Y'know, for all the effort Sega's put into scrubbing the name "Robotnik" from the gaming
lexicon, they just can't seem to shake it.
Granted, when it's jammed in the name of a game that was pretty lucrative for them back
in the 16-bit age - and stands as one of the few vestiges of the ridiculously popular Puyo
Puyo franchise available in the states - it's a bit harder to disavow.
For this 3DS Virtual Console port of the Game Gear version of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine,
they'd have had to rebuild the opening titles and change some text around... granted, today
that'd take like twelve minutes, but it's AUTHENTICITY, dammit.
We want everything in this painted-over Puyo title to be just as it was back in '93, all
the way down to the questionable inclusion of Scratch, Grounder, and Coconuts from that
godawful Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon.
Not the good one that was on ABC (that ended up being referenced in Sonic Spinball, come
to mention it), but the direct-to-syndication one that couldn't even be bothered to come
up with a decent theme song.
They just mashed up the game's theme with whatever they could find in the public domain,
like In the Hall of the Mountain King and Flight of the Bumblebee!
The heck does that have to do with Sonic?
I ask you!
Edvard Grieg and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov are spin-dashing in their graves, man.
Oh, yeah.
The game.
It's Puyo Puyo, man... gather bunches of four puy-erm-beans, make 'em disappear and fling
'em at your opponent's side.
It's one of the unique falling-block puzzle games in that, in its standard mode, it's
almost always played competitively.
You're not just working against a constantly-increasing drop speed, but also against a computer opponent
whom you have to consciously defeat.
As such, just keeping your pile low isn't going to be good enough; you have to design
chain reactions, you have to have an attack plan in mind, you have to keep your eye on
their pile to determine the best time to strike, and you have to go for a killshot rather than
just surviving long enough.
It's certainly an interesting dynamic, and one that raises the general difficulty of
the game by a significant margin.
Of course, it's a natural fit for head-to-head competition, which is facilitated in this
Virtual Console port by an expanded suite of touchscreen controls including local wireless
multiplayer, and extending to control configuration, save states, and extensive display options.
In addition to the standard Scenario Mode, there's a Puzzle mode that focuses on separate
goal-based challenges like clearing 11 puy-erm-beans at a time or completely clearing the screen.
Man.
More games need notebook-style stages.
For a portable game, on a system as limited as the Game Gear, there's no difficulty in
control or color recognition, a significant leg up on anything Nintendo would've been
able to offer at the time.
It's all the chaos of the Genesis-slash-Mega Drive version, just portable, as many of the
best puzzle games should be.
This is a game for slipping into a puy-erm-bean-dropping trance, slaying evil robots at every turn,
until your mom jostles you and tells you we're at grandma's and you realize you've just lost
three hours.
(Thankfully, this Virtual Console version benefits from the 3DS's battery life, as a
three-hour binge on an original Game Gear might've burnt through as many as 240 AA batteries.)
But, unfortunately, the experience isn't without fault.
The music - always an important part of puzzle games, as you're usually bingeing on them
for hours - consists of about two tracks, and they're not really anything to write home
about.
I honestly could've done with... well, even In the Hall of the Mountain King or Flight
of the Bumblebee, just to spice things up a bit.
So turn up the stereo in the car and let that be your soundtrack, while you smash puy-erm-beans
together, jotting down the occasional password (if save states are too new-school for you)
and wondering why they didn't replace that orangish Carbuncle mascot character with,
like, Sonic's head or something.