The Closeout Warrior

It’s probably become pretty apparent by now that I enjoy a good game of Puzzle League, and a good Pokémon game, so when a game comes out that’s a fusion of them both, I just kind of have to give it a try.

Pokémon Puzzle Challenge is actually more like the Tetris Attack game for the Super NES than Pokémon Puzzle League for the Nintendo 64. But what that means is that this game looks to be nearly identical to the Super NES one, but with different characters and sound effects.

So what do you do in this game? You have your steadily-rising pile of multi-colored blocks and can move them left and/or right to try and line up three or more in a row. Match more than three or set off chain reactions and your opponent loses health. When it loses all of its health, then you win!

But the thing in this version is that you have different Pokémon to choose from, each one representing a different element in the Pokémon universe. If you pick a pokémon that has a type that its opponent is weak to, then your attacks do more damage, and you’ll win quicker. Pick the wrong one, though, and you’ll have to do a lot more chains and combos to win.

I played this game a fair bit, mostly because it was an update to the old Tetris Attack game that I had nearly worn out on my Game Boy, plus it was in glorious COLOR! Which made it pretty ideal for showing off my Game Boy Color, and for practicing up on my Puzzle League skills on the go. Which I find pretty important. You never really know when an impromptu game of Puzzle League can break out, so it pays to be prepared.

With two Pokémon games under my belt that were fairly similar, why in the world would I want to play the next game in the series? Because I have some kind of compulsion to catch wild animals and make them fight for my amusement, I guess.

Pokémon Sapphire is a whole lot like the other games in the series so far. You take control of some kid that travels the world and tries to be the best Pokémon trainer in the world, oh, and possibly stop the machinations of a power-hungry group bent on world domination. The main differences being that you have a new landmass to explore, lots of new creatures to catch, you can play the game as a boy or a girl, and it’s on a new-fangled system, so it looks a lot prettier.

Yeah, the game’s a lot like the older games in the series, just refined a little more. There are a few additions here and there, like making berries, tag-team battles, and refinements to the breeding system, but it’s largely the same game. Which is fine by me, mostly because the concept was solid to start with, and each iteration just kind of polishes it up a little more.

Now does that explain how I’ve managed to while away over 120 hours at this game so far? Probably not, but that’s OK.

I’ve really liked most of the games in the Castlevania series, with the odd exception. So when I found out that the series was making its way to the Game Boy, my then pet gaming system, I immediately wanted it. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually have anything resembling an income at the time, so I had to wait until it made its way to my local used video game store, and then get it there for a pittance.

I don’t really know much about the story, other than Dracula has once again gone from being dead to not being dead, and you have to take the Belmont du jour to go and try to kill him again.

I’ve grown accustomed to Belmonts not being the most nimble folks in the world, but the Belmont in this game just seems, I don’t know, more plodding than most. He can barely run and jump, which is kind of a problem since there are several gigantic enemies that you have to try and avoid. And you’ll be able to, but only just, and only with pinpoint timing.

One of the things that’s kind of hard to convey in videos and screenshots is that the original GBA had a really smeary screen, which isn’t really that big of a problem until you have reasonably-detailed backgrounds like you do in this game. Then it becomes a big problem when you start to scroll the screen to the left and to the right and all of the backgrounds begin to blur so bad that they obscure absolutely everything on the screen, goodies, enemies, platforms, and everything. Then it gets real hard to figure out where you are, where the enemies are, and where the edges of bottomless pits are. Combine all three of those things and you have the makings of a fairly frustrating game. And, as a result of that, I never really made it much past stage 2 (out of 4!) before I decided to take it right back to the store I got it from.

The original Pokémon game that I played was pretty fun, and I guess a few million people agreed with me. And what do you do when you have a wildly popular game? Why, make sequels of course!

Pokémon Silver (and Gold) is, essentially, the same as Pokémon Blue (and Red) with a couple of minor changes: it takes place in a new region to explore, the battle mechanics have been tweaked, there are several more creatures to fawn over, which can now breed somehow, and the landmass from the original game is included to go and explore.

