Puyo Puyo Sun 64

Feeling a bit down in the dumps? Could do with some sunshine in your life? The doctor recommends an immediate dose of Puyo Puyo Sun 64! Puyo Puyo is a long-running series which has seen many incarnations — it was Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on the Mega Drive, and was an 'influence' on Kirby's Avalanche on the SNES. The basic game always remains the same, though; it's a Tetris-style puzzler where the objective is to arrange falling coloured blobs (the titular Puyos) into groups of four or more. Grouped Puyos disappear, in the process causing a number of dead Puyos to clatter down onto the screen of your opponent. Setting off chain reactions, where the disappearance of one group causes others to be formed, builds up massive numbers of tumbling transparent stiffs above the other player's screen, and if the Puyos reach the top, it's game over.

The principle behind the game is one of those which is actually easier to pick up and play than explain — although it's not quite as perfectly simple as Tetris, it's not far off. Beginners can just concentrate on guiding the falling Puyos into groups, while more advanced players (those who've been playing for five minutes or more) can start to develop tactics for setting up monstrous chains of Puyos that only require a single appropriately coloured bean to activate.

Although the N64 itself provides a perfectly adequate opponent (though one which gets very hard to beat annoyingly soon — damn that maid!), the real fun of Puyo Puyo is in taking on another person. Puyo Puyo Sun 64 actually offers a tournament mode, which should be an absolute scream at parties (as long as you can prevent people spilling drinks into the machine!) because up to 16 people can take part in a blobtastic knockout contest. Only two people get to play at once, however. That's more than enough, considering the amount of brutal competition it generates!

Boof! Eat my Puyos

The one-player game shows Japanese storytelling at its weirdest. From the look of things, a group of evil yet cute, even sexy (if you're into green-haired women with wings) demons have turned up the heat by making the sun even hotter than usual, apparently so they can hold a beach party. Arle, the long-suffering heroine of the Puyo Puyo games, takes exception to this, deciding that buckets of sweat won't help her pull, and begins a trek across Puyo Island. En route, she encounters some of the most lunatic enemies this side of a Parodius game or a bad acid trip.

All the various characters in the game have their own little animated scenes where they do their bit to block Arle's progress, done in true Japanese style. If you don't like anime, you'll probably have a problem with this. Well go on, sod off back to your Johnny Quest then! It's all incredibly cute, and another example of how much effort the Japanese put into designing the inhabitants of their games. Everything has a personality, even the Puyos themselves! In the game, the red Puyos look angry, the blue ones seem horribly nervous about the whole experience, the yellow Puyos dance and spin and the pink ones cry if they're left alone. Bless 'em!

Graphically, Puyo Puyo Sun 64 hardly pushes the machine — in fact, it wouldn't push a Mega Drive! It wouldn't have taxed the N64 to have put the whole game into high resolution, or at least the playable sections, but Compile seem happy just porting across the graphics from the existing Puyo games.

Puyo Puyo's sound is unremarkable — it's got all the little cutesy squeaks and wibblings you'd expect from the characters, and some jaunty Caribbean-influenced tunes to bop along to. An amusing touch is the use of the Rumble Pak, which shakes according to how many dead Puyos are barrelling onto your screen — a single deceased bean produces only the tiniest tremble, but a massive avalanche of corpsed legumes sets the controller jerking in your hands like a raver with St Vitus' Dance.

Puyo Puyo Sun 64 is great fun, and a brilliant two-player game. The only problem is that practically identical versions of the game are available on other consoles for a far lower price (you could probably pick up a Mega Drive and Mean Bean Machine for less than the cost of this cart), and it's hardly cutting-edge stuff either. But sometimes, you've just got to say "To hell with mip-mapping, let's party!"

One of our favorite Puzzle games is making a reappearance on the Nintendo 64 in japan. Puyo Puyo originally came to the U.S. in the form of Kirby's Avalanche (Super NES) and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine (Sega Genesis). This classic formula hasn't really changed in the 16- to 64-Bit transition.

If you've played any of the old Puyo Puyo games, then you know how to play Sun 64. The concept is simple: Move and rotate cascading pairs of colored blobs in order to form colored matches of four. The matches don't have to line up--four pieces of one color simply have to be touching. It certainly sounds like a boring and stale concept, but it's not until you learn the combo system that the game gets interesting (hey, you wouldn't play Tetris without trying for a "Tetris," would you?).

Combos are a breeze. Simply place the colored blobs in a formation such that disappearing matches will cause blobs sitting on top to make further matches. The more chain reactions, the better the combo. If you're playing a Vs. game (against the computer or another human), then the combos will throw garbage blobs onto the opposing field of play. These garbage blobs serve only one purpose: to inhibit gameplay. Here's where you'll find the first major difference in the new Puyo Puyo. Unlike prior Puyos, Sun 64 now has three garbage blob options (see sidebar).

It also offers a myriad of game options, like one- or two-player matches, Survival Modes (where you last as long as you can), 16 player tournaments and Tokuton Nazo Puyo, a Practice/Puzzle Mode where the CPU will show you how to set up combos up to 16 times big (that is, if you can successfully mirror what the computer wants you to do).

In japan, this game has already come out on the Saturn and will be coming out shortly for the PlayStation.

Taking Out the Garbage

The Puyo Puyo Sun games introduce a new kind of garbage blob...that isn't exactly garbage. If you choose to play with sun pieces, you'll start out with a row of them at the bottom of the playing field. Removing them (which is done the same for ail garbage blocks: combo away regular pieces adjacent to them) will cause mega damage to your opponent. They will throw a ton of normal garbage blocks on the opposite side. In fact, a small combo done next to a couple of suns can drown out your opponent almost instantly. Once in a while, new suns will find their way into the mix to make things interesting.

The second type of garbage block is the two-hitter, which was introduced in Puyo Puyo Tsu (Puyo Puyo 2 to you and me-it was never released here). These need to be hit twice to be removed.

The third type is just the normal clear garbage blob that we saw in the original Puyo Puyo.