Block Wars (Playstation)

It's kind of interesting, that every time I find another Versus Arkanoid clone, it manifests its competitive element in a totally different way. There's the most famous example, Puchi Carat, that essentially transplants Puzzle Bobble's ruleset into a block-breaking environment, there's Blocken, with its combination of a block-breaking race, and Tetris Battle Gaiden-esque attacks, and now Block Wars, which has yet another interpretation of the concept.

How it works is that the field is horizontally aligned, with a player at each end, barrier in the middle, and a solid wall behind each player. Each player starts with an identical set of blocks, and they go about their business smashing them with the ball. There's a bunch of characters to choose from, and as far as I can tell, they differ in how fast the ball goes, and how quickly it accelerates. There are two possible win conditions, the least interesting being smashing all your blocks before your opponent does.

Much more interesting is the way the walls and centre barrier come into play. The other way you can win is to ensure that one of the blocks on your opponent's side touches the wall behind them. Of course, this is done by moving the barrier in the middle of the field. There's two things that make the barrier move: hitting it with your ball pushes it away from you and towards your opponent. Allowing your ball to hit the wall behind you does the opposite. I think hitting the barrier also makes extra blocks appear on your opponent's side of the field, but the game moves really fast, so I'm not totally sure about that.

Well, the balls move really fast, but the game doesn't always. As is often a problem in single player Arkanoid-likes, you do often end up with situations where both players have one brick remaining in a hard-to-reach place, and there's a long, tense battle to be the first to reach it. And of course, with no blocks in the way, both players are knocking the barrier back and forth, too. The tension would probably be a lot more exciting with human opponents than AI ones, I assume.

Block Wars is a playable game, but if you plan on playing it single player, I wouldn't bother. There's a perfectly fine Playstation port of Puchi Carat, and that game's a lot more fun, and it has a couple of solo modes, too. Maybe Block Wars would have worked better as an arcade game, maybe on a tabletop cabinet with a vertically-aligned screen between the players?

Crayon Shin-chan Puzzle Daimaou no Nazo (3DO)

I'm not super familiar with Crayon Shin-chan, but I do know it's one of those absurdly long-running family anime that's been going since at least the early 1990s. I did see one episode once, back in the early 2000s when Fox Kids was still around, and I was really caught off guard and surprised to see that a kids channel was airing a show where a little boy gets a package from the postwoman and remarks "Hey, I've got a little package for you too, baby!" Anyway, as long-running as it is, it's had many videogame tie-ins, and this is one of them, on that doomed console, the 3DO.

It's a puzzle game of the sort that could really be skinned to match pretty much any property at all, though since it's a 3DO game, they have gone all-out with the theming, and there's lots of little animations and a ton of voice acting. Of course, it's a versus-style puzzle game, and it takes the Tetris Battle Gaiden approach of having special blocks that have to be cleared to activate special abilities, though unlike TBG, which has you saving those blocks up to use a more powerful power at your leisure, in this game, the power is used as soon as the special block is cleared. An extra little bit of personality I liked about this game is that every character has their own set of normal blocks, which I presume are linked to their interests. Like Shin-chan has little scribbly faces, his dad has socks and beer, and so on. It's a nice touch, and a more interesting way of saying "look at all the space a CD gives us compared to cartridges" than FMVs, too.

Anyway, different normal blocks fall from the 'bove, and disappear either when four of the same are placed in a straight line, or in a two-by-two square. If you get rid of them via the square method, one of the blocks in the next piece will be replaced with a special question mark block, which can take the place of any colour/shape in a disappearing formation. The kind of blocks with which you make the special blocks disappear decides which power gets activated. For example, one colour will make a randomly-selected bunch of the pieces in your pit fly away, another will erase the bottom three rows of your pit, and another will dump two rows of garbage blocks into your opponent's pit. As is tradition, the first person to have blocks go over the top of their pit loses.

Unfortunately, I have to say the same thing I say in almost every post I write about versus puzzle games: it's alright, but Puyo Puyo, Magical Drop, and a few other games have perfected aspects of the genre to such an extent that any other games have to have something really special to be worth anyone's time. And unless you really love Shin-chan and can understand spoken Japanese, Puzzle Daimaou no Nazo doesn't really have anything going for it. It's not a problem that troubles other genres, but I feel like versus puzzlers, especially the ones that aren't in the upper echelons, are so similar that it makes it possible for a few games to rise to cyclopean heights and eclipse all would-be competitors. I mean there are a few that aren't as good as those mentioned, but are still worth playing, like Landmaker, for example, but again, Landmaker is a very unique game that stands out.