The story is basically the same as the previous generation. You decide to set out in the world to become a Pokémon trainer, and along the way you cross paths with Team Rocket (still the bad guys) and foil whatever nefarious plans they concoct. But, ultimately, this game is largely the same as the older one. You still go around and have to find, capture, train, and fight your ultimate team of beasties and try to be the best.

I spent far too long with this game. The first one was really fun, and this one, being basically the same game but refined a little bit was just as fun. And since they put the people and places from the first game in this game, it just added icing to the cake. And the breeding thing? That was just weird, and you better believe that I spent hours upon hours mixing and matching Pokémon to create the ultimate team. Which I never was able to do, but I sure had fun trying.

I was actually an owner of a Game Gear for a time, but its battery life of about fifteen minutes made its viability as a portable system kind of suffer. But a few years later I felt that hendheld color video game consoles had made enough progress that I could give it another shot, so I picked up a Game Boy Color. And even though the Game Boy Color could play all of my classic Game Boy games, I still wanted to get something to bask in the more-than-four-shades-of-greenish-grey screen. So I picked up a version of the old standby, Tetris, incarnated as Tetris DX.

This game is really just the same as the pack-in Tetris game I got with my original gigantic Game Boy in ‘89, but with little splashes of color everywhere and some slightly tweaked gameplay mechanics.

But I guess, as the saying goes, it wasn’t broken, so there was nothing to fix. You can still play endless mode until your brain and fingers just can’t keep up, or you can play “B Mode” where the playfield is drastically shortened. Or, if you were lucky enough to know someone with a Game Boy Color and this game and had the forethought to bring your link cable along, then some head-to-head action could be had.

It’s weird, every few years a new system will come out and eventually there will be a version of Tetris for it. Then I’ll inevitably pick it up and realize that I haven’t played the game in quite some time, which will lead to me losing far too many hours to it until the next system comes along and I pick up its version of Tetris.

I do sometimes wonder, though, how many times Nintendo can sell me the same game.

Dong Dong is the name of one of one of the unlockable games in the first Wario Ware game. Shockingly, there’s nothing pornographic about it or in it. What a waste of a name.

Dong Dong is played with two players on one system. You have these straw-things that move up and down and you have to try and nudge rocks out of the center column to crush your opposition while simultaneously nudging the rocks your opponent is nudging back in his direction. It’s all about timing.

There’s really not much more to it than that. You just have to have better timing than your opponent and then you win! Though I suppose it’s kind of nice that you can play two players with the same Game Boy, but you’re going to get a little cramped doing it if you go too long.

I played this game a couple of times and it was kind of fun for a while, but I really just wanted to bring up the game because the title sounds so… naughty.

Tee-hee!

After Mario gets done saving the various lands scattered around his world, I guess he retires to his own land, Mario Land. Unfortunately for him, though, Wario, Mario’s long-time rival that nobody knew about, has taken over Mario’s castle and has hidden the six coins needed to open the castle’s door in the far reaches of Mario Land. So, in other words, it’s the same old song and dance, just without the princess to be saved.

But unlike the last Mario game, which was hardly like a Mario game at all, this one actually looks like it takes place in the Mario universe, which is a step forward, I guess.

So it’s typical Mario stuff, so if you like that kind of thing, and I certainly do, there’s plenty to like here. Even though Mario gets a set of rabbit ears that he can flap to allow him to kind of glide around. Which is kind of cute, I’ll grant, but a little strange.

The first time I played this game a friend and I tag-teamed it during a marathon gaming session. We managed to collect all the gold coins and unearth all of the secret stages in the game, but we never managed to make it through the final level. You might notice that this is a recurring theme of sorts around here. But this one was different!

This game I actually felt compelled to go out and purchase. Even though I had, in the space of one long evening, managed to unearth all of its secrets. Maybe I was lured in by the thought of being able to control Bunny Mario, or hopping into a bubble blown by a hippo on the beach to take me out to space, or the thought that I could finally topple Wario after getting so close and then being denied.

Any of those would be plausible.