Nyoki Nyoki Tabidachi-hen (3DS)

The developer/publisher of this game is a company named Compile-O, who are apparently made up of former members of Compile. Considering that this is a colour-matching versus puzzle game, that must be a good thing, right? At first glance, the little multicoloured blobs look a lot like Puyos, too. Luckily, though Nyoki Nyoki Tabidachi-hen manages to be both a good game, and an original enough concept to avoid being trapped in Puyo Puyo's shadow.

Like in Puyo Puyo, you put the same-coloured blobs next to each other and they merge, but unlike Puyo Puyo, you can keep doing this with as many of them as you like, and they won't disappear on their own, they'll just keep merging into bigger and bigger hattifattener-like blobby towers until you're ready to make them pop. The process of making them pop is a little like Super Puzzle Fighter, or Baku Baku Animal, in that you accumulated tower of blobs has to be touched by an activation blob of the same colour to vanish. The difference being that in this game, rather than waiting around for the activator to be given to you, at the touch of a button, you can change the piece you're currently controlling into an activator, and you can do this whenever you like, and how often you like.

Obviously, getting rid of lots of blobs at once means giving your opponent lots of junk blobs to get in their way, but even this is subject to the same kind of player choice as the activator blobs. All the junk pieces you create by destroying the coloured blobs on your side are stored until you want to use them. Once they're there, you can drop them at any time you like, though a maximum of 40 can be dropped in one go, after which there's a few seconds of cooldown time. These two mechanics, the player-summoned activator blobs and the player-launched junk blobs work together to create a unique kind of tension not usually seen in these kinds of games: you might be tempted to build up huge piles of blobs before you get rid of them, or huge amounts of junk to pummel your opponent with, but you have to be careful and keep an eye on what they're doing too, as if you're not, just a few well-timed junk blobs dropped into your field could ruin all your plans.

So yeah, Nyoki Nyoki Tabidachi-hen is a decent game, that proves that there's still new things to be done with the competitive colour matching puzzle genre. And by the people who started it, no less! Of course, it's a Japan-only 3DS game, so actually getting to play it might be difficult for some people, but I'm sure you can figure something out if you want it.