Palamedes II - Star Twinkles (NES)

You might remember that a while back, I reviewed the arcade game Palamedes, which was all about matching dice and forming hands and so on. Palamedes II is the sequel to that game, obviously. It's still about matching dice and forming hands, but it's been completely re-jigged to make a much faster, more competitive game.

The most obvious difference compared to the first game (and the only one that Wikipedia mentions) is that the dice now rise up from the bottom of the screen, rather than descending from the top, but there are many more changes. For example, while before, your character held a die, and you would cycle through the sides, throwing it up to hit a matching die above. Now, you press a button to shuffle the column of dice directly beneatht you, and another to take the top of the column. Complicating this is the fact that you can only take a die that is the same, or one higher or lower than the last die that was taken. This is simple enough to keep track of in the single player endurance mode, but when you've got an opponent, the same "last die taken" applies to both players, which offers an extra little strategic element as you try and ruin your opponent's hands while building your own.

The hands themselves have also changed, as they're now made up of only four dice instead of six, which means versus games are a lot faster, with both sides forming hannds and cashing them in every couple of seconds, and as a result, both characters moving up and down the screen quickly. It's pretty exciting, and a good change all round, even if it does take away the satisfaction of forming a nice clean 1-2-3-4-5-6 hand like in the first game. I should probably mention that as the dice are ascending up the screen, the characters stand on a platform on top of them, and you lose when your character is crushed between their platform and the ceiling. Oh, and forming hands erases rows of dice from beneath you, and forces the same number to quickly rise up beneath your opponent. Those are pretty important details, but I just couldn't find a place to fit them in until now.

I've said this before about competitive puzzle games, but though Palamedes II is a great game, it's in a genre with some pretty much perfect entries in the form of the Puyo Puyo series, the Magical Drop series, and in more recent times, Puyo Puyo x Tetris, too. But if you've got a Famicom (or a NES with an adaptor, or some other Famicom-compatible console) and you see a copy of this game going cheap somewhere, it's definitely worth picking up.

Minesweeper (PC Engine)

Traditionally, the main strength of Minesweeper has been the fact that it's insantly accessible on your computer's desktop at a second's notice. Logically, therefore, a version of the game that requires a console, a TV and a physical copy of the game might seem superfluous to the point of absurdity. And it is! But still, the PC Engine version of Minesweeper does have something in its favour, which is, like what the arcade game Logic Pro did for nonograms (that is, making an actual videogame out of them), as does this with the concept of Minesweeper.

There's four modes to choose from once you start the game, though we can disregard two of them right off the bat: one's just regular old Minesweeper, and the other lets you choose the size of the grid and the number of mines. The meat of the game is in the other two modes: The Voyage and Cook's Quest. The Voyage is the least interesting of the two, being set in the high seas of the sixteenth century, it's just a long series of pre-set Minesweeper grids for you to gradually progress through in order. What really kills the draw of this mode is that despite being on the PC Engine CD, a system that has space for game saves built into itself, Minesweeper expects you to write passwords down like some kind of stone-age oaf, which wouldn't be so bad in a normal game, but remember: this is just another layer of obfuscation put on top of what is already a comedically inconvenient way to play Minesweeper.

The other mode, Cook's Quest suffers from the same problems of pre-set rids and lack of saves, but I'm willing to give it much more leeway simply because it's generally a much more interesting concept and a lot more fun to play. In this mode, each grid is part of a large underground cave complex, and there are doors dotted around the edges. You aren't expected to clear every mine on every grid, just carve out a safe path to the doors and to the various treasures and items strewn about the place too. This is actually a pretty addictive mode, and not only is it a lot more fun and interesting than regular Minesweeper, but it actually makes sense to be using a D-pad rather than a mouse in this mode, since you can't go more than a space away from the safe spaces you've already revealed.

Though it's obvious that the grids are pre-set to make this a fairly-designed game, it is a buzz killer to be digging around for half an hour, only to misclick and go all the way back to the start to solve the exact same puzzles again to get back to where you were. Maybe it could have had both pre-set and randomised modes, like Toejam and Earl on the Mega Drive? What would be really cool is if you were digging for artifacts, and each one had an in-game encyclopedia entry, like in La Mulana or something. But I'm just fantasy game designing now, aren't I?

