| smbhax [sys=PS1; cat=Puzzle; reg=JPN] |
| | | Super cutesy Taito vertical puzzler, the shtick here being that your little character, mobile along the bottom of the screen, looses pairs of balloons up to a waiting cloud bank, attempting to match three or more of a like color, bursting the group and, eventually, clearing all balloons from beneath the clouds--then it's on to the next, more difficult board, of course!
Doesn't altogether transcend the genre but makes a strong claim for the number-one spot with tons of gameplay varient modes and playable characters (including such Taito faves as the dinos from Puzzle Bobble and the hammer dudes from Don Doko Don), a huge number of pre-configured challenge levels, and an overflow of spritey charm and color. And I must say I like the "slippery balloon physics" that allow the balloons to glance off corners and skim past small obstacles that would stop them and provide temple-pounding frustration in a lesser game, and that they take advantage of in various creative ways such as "boss" stages where monsters jump around on the clouds above, shifting the balloons and making it more of a challenge to land your balloons accurately.
pop'n pop rises a bit above the competition like a balloon with a little extra helium, no small feat considering that there are about 2.5 billion vertical vs video puzzlers out there (a bold claim I suppose since I've probably only played a dozen or so of them, but I'll just have to trust to luck). |
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Pop'n Pop--the one game in the Xbox & Windows versions of Taito Legends that ISN'T in any of the PS2 collections--and Champion Wrestler!
The PS1 version of Pop'n Pop redoes the arcade version's regular sprites into PS1-style hardware scaling sprites, and the balloons and clouds squishing and wobbling all over kinda make me nauseous--and who thought brown was a good balloon color??? ; P Lots of modes and super-deformed characters from Taito's cutesy puzzle platformers can't make up for it; oh yeah and I hate the balloon-pair-rotate thing, and how you're pretty much always having to aim at a moving (Space-Invaders-style), squishing target. |
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