm to pay the prices for which it sells online these days. But emulating also means you can play the fan-translated version, and read the story, which is nice. You'll probably get an hour or two of distraction out of it before you get bored.

Panel Ninja Keesamaru (Game Boy)

 Despite having a translation patch, this is a game that I've never seen mentioned before, anywhere. I only found it myself because I was copying Pipe Dream over to the Game Boy folder of my RGB30, and decided to copy over some alphabetically local games that caught my eye alongside it. Also, there's almost no text in the game, and what little there is wouldn't present any barrier to progress, so it's an odd choice for having a translation patch.

 

Each stage is a single screen puzzle, in which you have to literally leave no stone unturned in seeking out the exit door and the key to open said door. Your main action, other than moving, is to flip floor panels. When you do this, you flip the panel in front of and behind you, toggling those panels between two positions: blank, upon which you can walk, and shiny, upon which you can't. So you have to flip tiles in such a manner as to make your own way through the stage, and also to leave blank spaces onto which stones can be rolled. There's also enemies wandering about in some stages, that can be defeated by flipping the tiles they're walking across.

 

After fourteen stages, you'll also face your first boss fight! The boss wanders back and forth at the top of the screen, shooting at you, while you have to roll stones into pits, looking for the switch to step on that kills the boss. Interesting that they'd make the boss fights into puzzles, when there are (mostly pointless) single-use weapon items hidden around the stages. Obviously, this is the kind of game where everything has a clear and specific purpose in the world (a quality I've referred to in the past as "purity"), and every stage is an arrangement of those elements that tests your understanding of them, with new elements being introduced every couple of stages. It's a surprise that it doesn't have a stage editor, actually, since similarly constructed Game Boy games did, like the pirate cart classics Pitman and Hyper Lode Runner.

 

Unfortunately, while I was enjoying this game for a couple of hours, disaster eventually struck! Eventually, you'll "level up", and instead of just flipping the tiles directly in front of and behind you, you'll flip the four tiles orthogonally adjecent to you. I feel like this might have been implemented without it having been properly tested, as it mostly makes things more difficult, rather than easier, and I eventually reached a point, almost twenty stages in, where it just made progress impossible, as it prevented me from making a space to roll a stone, and then clear a path back to the other side of the stone to do the pushing. So, I'd recommend the game, were it not for that one small, but devestating flaw. Never mind.

U.P.P. (Playstation)

 Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information on what UPP stands for. But I did find out that apparently, when it was released, the big selling points for UPP were the attack animations and the voice cast. Though I've never been into sriyuu fandom, so I can't really comment on that, I can say that the attack animations do look really great. The characters appear onscreen casting their spells in big, screen-filling animations. Well animated and high resolution, you could be tricked into thinking this was a PC-FX game or something.

 

But I should really get onto describing the game in which these attacks are taking place, shouldn't I? It's a typical match three coloured blocks falling stuff puzzle game. Except that the blocks are floating upwards towards the top of your well instead of falling to the bottom. For the sake of convenience, just remember that if I describe falling or gravity for the rest of this review, imagine I did so upside-down. Anyway, the mechanics of the actual colour matching are as generic as can be: you put three or more of the same colour in a row, and they disappear. The combat aspect, though, is similar to the Hanagumi Taisen Columns games, in that rather than sending junk blocks over to your opponent's well by making chains, you instead fill up a meter, and can use the meter at your leisure to perform a character-specific attack.

 

These attacks are pretty varied, too! From simple things like filling up the bottom of your opponent's well, sticking all the blocks in your opponent's well together so they don't fall when those below them are erased, and so on. The final boss in single player mode has an especially harsh one: a few random blocks in your well will temporarily be turned into skulls. Erase three skulls over the course of the match, and you immediately lose! Unfortunately, as interesting as these attacks are, and as impressive as the animations that accompany them are, they also provide the game with its biggest negative.