Anyway, Minesweeper is a ridiculous game that shouldn't really exist. But it does, and you can get a copy dirt cheap. I recommend you do so, just so you can play Cook's Quest and fantasise about how much better it would have been with just a few changes. Aah.

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.

Soreyuke! Amida-kun! (Game Boy)

So, I'm sure you've all seen the Amida lot-drawing system somewhere at some point, whether it's in the bonus stages for Super Mario Land 2 or Psycho Fox, or that episode of Cardcaptor Sakura where Syaoran gets picked to be the princess in the school play. In case you haven't, how it works is that there's a bunch of vertical lines with different results at one end, and all these lines are connected at random by vertical lines. Normally, the middle area with all the vertical lines would be covered up while everyone chooses a starting point. After everyone has chosen a starting point, they go down the path they've selected, with the twist being that every time they come to a horizontal line, they have to go across it, and since they were all hidden when the paths were chosen, no-one knows where they'll end up.

In Soreyuke! Amida-Kun (also known as just "Amida"), you control a sentient, mobile vertical line. There's a round Kirby-like creature on each stge who wants to get home, and you have to get them there, while ensuring they don't walk into any skulls, which are at all the ends of the vertical paths that aren't home, as well as on some of the horizontal paths too. Obviously, you do this by moving around and actng as a bridge so that the creature crosses at all the right places.

The stages start out pretty simple, with only a few vertical paths and regular old horizontals dotted about. As the game goes on, though, more vertical paths get added, as well as different kinds of paths joining them, starting with diagonal paths, which act the same as horizontals, but take up more room. Then later there's paths that just send your little blob back the way from whence they came, and others that teleport them to a different part of the stage, and so on. Like most fixed puzzle games, it starts out simple, and gets more complex and difficult by scaling up the size of the problems and adding new elements. It actually gets pretty difficult surprisingly quickly, once you get past the first few stages.

There's not really much more to be said about this game. If it sounds interesting, give it a shot, but don't expect anything spectacular.

Pastel Muses (Saturn)

There's a lot of iteration in the world of puzzle games: one game gets popular, and other developers try to replicate this success by taking the core mechanic of that game, and adding to it, or changing it in some way. Sometimes it might be the same developer, like how Taito tried to repeat the success of their Puzzle Bobble games by taking those games' ruleset and applying it to an Arkanoid-alike when they made Puchi Charat. Softoffice, developers of Pastel Muses and no other games before or since, took the "shooting coloured bubbles at each other" concept from Puzzle Bobble, and moved the target bubbles from the top of a well to the bottom of a small valley.

To clarify, like Puzzle Bobble, Pastel Muses has you control a cute character firing coloured bubbles from a device, with the aim of matching sets of three or more to make them disappear. The difference is that while PB has you at the bottom of the screen shooting bubbles upwards, PM has you on the left of the screen, shooting them to the right. That is a little unfair of a description, though, as there's a big difference in how the two games control, too. In Puzzle Bobble, the test of your skill in in precision aiming, like a sniper: your job is to point your gun in the exact right direction to make the bubble go where you want it to, and the bubble will travel in a straight line in whatever direction you shoot it. In Pastel Muses, however, the direction in which your gun is pointing is pretty much irrelevant, and instead, your task is to determine the power with which your bubbles are fired, determined by how long you hold down the fire button. Furthermore, Pastel Muses' bubbles don't travel in straight lines, but arcs, reliant on how much power you use to shoot them.

Another twist is that the playing field is on a hill, with the player at the top and the game ending when a bubble reaches them. So, if you pop bubbles near the bottom of the hill, those above will roll down to take their place, causing traditional puzzle game chain reactions. It all takes a bit of getting used to, but after a few plays, you'll pick up the knack of instinctively knowing just how long to hold the fire button down to get the bubbles to go where you want.

There's a few different modes of play based around the game's basic idea. There's a mode directly lifted from the Puzzle Bobble games where you play various sets of preset puzzle stages laid out in a branching alphabetical path, there's a kind of survival/time attack hybrid mode where you clear stages as fast as you can against the time limit, with a small amount of extra time being added after each stage, and there's a more traditional survival mode where the bubbles keep gradually advancing until you can't keep them back any more. The time attack is probably the best of the three, feeling more urgent and more arcadey, it's a shame there aren't more puzzle games with a similar mode.

