Yoyo's Puzzle Park (Playstation)

 There's some slightly odd circumstances surrounding the release of this game. Firstly, it's one of those games with a massive gap between its Japanese release (1996) and its western release (1999). Also, in Japan, it's called Gussun Paradise, which is a better name for it than Yoyo's Puzzle Park for two reasons. The first is that it lets you know that it's a spinoff from the Gussun Oyoyo series of puzzle games, and the second is that the reason it's a spinoff and not one of the main entries is that it's not a puzzle game. Instead, it's a Bubble Bobble-like: a single screen platformer in which you have to kill every enemy to progress, and also you score more points by killing multiple enemies in one go.

 

Unfortunately, every game in this genre is expected to have its own novel way of killing its enemies, that allows for that multi-kill high score play, and by 1996 the well seems to have been running dry. How it works here is that there are enemies going around, and they kill you if you touch them. You can stun them by shooting at them with one of those cone-shaped party poppers, which also knocks them back a little bit, so you can (labouriously) get them where you want them to be. There are also living bombs with faces that just kind of passively sit around. You can't shoot them with your popper, but you can go right up to them and kick them, or you can jump on them from above or headbutt them from below. Any of these nudges them a bit, and lights their fuse. Naturally, their explosions are pretty big, and they kill anyone caught in them, friend or foe.

 

It's awkward, slow, and just generally not fun at all. The worst part of it all is that the bombs regenerate where they exploded, and while you can kick them off of the edge of platforms, but there's no way to get them back to higher parts of the screen. Meanwhile, the enemies, when not stunned, can jump up to higher levels at will, meaning that you'll spend a lot of time stunning enemies and kicking them down the stage to get them to the bombs that are stuck down there. There's some interesting power-ups, at least, in the form of vehicle/animal/rubber ring things that go around your waist and give you new abilities, like flight or long-range shots. I don't think there's any that just let you directly kill enemies, though, like there are in most games of this type.

 

Though I found playing the game itself fiddly and tedious, there are some things I liked about the presentation. The map screen, from whence you pick which set of stages you're going to tackle is a very nice bit of pixel art. In fact, the game's premise is a stamp rally around the various different areas of a theme park, and it really commits to this concept in things like the save and load screens and such. Stages will do gimmicky things based on where in the park they're meant to be, too: in the aquarium, there's rising and falling water levels, with some enemies floating at the top of it, on a flight simulator, the entire screen tilts, and so on. Something else nice is the unusually human way the options are phrased: instead of "new game" and "load game", there's "play from the beginning" and "continue", while "play on my own", and "two of us play" take the place of "one player" and "two player". It's immediately noticable and adds a lot of charm.

 

Like you might have figured out, I didn't enjoy playing Yoyo's Puzzle Park, and I don't recommend it. At least, I don't recommend playing it and expecting a fun game. Give it a quick go to see how nicely presented it is, though. Then you can properly lament what a chore the actual game is. I'm surprised to learn, from a quick look at ebay, that copies are less than a hundred pounds, but still a lot more than I'd recommend paying.