Plus Plum (Dreamcast)

Also sometimes spelt as "Plus Plumb", this is a pretty low budget-looking, Japan-only competitive puzzle game. Of course, it's about matching coloured blobs, but it does at least bring some new ideas to the table, even if they're not good ones.

Like you might expect, Plus Plum has you arranging coloured blobs into matching sets of three, which then disappear. What's different is what happens when they disappear: not only do the blobs above them fall down, but all the blobs touching them also change colour. So to make combos, you not only have to take into account where the blobs will fall, but what colour they'll be when they do. Luckily, the colour changing isn't random, and the six colours are in three pairs: red and blue, white and purple, and yellow and green. The blobs also only fall one at a time, and rather than changing shape or formation like you would in most puzzle games, you can move that one blob around, and change it to its opposite colour.

It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's pretty simple once you've got the hang of it. I think with a bit more work, it might have led to a decent puzzler, but this game has one massive problem: it's incredibly slow. I haven't had a single game, win or lose, that's taken less than four minutes. The blame for this falls at the feet of PP's other oddball mechanic: the playing fields of you and your opponent are on some kind of counter-balanced platforms, and the game is lost when either one player's platform has been lifted high enough that their blobs touch the top of the screen, or their platform is so weighed down that it hits the bottom. Compare these four minute matches with the likes of Magical Drop (my personal favourite competitive puzzle series), where matches can be won or lost within seconds of them starting, and Plus Plum feels like a meandering, tension-free bore.

I can't recommend tracking down Plus Plum at all. There might not be as many competitive puzzle games on the Dreamcast compared to the Playstation, but there's still plenty that are better than this one. Strangely, though, it was apparently popular enough to get a sequel, Plus Plum 2. However, that was released on the original XBox, in Japan only, so it presumably sold about seven copies.

Other Stuff Monthly #1

So, this blog has been around for a whole decade now, and I've decided, for various reasons, to add something to the formula. What is that something? Monthly posts about things that aren't obscure videogames! But they will be mostly other obscure things. And sometimes they might also be videogames. Plus, it's only one post a month, so don't worry about the blog's focus changing or anything, okay? It'll be fine. Anyway, the first subject is this cute piece of merchandise from the 90s anime Magic Knight Rayearth!

I saw it on YAJ, with its name machine-translated as "The Book of Rayearth Magic Chapter 2", which is almost definitely wrong, but it was cheap, and I wanted to know what it was. What it is is a kind of Rayearth-themed personal organiser thing, kind of similar to the Funfax line that was popular among UK kids in the early-mid 1990s. The back of the box even advertises what appears to be additional inserts (sold seperately), just like what Funfax had! Some of you might be left in the dark by the past few sentences, so I'll elaborate further: this is a little ring binder/filofax-type thing, that contains various pre-printed inserts for organising your life when you're a mid-90s 10-year-old Japanese girl on the go.

Oddly, it doesn't contain an address book section, which you'd think would be standard for this sort of thing. It does have lots of other stuff, though, and I'll tell you about it, in as much detail as I can muster without being able to read Japanese. The first section seems to be teling a little about each of the three main characters, and contains what I think is a little personality quiz to see which one you're most like. Then, each of them has their own section, in which I think they're giving the reader advice on things like fashion, excercises, making gifts, and so on. After that is the most disturbing part, considering that this is a product for little girls: the "power-up record" section, which seems to contain sheets for keeping a record of one's height, weight, and other measurements over an extended period of time. Why'd you include a thing like that, SEGA?

Finally, there's a series of plastic envelopes containing various useful day-to-day items, like a Magic Knight Rayearth ballpoint pen (which doesn't work. I assume the ink inside has solidified over the decades rather than ran out, since everything else in the box was totally unused when I got it.), a couple of blue plastic magatama, a bunch of cards with some really nice MKR artwork, and a little mirror. Altogether, this thing is a nice little piece of anime merch, with the exception of the power-up record, which is unpleasant in so many ways, like if they made a Dragonball organiser for boys with a page to keep track of like, your bicep size or something? Just really drive home those body image issues early, right? But the concept of it is really cool, at least. So that ends the first post of this new series, I hope you liked it, and look forward to more old toys and stuff in the future.