Pastel Muses is an okay game. If you really like puzzle games and the satisfying feeling of slowly mastering a slightly unintuitive control method, then it's worth a shot. Bear in mind, though, how much I mentioned Puzzle Bobble in this review, since it's so incredibly derivative of it that it'd be a lot more difficult to describe without mentioning its inspiration. So if you're a stickler for originality, it might not be for you.

Loopop Cube Loop Salad DS (DS)

Like Binary Land, I also received a physical copy of this game as a kind gift from a patreon subcriber, this time Justin, of the excellent (though sadly seldom updated) site, Tinpot Gamer! This time, it's a cute puzzle-platformer that was ported to DS from the Playstation. Unfortunately, I haven't played the Playstation version, so I can't tell you how they compare. I can only tell you about this version on its own terms.

Anyway, the biggest thing that will hit you about this game is the presentation: there's lots of art in the cutscenes and on the title screen and in the backgrounds of the stages by prolific artist Izumi Takemoto (who has appeared on this blog before, back when I reviewed the Saturn adventure game Dinosaur Island). I don't think any of his work in any field has ever been released in English, though if I'm wrong, please tell me. As well as that, each set of stages has a theme, like cake, medicine, sleeping, and so on, and the player character has a different sprite for each theme! And that's not all, either: each set of stages has its own background music, with not only vocals, but also karaoke lyrics on the bottom screen!

It's already the third paragraph, and I haven't even mentioned how the game plays yet! Each stage has various differently coloured cubes that you can push around. They disappear when three or more are touching, and the aim of each stage is to get rid of them all. Like you'd expect from a game like this (that doesn't hide it like certain other games that have recently been on this blog, rassum frassum), your movement and jumping is all very precise: jumps always reach the same height and cover the same distance, and you always move one block's width at a time.

The problem with a lot of these games is that they're either so easy as to be a boring timewaster, or so hard that I get a few stages in and give up. Loopop Cube is a rare case that falls somewhere in the middle! I've gotten slightly stuck a few times, but I've managed to get over thirty stages in so far (out of 120) without totally giving up yet, so that's pretty great.

In summary, Loopop Cube Loop Salad DS is a very cute, well presented game, that's also alright to play. Obviously, it doesn't have the kind of superfast action I usually crave, but as the ancient philosophers said: a man cannot live on bullet patterns alone.

Kuru Kuru Panic (Playstation)

It's yet another colour-matching competitive puzzle game! This time, it's on the Playstation, rather than arcades, and it seems to have been made by a very small team, who proudly put all their names on a screen preceding the title screen, which sounds like it would be annoying, but it actually gives the game a feel of being the product of a ragtag bunch of enthusiasts. According to GameFAQs, they only did two other games, one of which was part of the Atelier series, and the other is the Dreamcast version of that visual novel thing starring Samurai Shodown's Nakoruru. Which is a bit sad really, isn't it?

Anyway, the main gimmick this game uses to stand out from the crowd is that rather than rectangular pits, you have coloured blobs falling towards the centre of large wheels? Though it might not be obvious at first, the effect this has isn't just aesthetic, but also has a few effects on gameplay. The first is that the wheels mean that unlike most games, your playing area is much wider than it is tall, so while piling on the blobs in one place will kill you quicker, you have more places in which to drop them. There's also the fact that you move the wheel itself round, rather than moving the blobs round it, which takes some getting used to at first, and allows the game to do another thing: set up blobs to fall in at different locations at the same time (or at least, in very quick succession).

The fact that you're almost constantly bombarded with blobs to place, and that you have such a wide area in which to place them makes Kuru Kuru Panic a fair bit more stressful than other puzzle games, even before it starts speeding up. It gets a little better once you realise this fact, and concentrating on just setting up little chains here and there when you can, and not getting too caught up in trying to build up one big chain. The fact is, you don't always have total control over where every blob, so you just have to do what you can to manage. Writing it like this makes the game sound like it's mostly luck-based, and not very good at all. And to be honest, I don't feel too bad saying that.

