Panic Bomber World (SNES)

Panic Bomber World is a puzzle game starring Bomberman. It's of the "falling stuff" and "versus" sub-genres. It's pretty good.
It's more complex than most games of this type. You do mainly play by matching up coloured Bomberman heads in rows of three, but that's where the genericity ends. When you match up rows of same-coloured heads, bombs spring up from the bottom of your pit. Every now and then, a lit bomb will fall down into your pit. When the lit bomb lands, it explodes with a traditional Bomberman plus-shaped explosion, and also like in bomberman, any other bombs caught in the explosion also explode like this. Any Bomberman heads caught in the blast don't disappear like you'd expect them to, though. What happens is that the traditional versus puzzle game junk blocks start appearing from the bottom of your opponen't's pit, and the more heads caught in the blast, and the more bombs that go off, the more junk blocks appear. The junk blocks can only be erased by blowing them up with bombs. There's also a red bar next to each player's pit, and when this fills up, a huge bombs falls into their pit and completely erase the top few rows of stuff.
In single player mode, you go to various countries around the world, fight two enemies, then a boss. I don't know how many stages there are, as i've only made it to the third boss so far.
Like I said at the start, this game is pretty good. It's not as good as Super Puzzle Fighter or Magical Drop, but it's still worth playing. If you're a big Bomberman fan (Bomberfan?), even more so, as this game contains tons of cool little variant Bombermen. Although the two "regular" enemies on each stage are just strange blobby things, each stages's boss is a Bomberman themed to whatever country that stage is set in. Jamaica has a laid back rasta Bomberman, America has a cowboy Bomberman, and england has... some kind of awesome badass Bomberman whose battle theme is some cool 16-bit power metal! As well as the bosses, the pit backgrounds also show Bomberman getting up to nationally-themed activities, like lying on the beach or going snorkelling in Jamaica, and having afternoon tea or looking for the loch ness monster in England!
Apparently, this game has also been ported to PSP and Wii.

Diet Go Go (Arcade)

Diet Go Go was released by Data East in 1992. It's a spiritual successor to Tumblepop. The plot apparently involves an evil scientist giving everyone free meat and cake. That bastard. Instead of vacuuming up enemies then shooting them like in Tumblepop, you inflate them with balls, then kick them around at other enemies. This works a lot better than Tumblepop's vacuuming which could sometimes feel a bit awkward and inaccurate.
Instead of always dying with a single hit, if you get hit by an enemies attack (which is usually in the form of food being thrown at you), you become fat and slow, and die if you get hit again. If you get hit by the enemies themselves you die straight away.
Like in Tumblepop, you get extra lives from bonus stages, this time accessed by getting 777 on the fruit machine at the top of the screen, which spins whenever you collect one of the big gold coins that enemies drop. Matching triples of other symbols gets you one of each power-up or causes a whole bunch of points items to appear onscreen. This random element meants this happens a lot more often than collecting the whole word "tumblepop", so you end up getting extra lives pretty frequently.
Like you can see in the video, it's a lot faster than Tumblepop, and i think it's a lot better too. It's actually one of my most played roms in MAME, and one of the few i can come close to completing.

(Originally posted on selectbutton.net on 13/03/2009)