Review

Nov

2017

Solomon Rambles About Japanese-Russian Relations

Puyo Puyo Tetris

Pretty Pretty Terrific

Video game crossovers are familiar territory in the gaming world. On the Switch alone, we have Mario + Rabbids, Fire Emblem Warriors, and even the Blaster Master DLC characters. On paper, all of these examples probably sounded somewhat nonsensical. In the case of Mario + Rabbids, the internet collectively cringed when the concept art first leaked. However, each game has shown that the crossovers can be wildly successful, drawing on and combining the strengths of each included franchise. The end product may still be strange, but strange combos can still be good, just like fried chicken and waffles.

Although I imagine few people were clamoring for a Puyo Puyo/Tetris crossover prior to the release of Puyo Puyo Tetris (PPT), it’s not surprising that these two juggernauts could share a home together. Both series have produced some quality games, so you would hope that merging them could create an experience greater than its separate parts. That goal isn’t quite realized with PPT; in fact, the opposite may be true. Let’s make this clear: Puyo Puyo Tetris offers a great rendition of each series. That said, when the two try to mix, their resulting love child is less than pleasant.

What is it?

Most gamers are familiar with Tetris, having played it on a console, handheld, or calculator at some point in their lives. For those of you who haven’t played Tetris yet, you’re lying. You’ve played it. If you’re still insistent that you haven’t, Tetris places you in the role of a zookeeper who must feed his animals with limited supplies. In order to make matches, you must pair an animal with what it eats. Rhinos eat grass; lions eat rhinos; humans eat lions; and grass eat humans. Build up your food chain, and whoever’s zookeeper survives longest wins.

Comparatively, Puyo Puyo is less recognizable to a western audience. “Puyos” (little colored blobs) will fall down in pairs, which you can rotate just like tetrominoes. Your basic goal is to group together four or more same-colored puyos to make them disappear. Making matches is easy enough, but to win, you’ll need to make combos. Unlike tetrominoes, puyos follow the rules of gravity once placed and will fall to the bottom if there is space. This is the key to combos because you will want to arrange your puyos to create a domino effect. Ideally, once a match is made, the surrounding puyos will fall to create another match, which hopefully triggers another. Successful combos will send “trash puyos” raining on your opponent’s board. Trash puyos cannot create matches, and to remove them, you have to make matches beside them. As with Tetris, if your screen fills to the top with puyos, you lose.

Throughout numerous modes, Puyo Puyo and Tetris come together in three main flavors. In most modes, you and your opponents each choose to play either Puyo Puyo or Tetris alone, allowing you to abuse each other with your weapon of choice. Conversely, Swap Mode forces you to alternate between each puzzle game every thirty seconds. If you lose on one board, you lose the game. The novelty with Swap Mode is you can chain combos across your two board states when you swap, allowing you to hail hell on your opponents if you juggle your clears/matches correctly. Lastly, Fusion Mode throws both puyos and tetrominoes on a single board, and these pieces must be cleared just as you would in a normal mode. Block/blob placement is key because as the two mix, stringing together combos becomes less intuitive.

What’s good?

Both Puyo Puyo and Tetris are inherently great games. Both can be picked up relatively easily, and both have the “one-more-round” addictiveness of crack cocaine. Unless you hate puzzle games or crack cocaine, you will enjoy one of these games. And if you happen to hate Puyo Puyo or Tetris, you can effectively ignore one half of PPT and still have a solid game.
There are modes galore. For multiplayer alone, you have Versus, Party, Fusion, Swap, and Big Bang. For the lone player, you have those modes plus a story mode and challenges like Marathon, Tiny Puyo, and Sprint. The online features are pretty robust as well, and the online community is still active to this day.
Swap mode is absurdly satisfying. I would venture to guess most players will have some skill with Tetris before playing PPT but will have barely touched Puyo Puyo. Swap allows for players to slowly grow accustomed to Puyo Puyo while still being able to compete with their Tetris skills. Once you have mastered both Tetris and Puyo Puyo, you’re introduced to the joy of blasting massive combos utilizing the swap mechanic.

What’s bad?

Fusion is absolutely atrocious. Other reviewers have come to enjoy this mode, but try as I might, I haven’t been able to see its merit. Fusion theoretically adds another level of complexity by challenging you to manage your puyo matches and Tetris clears on the same board, but the result is less “rub your stomach and pat your head,” and more “shove your fist down your throat and shove your other fist down your throat.” As is the case with double-fisting your throat, Fusion feels frustrating, unintuitive, and boring.
The Party and Big Bang modes are intriguing but don’t have much substance. Party mode focuses heavily on items which can temporarily speed up your opponents’ game, prevent them from rotating pieces, or generally screw up a normal board state. While good for a laugh, Party’s antics favor chaos over control, which will turn off many players. Big Bang, meanwhile, gives you pre-constructed boards which can be cleared with easy combos, and players compete to complete more boards than their opponents. Again, the mode is nifty but grows tiresome after a few rounds.
Puyo Puyo Tetris lacks certain quality-of-life features present in previous games. Apart from Party, there is no multiplayer score attack mode. You can’t practice after you are knocked out of a round, a feature that can greatly help beginning players. You can’t select computer difficulties; instead, each character has a hidden difficulty level, and you’ll have to figure what this level is, supposedly by dating the character and developing your shared bond or something. Other features are missing, and although their absences do not necessarily ruin the game, PPT feels more like a debut game rather than a feature-rich entry expected of two long-running franchises.