 

The problem is that the pace is so slow! My favourite puzzle game series is Magical Drop, in which matches are often over in a couple of seconds, making UPP's matches feel glacial in comparison. The meter-building gameplay is slow enough (even though it never feels as such in the aforementioned Columns games. maybe the meters just fill faster in those games?), but the much-lauded animations cause everything to stop for ten to twenty seconds while they play. That's longer than an entire Magical Drop match, for a purely cosmetic element!

 

UPP isn't a bad game, and I think it's worth playing at least once, just for how good it looks. But I don't think it's a puzzle game anyone will be going back to for years and years, and I especially don't think it's one that you'll get a lot of fun out of through playing against human opponents, either. Most of all, though, and I think I've said this about puzzle games a few times before: I can't imagine anyone ever choosing this over Magical Drop or Puyo Puyo or Money Idol Exchanger or Landmaker or any of the other greats of the genre.

Zig Zag Cat Dachou Club mo Oosawagi da (SNES)

 It seems doubtful that I'll find another brick breaking game that comes close to being as good as either of the two titans that stand atop the genre, Puchi Charat and Prism Land Story, but I keep on looking. Zig Zag Cat, though it does have a few interesting ideas, definitely isn't the one to do it. And remember: interesting and good aren't always the same thing.

 

The biggest idea Zig Zag Cat has is structural: it's got some vague, very slight RPG bits mixed in with the Arkanoid-like action. Very slight meaning that there's little "towns" (contained entirely within one building each) between the stages, with save points, inns (that don't seem to actually do anything), and shops. The shops sell power ups, but they're as temporary as the ones that appear in the stages themselves, and coupled with the rarity of the coins, a bit pointless. There's no permanent equipment or levelling up or anything, though. Which on the one hand is a plus for the game's balance and difficulty curve, but it would at least have offered something a bit more exciting to talk about. I wonder how levelling up and permanent upgrades would even work in a game like this, for example.

 

The stages themselves are vertically scrolling, and for the most part, sparsely populated with bricks to hit with your ball. And while the screen's scrolling, you can just hit them with your paddle as you get to them anyway. A few times in each stage, though, the scrolling stops, and you have to get through a more traditional Arkanoid-style stage, though even here you don't have to break all the bricks, just one particular one. It's a grey blob thing that opens an eye the first two times you hit it and disappears on the third. The stages are all completely linear, of course, and it all feels like a significantly more boring version of Devilish on the Mega Drive.

 

Something else that makes this game noteworthy, other than its unusual combination of structure and genre is that it's a tie-in game to a Japanese comedy trio called Dachou Club. I don't really know anything about them, other than that the first related search result I found was a news story about one member's untimely death in 2022. They appear a few times to say stuff to your character, but I can't read Japanese, so I can't tell you anything about what they say. Since the protagonist is some kid, and the ball is his cat, I wonder if the tie-in was something added late in development? It seems more like pretty generic early nineties "it'll do" nonsense than something a group of famous comedians would come up with.

 

I don't recommend playing Zig Zag Cat. I played it for about an hour or two and at best I was bored, and at worst I was frustrated (and not in a fun way). But it's weird and unusual in various ways, and now you know about it. You're welcome, I guess?

SubaraCity (3DS)

 I discovered this game while trying to find a city building game for 3DS. I didn't find one, so if anyone can recommend any, please let me know. Well, it is about building cities in a literal sense, but it's not a city building game like Sim City or something. It's a puzzle game, like Zookeeper or Sega Swirl, that is themed around buidling a city. 

 

How it works is that there are buildings/people/trees/etc. in a few colours on a grid. If they're the same colour and touching, they can be fused together into a higher-quality building. You pick which of the multiple squares the buildings being matched together go into, leaving empty spaces where the rest of them are.Then more buildings fall down to fill the empty spaces. Or, since the game is played looking down from above, the new buildings fall southwardly. It doesn't really make sense either way, so don't worry about it. Once a building reaches level ten, its colour changes to white, and it can only be fused with other level ten buildings. When you do this, the level of the new building is determined by how many level tens are being fused: two of them become level eleven, three become level twelve, and so on. 

