[This post is part of a collaborative Sonic retrospective based around the games on Sonic Mega Collection Plus. To read more, please head over to the central post!]
The charts don’t capture every game’s impact, and one which they missed was Tetris, which set up a whole fruitful genre. Sega’s quick response in the falling-items-puzzle-game genre was Columns in 1990, the Mega Drive version of which made it here just before Game Boy Tetris did, which must have helped it to do pretty well. A year later, Compile released Puyo Puyo on the MSX, which would take a more convoluted route to being Sega’s next great attempt here in 1993.
It’s a relatively simple game of matching four blobs of the same colour, with a couple of twists. First is that they don’t have to be in a straight line like is the case for many similar games. The other one is that it takes place not just as a fight against the increasingly fast process of entropy, like Tetris, but as a contest against a succession of opponents. You can, if you can spare the attention, watch your opponent wrangling exactly the same sequence of pairs of blobs. The first one to have their space filled to the top loses. Some of those opponents visibly take different strategies, like making towers of blobs at each side of the screen. And when you each set up elaborate combos you are not just multiplying an abstract score, but inflicting setbacks, in the shape of rubbish unmatchable blobs, on your opponent.
This lends a different mentality to the process, and also works to complicate the strategy. There is a big advantage in not taking opportunities to clear blobs when you can set up a bigger combo instead; it’s pretty much an essential to win once you’re past the first couple of stages. But when you set up a combo and wait for the chance to finish it, it’s not just your own competence and the luck of the draw you have to rely on. Your opponent could strike and block off your access to those unfinished combos, turning them from positive to negative instantly. This style of multiplayer was not a new concept (and it was in the fairly similar Dr. Mario), but making it so central to the game still has a big effect. The extra unpredictability occasionally frustrates, but it makes for an intense and dynamic experience. It’s no surprise Sega could see the international potential for that.
For all the gameplay’s appeal though, as a spin-off of an RPG with no release in Europe or the US, Puyo Puyo didn’t have the ideal backdrop for the mainstream. So it got reskinned with the player now competing against Dr. Robotnik’s assorted henchentities from the animated series Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, which made it to the UK on Sunday mornings on Channel 4. Before this post I had never played Puyo Puyo or Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, and having now played the two to confirm: yes, same game. Not just in concept, either: the blobs (‘beans’) and gameplay space look exactly the same.
I enjoyed the original, its surrealist tone and its fight against an anthropomorphic foot more. It’s also very weird to me that the reviews of Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine I found in both Sega MegaZone and the official Sega Magazine don’t mention the origin of the game as something different, even though the latter mentions its popularity in Japan. It perhaps speaks again to the greater height of informational and cultural barriers at the time. Still, while we could always wish for more, the essence of the game made it through to us intact.