What’s the verdict?

Puyo Puyo Tetris is a wholly solid game in hopefully what will become a continuing series. Whether you are attracted to blobs or blocks, PPT has something to appeal to your interests. It’s a game for all occasions: great on the go or on a TV, perfect for friends or by your lonesome, pitiable self, and appropriate for a quick round or for hours-long marathons. Apart from Swap, PPT doesn’t reinvent either puzzle series, but the marriage of these two franchises still makes for one of the best puzzle games on the Switch.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 8
Time Played: 85 hours
Number of Players: 1-4
Games Like It on Switch: Magical Drop II, Tumblestone

Scoring Policy

Oct

2017

Solomon Rambles About Boxing

The Jackbox Party Pack 3

AKA How to Determine How Vulgar Your Friends Are

Jackbox Party Pack 3 is a video game for people who dislike video games. You don’t have to use a controller; just use your phone! You don’t need skill; just wing it like the rest of us. It’s not even a real video game; it’s the bastard child of a trivia bar game and Cards Against Humanity (trying to pretend it’s as innocent as Apples to Apples). Invite your friends; invite your family; don’t invite your neighbor. Everyone can join in the fun.

That’s Jackbox’s immediate appeal. Over generations of consoles, I have tried to engage non-gamers with any “accessible” game I have come across, be it Mario Party, Mario Kart, Nintendoland, Wii Sports, Just Dance, or even 1-2-Switch. No game has had as much success in drawing in a diverse crowd as Jackbox has. Although none of its five glorified board/trivia games carry the depth or complexity of a typical video game, they still wield some magical, universal appeal. As such, despite its awkward appearance, Jackbox earns its designation as a party game, just like the games listed before it (minus one or two, if you catch my drift).

Deal-breakers:

Before getting to the individual games, it’s important to recognize Jackbox’s barriers to entry. If you don’t have the following three elements, this game hates you. You will need:

A party of people. Ideally, you will have five or more people to play altogether because anything less is a get-together, and it’s not called Jackbox Get-Together Pack for a reason. Most games can fire off with at least three people, but the fun factor is diminished.
Devices for each person. Be it a smart phone, a tablet, or a computer, each person needs a device with which to read prompts, write, and draw.
Wi-Fi. For most people, Wi-Fi is not a concern because they obviously have Wi-Fi to download the game in the first place. However, Jackbox is literally unplayable without internet, and if you use crappy Wi-Fi, you run the risk of disconnections or missed prompts.

The games:

Quiplash 2:

The favorite among my crowd, Quiplash 2 challenges you to answer age-old prompts like “How the dinosaurs really died,” and “The worst way to spell Mississippi.” You can answer however you wish, but your answers will then be pitted against another player who had the same prompt. The players who did not respond to the prompt will then vote for the best one, so make sure your responses tickle your audience’s funny bones (or raunchy bones, depending on the depravity of your group). Whoever receives the most votes over three rounds wins.

Of all the games on Jackbox, Quiplash is the most easily accessible and routinely elicits laughs due to how crazy answers can be. Like Cards Against Humanity, you’ll come across some uninspired prompts which lead to equally underwhelming responses, but the majority of the prompts are suitably suggestive or creative. Like the other Jackbox offerings, Quiplash games are pretty quick, allowing you fire off a few more rounds without sucking up too much time.

Trivia Murder Party:

Perhaps the least inspired of the bunch, Trivia Murder Party is a trivia game with a tongue-in-cheek horror theme. Your goal is to outlive everyone else and escape from your captor, who provides the game’s incessantly annoying narration. Answering multiple-choice questions correctly guarantees your survival while a wrong answer leads you to a mini game. These mini-games offer simple tasks (drawing, solving math problems, cutting off a finger), and if you mess up here, you’re knocked out of the game.

Trivia Murder Party is harmless enough to be enjoyable, but no one in my group has walked away from it eager to play again. Trivia fans may be a bit disappointed with it because the questions draw a little too frequently from pop culture topics, even for a trivia game. The aesthetic doesn’t offer much either, and your captor/narrator becomes increasingly grating with each round. Stockholm syndrome will certainly not be an issue here. Incidentally, this is the only game you can play by yourself, so there’s that.

