Puyo Pop Fever: How a Little Spice Can Change the Dish

I'm a bit of a puzzle game fan. Whether it's Tetris, Dr. Mario, Puzzle Bobble, or many others, I like popping these games in to play for a few rounds. My Japanese Sega Saturn library can best be described as Sega classics, and Puzzle games. I could probably do a post on Sega Saturn puzzle games, but that will be for another day. Today, I'm going to talk about a puzzle franchise that up until recently, I had no interest in, that franchise being Puyo Puyo.

I think I can confidently say that a lot of people were first exposed to Puyo Puyo from Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, or maybe that's just the Sonic fan in me showing. I played it as a kid, through Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection on PS3. I didn't like it back then, but I also didn't care for the genre back then. However, even as an adult who loves the genre,  I still don't like it, and I know exactly why, I'm not good with setting up combos. Combos in Puyo Puyo require forward thinking, and luck. You need to be able think ahead, and if you can't, well you're not getting far, because the CPU will destroy you. Add on to the fact that I tend to prefer high score puzzlers over head to head puzzlers, and yeah, Puyo Puyo was just never for me. That was until one recent addition to the collection changed that.

During one afternoon eBay session, I saw a Japanese copy of Puyo Pop Fever on PS2 for cheap, so I decided to grab it. I'm always looking for PS2 games to add to my collection, and even though I didn't really  care for Puyo Puyo, it was still a puzzle game to add, and I had heard good things about it. When it arrived, I played it for a little bit, not really expecting to enjoy it, but I ended up liking it. Now, I'm not going to say this game made me fall in love with the entire franchise, and I'm now a Puyo Puyo superfan, but I will say that if you want to give Puyo Puyo another chance, you should try Puyo Pop Fever.

Puyo Pop Fever adds some spice from the spice cabinet into normal Puyo Puyo. It's not a new dish entirely, but it adds flavor to the original to give it a different taste. For starters, we must mention the new Fever mode, because it's in the game's title. Fever mode is a special mode that activates after filling a 7 point meter. This meter fills by one every time you counter trash Puyos entering your field. Fever mode gives you preset Puyo patterns to make chains off of, and if you're fast, it's a handy way to send a lot of trash to your opponent. 

Now, if this was the only spice added, I'd probably not care much, but there are a few other bits of spice I did not see in previous titles I've played. There are a few new pieces in this version, these being the "L-shaped" piece, the "Yin-Yang" piece, and the Big Puyo. The "L-shaped" piece is 2 matching colored Puyo pieces, with an additional differently colored Puyo on the end of it. I call it the "L-shaped" piece, because in some orientations, it looks like an L. The "Yin-Yang" piece is a block of 4 Puyos, 2 lines of 2 different colors, and as its dropping, its shaped like an "Yin-Yang" symbol to me. Finally there's the Big Puyo, which is just a block of 4 matching Puyo. There's one more little bit of spice to mention, which is if you clear all the Puyos on your  field, you receive a small pile of Puyo that you can use to chain  a small combo in order to give trash to the other player, it's a nice little incentive. None of these are major game changers to me, but they help spice up the traditional Puyo formula, which was stale to me at this point.

I do also want to mention the personality of this game. I didn't really care for the presentation of previous Puyo Puyo games, even the earlier Japanese games.  Although the older games have cute character designs, they don't have much else to an English speaking man who can't read Japanese. I'm not blaming the games on that by the way, that would be like me blaming an anime for not making sense, but I'm watching it without subtitles, I’m not the intended audience. Puyo Pop Fever though is one of those games with language settings, so even though I bought the Japanese version, I can put it in English, which means I can enjoy the dialogue. Battle intros bring a smile to my face here, because the voice acting is silly in an humourous way, and it being in English lets me understand what is going on. The game’s also pretty colorful and has interesting background art, meaning your play field is not some boring rocks, looking at you Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean  Machine. 

Puyo Pop Fever is not a game that's going to completely change your mind about Puyo  Puyo. If you hate these games, and can't stand them at all, yea this isn't gonna be for you. However, if you want something new from Puyo, a little spice on the traditional formula, Puyo Pop Fever might be for you. I am certainly a little more open-minded to the franchise now, and I might look into other games. I hear Puyo Puyo Sun is pretty good, and I believe it changes up the formula, so maybe one day I will have to look at it. But until then, have a great day!

PlayStation Interactive Sampler Disc 1: The beginning

I have a rather large collection of US PlayStation demo discs at this point. I have every US PS2 Magazine demo disc, and almost every PlayStation  Underground volume. I'll probably yap about them in a future post, but not today. Today I wanna yap about a part of a recent addition, being Vol 1. of the PlayStation Interactive Sampler discs. I acquired several of these in an eBay lot recently, and I might yap about other volumes in the future, but as the first post on this mess of a blog, I find it poetic to yap about one of the first demo discs on the original PlayStation.

Before I dive into this disc, I want to share a fun fact I learnt while doing a tiny bit of research. There are actually two versions of this disc, one bundled with the console, and another apparently sold in stores. The difference is the packaging here, the store versions removes references to Mortal Kombat 3, and Loaded, both being mature  rated games. I don't know if these 2 titles are removed on the disc, but if so, that's crappy. I own the pack-in version if that wasn't made clear.

Booting the demo disc up brings you a little intro followed by a list of the games featured on the disc. This is peak 90s aesthetic to me, trying to be extreme, cool, and hip, which is something I enjoy. The games with playable demos are Loaded, Wipeout, Twisted Metal, Warhawk, and Mortal Kombat 3, while NHL Faceoff, NBA Gameday, Destruction Derby, and Descent are video previews. This disc is pretty light on content  compared  to future demo discs,  but keep in mind this is a disc released around the PS1's launch. 

Do I think this is a great demo disc today? No, not really. I am a little biased, because I tend to prefer later PS1 stuff, around 1998 and onwards. This is 1996, so it's that launch period of the PS1, a time I'm less accustomed to. Now that's not to say all of these games suck, but I will say nothing here is something I really enjoyed. Wipeout is the best game here in my opinion, but even that is just a 1 lap 2 minute course. Most of these demos are under 5 minutes, hard to get anything out of them now. Now for 1996 that's fine, this was a new thing for a lot of people, and to get even something small in their console bundled in will surely distract them for a bit, but in a modern lens, this is good for collectors wanting to own a bunch of demo discs, but there's nothing for a player here, for that you should buy an Underground demo disc. I do get how its silly to  talk playability in a demo disc, because it’s 2026, and if you want to play any  game on ps1, there's so many options, but I am a silly guy who has played arguably too many demo discs, and I do find fun in them, but this one was just cool for the novelty, nothing more. 

That's Vol 1  of the PlayStation Interactive Sampler  Disc. I love demo discs,. so expect to see more demo discs yapped about. I got over a hundred of them, so I'm not lacking at all. I might  even have more demo discs than games at this point, which is sad to think about. Anyway, have a great day.