Every time I review a puzzle game, I always seem to end up talking about how it's good enough, but it has nothing to allow it to stand up to the giants of the genre. But in this case, I think it's more a case of that I desperately wanted this game to be better than it is, but it's just not. It's not a terrible game either, though: it's well-made and well-presented, but more important than all that is the fact that it's just not a very fun or interesting game to play.

Karian Cross (Arcade)

Karian Cross is yet another Korean arcade game, but I think it's by far the most professionally-made and high quality Korean arcade game I've yet featured on this blog. It's a typical versus-style colour matching puzzle game, with chains and junk blocks and all the usual hallmarks that come with the genre. Obviously, though, it does have one unique mechanical element to call its own, and it does display a pretty high standard of presentation, too.

The basic tactics are pretty much a total rip of Puyo Puyo: get three or more blocks of the same colour touching, and they'll disappear, then those above will fall, and if those match too, they'll disappear and so on. Racking up big chains in this manner means dumping lots of junk blocks on your opponent. The first to fill their well up to the top with blocks loses. The unique factor comes in the form of the junk blocks themselves: they're normal coloured blocks, trapped in transparent cubes, and when normal blocks disappear next to them, they're freed from the cubes. Of course, if they match, they disappear.

So a smart player can (and will have to) include the junk blocks in any planning they do while preparing chains. Complicating matters somewhat is the fact that, like a lot of similar games that have multiple playable characters, each character dumps junk blocks on their opponents in different patterns. An interesting twist Karian Cross puts on this is that some characters will have junk blocks coming in from the sides or bottom of the well, as well as falling from the top.

As for the presentation, it's generally of a high quality, with well-drawn characters and backgrounds, and a nice general theme of medieval european fantasy holding everything together. There's one really great little touch in particular, in that each character has differently-shaped blocks: some characters have swords or axes, others have gems or different kinds of fruit, and so on. It gives the impression that unlike a lot of Korean videogames, especially arcade titles, it was made with some real care and passion put into it, and not just as a cheap cash in.

It's always hard when it comes to recommending puzzle games of this type. Most of them are good, sometimes even great, but the problem is, they're all also really similar, and the truth is that the Puyo Puyo and Magical Drop series and Money Puzzle Exchanger are so good, any games that want to offer competition have to offer something really special. Unfortunately, Karian Cross is yet another example of a good puzzle game that just can't compete with the titans at the top of the genre.

Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita (Saturn)

What we have here might be the worst game ever featured on this blog. It's definitely the most shameful licensed commercial release, with production values that would look bad if they were in some Chinese Pirate Mega Drive game, let alone a game licensed, officially released and sold for money on the Saturn in 1996. Even having an animated FMV intro doesn't make the game look any better, since even that manages to be grotesque and cheap-looking.

You take control of a whip-wielding pig, on a journey to retrieve a load of lost piglets (as far as I can tell, at least). This journey takes you across various different landscapes, which are fairly typical platform game locales: snowy place, clockwork place, jungle place, beach place, and so on. The stages themselves can be tackled in any order, and also have two types of sections. When you first enter an area, you'll play through a psuedo-platformy stage (though there's no actual platforming to be done), where you walk from left to right, using your whip to defeat enemies and free piglets from bubbles. Once you get to the end of one of these areas, you'll then enter a puzzle stage.

The puzzles are all varied, to the point at which I've seen quite a few of them, and they were all unique with none of them being just a variation on one of the others. The main problem is that not only do you have to solve the puzzles, but you also have to figure out what slving the puzzles requires. Like I said they're all unique, but on top of that, none of them come with instructions in any language. You're just dumped in there and expected to work out what you're meant to do, and how to do it in three attempts. If you solve the puzzle, you'll go on to another action stage/puzzle stage cycle. If you use up your three chances, you'll get a game over, and if you voluntarily quit, you'll go back to the area select screen.

I can't really tell you any more about it. The action stages are terrible and pointless, with tiny sprites jerking around in front of backgrounds that aren't even in the same scale. The puzzle stages are boring and if you solve them, there's no satisfaction, while if you fail, you don't feel any incentive to go back and try again. I played this game for about an hour, and the only positive thing I can say about the experience is that I can at least tell you not to bother.

I hate to say it, but Minami no Shima ni Buta Ga Ita is a game that deserves to languish in obscurity, forgotten forever. After you finish reading this review, try to forget you ever even heard this game's title.