Guesspionage:

For those who enjoy guessing percentages of survey results, Guesspionage is the game for you. Supposedly, Jackbox Games surveyed a bunch of people on the internet about random topics, and now you and your friends will take turns guessing how many people reported liking brownies with nuts or nutless brownies (among other important issues). One person guesses the exact percentage of people who prefer “nut brownies,” and everyone else guesses if this estimate is higher or lower than the actual result. Points are divvied out based on how close guesses are, and whoever has the most points wins.

No one likes this game. Some may think they do, but after a few additional playthroughs, they recognize the error of their thinking. Guesspionage is a simpler, worse version of Family Feud. And just like Family Feud, you aren’t trying to figure out how many people from the general populace still own functioning VCRs. No, you’re trying to predict how many people who take surveys for Jackbox Games still own functioning VCRs. Unless you study the habits of online survey takers, you’re going to rely on some luck to win this game.

Fakin’ It:

In a round of Fakin’ It, everybody except one person is given a prompt which they must answer by holding up fingers, making faces, pointing at someone, or raising their hands. For instance, the prompt could be, “Point to the person who has the most knowledge of Star Wars.” Each person then points based on who they think fits the prompt. The catch is one person did not receive any prompt at all, and this person is the faker. Based on everyone else’s reaction, the faker must quickly participate and pretend as if they also received the prompt. The group then has three chances to decide who the faker is. Points are given out based on how long the faker evades capture and who correctly guessed the faker. Multiple players will get a chance to be the faker before points are totaled and a winner is chosen.

Fakin’ It has potential to be an uproarious experience but is bogged down by its lack of direction and obtuse prompts. In all of my play groups, most people didn’t fully understand how to play until the game was over, and by that point, they weren’t interested in playing another round. Fakin’ It could be an immersive game, filled with bluffing, colluding, and accusations, but the quick pace of the game immensely limits these interactions. Plus, when faced with prompts like, “Hold up five fingers if your name starts with a J, seven if it doesn’t,” your chances as the faker are crippled. A dedicated play group could really enjoy this game, but finding the dedicated people is another task altogether.

Tee K.O.:

Finally, Jackbox 3‘s obligatory drawing game, Tee K.O., sees you and your group pitted against each other to create the best t-shirt. This mode cycles through four stages. In the first, you draw whatever comes to mind, be it dragons, patterns, or inappropriate anatomy. Next, you are tasked with producing slogans for the t-shirts. Again, these slogans can be anything, from “Well, you tried,” to ” Just leave it for later.” Then, you will receive t-shirt designs and slogans created by the other players, and from these, you will choose the best t-shirt/slogan pair. The last stage displays everyone’s final product together, with players voting for their favorite. Whoever’s t-shirt is left standing is declared the winner.

In my play groups, Tee K.O. Is typically cited as everyone’s first or second favorite game, usually because the end results can be incredibly wacky. Interestingly, Jackbox Games includes an option to buy actual copies of the winning shirt, so you and your friends can proudly wear whatever abominations you birth. Because the game places no limitations on what people can draw or write, house rules are recommended to provide direction to your play sessions and to avoid the inevitable barrage of penis drawings.

What’s the verdict?

In many ways, Jackbox Party Pack 3 and its brethren are better suited for websites which review board games, not video games. Almost all of these games could be translated to paper and pen, packed into brightly colored boxes, and sold at your local Wal-Mart. Although this is not a flaw by any means, it should influence your decision to buy Jackbox. If you’re looking for the next great party game, Jackbox is a solid substitute to card games and an even better candidate for drinking games. For those looking for a more traditional multiplayer video game, this box can be left untouched.

Arbitrary Statistics:

Score: 7
Time Played: Over ten hours
Number of Players: 1-8
Games Like It on Switch: The other Jackbox Party Packs, Use Your Words

Scoring Policy

Oct

2017

Solomon Rambles About Traps

Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap

Extreme Makeover

Time has been somewhat apathetic to Wonder Boy: the Dragon’s Trap. The game received favorable reviews when it first debuted back in 1989, but even then, it wasn’t destined for any halls of fame outside of the best Sega Master System games. In 2007, Dragon’s Curse (the TurboGrafx-16 version) arrived on the Wii’s Virtual Console where I first encountered it. Again, reviewers offered praise for the game, and I enjoyed it well-enough, but Dragon’s Curse was not a must-have, even among TurboGrafx-16 games. Ten years later, we see Lizardcube unearth the game once more, and the reception hasn’t changed one bit. The Dragon’s Trap is a solid game, but don’t expect it on any Top 10 lists.

You could almost call the Dragon’s Trap “timeless,” in that it is timelessly unremarkable but good. However, “timeless” very much ignores that the game has not aged well. In the 28 years since its release, this Wonder Boy has developed wrinkles, age spots, and its fair share of disabilities. Its saving grace has been its makeup artists. As it stands, the Dragon’s Trap is not a testament to the Wonder Boy series’ enduring appeal. Rather, it’s a tantalizing showing of Lizardcube’s potential as a developer.