 

As you're doing this, two numbers are going up. The first is population, which is your score. It goes up depending on the levels of the buildings you create, and gets a massive boost every time you make a ten plus building. The other number is the year. It starts at the year 2000, and goes up a year for every action you take. You've also got an expendible resource called mayor marks, which let you destroy one building. You start with two mayor marks, and get another every time you pass another century, and every time you make a building that's level fifteen or higher. The game ends when you've got no buildings of the same colour touching each other and you have no mayor marks with which to make space.

 

The presentation is kind of interesting, too. Visually, it's pretty much exactly how you'd expect: cute little buildings and people, all very clean and toy-like in appearance. But the music is completely bizarre. It's good, I'm not denying that, but it's also incredibly ill-fitting. You're playing this cute little puzzle game, all while the 3DS is playing this dramatic, doom-laden apocalyptic score that almost sounds like it could be made up of castoffs from the Akira soundtrack! 

 

This is a fun game, and incredibly addictive. After installing, I immediately played through an entire charge of my 3DS' battery in one sitting. Apparently, it's also available on pretty much every other modern platform, so if you want to give the developers some money (that they definitely deserve, and which I'll be doing as soon as possible), get one of those versions rather than (or in addition to) the 3DS one.

Puzzle de Bowling (Arcade)

 I think it's a fair thing to say that iteration and expansion on existing ideas, even if they're someone else's, is a legitimate form of game design. It's a fine line though, especially when you go with an aesthetic that leers very close to that of your ludological muse. Puzzle de Bowling iterates upon the Puzzle Bobble series with a couple of its own ideas, but as inferred, I think making it look so much like Taito's games was a big mistake that gives it the air of a shameless mockbuster.

 

Like you've probably inferred, Puzzle de Bowling is a lot like Puzzle Bobble, but with a bowling theme. Also, the characters are cute anthropomorphised signs of the zodiac. There's a bunch of different-coloured bowling pins at the top of the field, and you roll different-coloured bowling balls at them. When the balls stop moving, they become pins, and if this results in three or more pins of the same colour touching, they'll vanish, and any other-coloured pins hanging off of them wil fall off, too. If you manage to get lots of pins in one go, you can get strike and split bonuses. 

 

The mechanical quirks come from the bowling theme. There's gutters at either side of the field, and you can get a gutterball, though I'm not sure of what the penalty is for doing this. It can get balls of unwanted colours out of the way, at least. The big one, though, is the way you can put a little curve on the ball. As well as moving your character left and right along the bottom of the field with the joystick, there are three buttons related to controlling the ball. Before you roll it, you can press the left and right buttons to determine a point at which the ball will veer in the respective direction. So you can get the ball into awkward little nooks that would require a difficult trick shot in Puzzle Bobble.

 

It sounds like it's an ability that would make the game far too easy, but it doesn't work out like that in practice. The puzzles in the solo puzzle mode are designed in such a way that though the curving system is very helpful, it won't get you out of every jam, and the weakness it has in versus mode is that it does take a couple of seconds longer to line up a perfect curved shot than an okay straight one. I'm sure with practice, high level players could theoretically be able to play accurately at high speed. But, obviously, this game is so forgotten, it's very unlikely that there are any high-level players anywhere in the world. Especially since its only home port was cancelled before release.

 

Anyway, and I feel like this is something I've said about other puzzle games in the past, Puzzle de Bowling is a decent enough game. It's fun to play, and like I said, its lack of originality isn't too much of a black mark, as it's obvious that the developers had an idea they wanted to try out that was an iteration on an existing one, and that's fine. The aesthetics, though, feel a bit cheap. The character designs are incredibly generic, and if you put the characters in Puzzle de Bowling up against those in its contemporaries like Magical Drop 3 or Puchi Charat, they're just lacking a certain intangible something to make them appealing. But here's the part I'm sure I've said before: the later nineties were an amazing time for puzzle games, and lots of really excellent titles were coming out. So why would you ever play this one over any of the others? It just isn't as good or as interesting or as exciting as any of them. Give it a shot in MAME if you're curious, but don't expect it to stick with you.