Review: Pokemon Puzzle League (WiiVC/N64)

Unlike most of the games I review, I actually spent time playing Pokemon Puzzle League (PPL) back in 2000, when it was current. However, that was only a singular rental that, for whatever reason, didn't prompt me to purchase the full $60 game. On the Wii's Virtual Console, that price has been significantly reduced, effectively eliminating my barrier to entry on a title that I vaguely remembered being pretty fun. Turns out that faint inkling was pointing in the correct direction as PPL is a deceptively deep and satisfying puzzle experience.

The core gameplay of PPL is a tile swapping puzzle game, known to long-time importers as Panel de Pon. You are confined to a rectangular column wherein tiles ascend from the bottom and you must switch them left and right to match three same colors in a horizontal or vertical row, making them disappear. From that basic mechanic you can also chain combos together for a higher score or to dump junk blocks into your opponent's column in head-to-head competitive mode. If you played Tetris Attack on SNES this is probably sounding familiar.

Of course the big draw here is that this is a Pokemon game, right? OK, maybe not, but the game is enhanced if you can derive some sort of amusement out of that material, ironic or otherwise. Every time you turn on the game a FMV clip (extremely rare for a N64 title) featuring characters form the original Pokemon cartoon series prompts the "story" that sets up the game. There isn't much of a plot to speak of, though each mode does take a slightly different angle on the Pokemon world. In the 1P Stadium mode, you defeat a ladder of CPU competitors that are recognizable from the animated TV show, and in Spa Service, Team Rocket, appearing in various cross-dressed regalia, tries to trick you into something-or-other in between line clear challenges. The toon-representative, voiced audio during matches can be grating, but since sound is largely inconsequential to this game, I usually had it muted and listened to something else.

What I'm trying to get at is don't let the Pokemon name scare you away from this superb puzzle game. The PPL developers did everything short of retro-actively adding online multiplayer to expand and enhance the simple gameplay needed to justify this as a full retail product. Some of these work better than others but the range of options is encouraging since the game feels too easy at the outset. It became clear before long that I should have been utilizing those easy stages as training grounds for combo building because I hit a wall in the unlockable Very Hard difficulty where I could only win on pure luck. If you hit that wall or just want a change of scenery, you can check out Puzzle University instead and tackle block elimination puzzles at a more methodical pace. In this mode you are presented with a small amount of tiles and a limited number of swaps to clear them all from the board. In theory you could translate these combo triggering skills to the competitive modes, but the frantic nature of those battles just drove me into a mindless, button-mashing panic.

Other modes in PPL include Practice, Endless, Time Attack, and the aforementioned Line Clear. These can be nice distractions, but they aren't where the real action is, so I doubt much time will be spent there. Plus, with the lack of online leaderboards, these score-focused modes lose a lot of their incentive since I'm the only person with access to my copy of PPL that spends any time playing it. Additionally you can switch on 3D mode which turns your rectangular game board into a rotatable cylinder with tiles emerging from the bottom all the way around. The cylinder is clear so you can see through to the back if there's an area requiring immediate damage control. This, like the other modes, goes a long way in showing the effort that was put into extending the Panel de Pon play experience, but always feels like an aside to the "real" head-to-head mode. Sure, doing the puzzle thing with polygonal graphics in a 3D space works fine, but like Tetrisphere, it doesn't measure up to the addictive nature of the basic 2D structure.

It's a relatively common thing for Japanese developers to take classic puzzle franchises and reskin them for Western audiences (think Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine), but PPL seems to go that extra mile with its supplementary content. The resulting world is pretty silly, with its paper-thin premise and goofy cartoon tie-ins, but it does serve to bulk out the puzzle gameplay, and do so with a sincere charm.

Review: Sin & Punishment (WiiVC/N64)

10 years ago cult-favorite developer Treasure put out Sin & Punishment, an English voice acted on-rails shooter, for the Nintendo 64, but only made it available in Japan. It's the N64 game that I came closest to importing purely on the basis of how it looked and what I had read about how it played. There's a grandiose anime-inspired, more mature (for N64) storyline with StarFox-like action, but you control a person instead of a plane. It was a game that looked extremely desirable in tiny screenshots on the back pages of EGM magazines. Now that Sin & Punishment has finally come stateside on the Wii's Virtual Console service, it was time to see if I was actually missing out.

For starters, let's get the unmet lofty expectations out of the way. S&P does not belong in the pantheon of all-time great N64 games, but it is still an incredibly stylish and unique product that has moments of absolute brilliance. Visually the game has a low polygon count for its characters, but not unexpectedly so, given its turn-of-the-millennium release. That said, the character models are rather grotesque, but in a way I find undeniably appealing. Everything has sharp, pointy angles, rigid joints and muddy textures. It seems like Treasure was trying to pull off something ambitious and cinematic with the designs, but I'd argue the game's all the better for these shortcomings as the characters literally look uncomfortable in their own skins.

This individualized discomfort seems to be one of the key elements of the story, but the character models alone do a better job of conveying this than any part of the formal plot in S&P. You control a guy who occasionally transforms into a giant mech-like monster and a girl who fights through an alternate future dream world and ultimately against the evil plot of their supposed-friend who I think they originally shared a common enemy with. So the story here, told mainly in non-interactive cutscenes, is nonsense that can be casually watched for awkward laughs, but thankfully skipped at will. As for the English voice acting, it's on par with some of the worst out there. All of these sloppy elements combine to create a broad feeling of camp that may have been awkward had this game actually been played in the US 10 years ago. S&P's overall presentation has aged both extremely poorly and extremely well, if that makes sense.

The design elements of S&P are worth noting, but are overall somewhat inconsequential to what this game is about. Like other games from Treasure, particularly those from the shooter genre, S&P leans heavily toward the hardcore sect. You control a character that, at times, must strafe, double jump, target, and shoot and/or sword slash at the same time, with each of those actions mapped to separate buttons. The control scheme has a sharp learning curve that requires significant practice to even handle properly, much less master. None of the three control setups offered are ideal on the Gamecube controller that I used to play the game, but hopefully the Classic Controller is more intuitively functional. S&P isn't a game that gives you much time to feel this stuff out either (though there is a tutorial mode) as you're quickly thrust into barrages of unrelenting enemy fodder at the game's outset that never let up. Still, it only takes about an hour to get through everything, so learning takes place on successive playthroughs more than over the course of one. As a side note, I would personally prefer a more movement-sensitive targeting cursor, as the sluggish one you're given makes parts of the game frustrating that could have been simply challenging. If it's not already clear, I recommend playing this game on Easy difficulty before engaging with Normal.

The strength of Treasure's game is its epic set-pieces. The ocean fleet chapter is particularly thrilling. The protagonist stands atop a floating platform that dramatically sweeps past armed frigates, waves of jet fighters, and countless energy blasts. Players would do well to get into pattern-memorization mode in such levels if they hope to get through with the least damage and highest score. After the sea battle the scene shifts to the sky where you must then take out a giant satellite fortress. Once destroying that, a huge asteroid mass hurtles towards your transformed mechanized monster friend and it's up you to tail the rock and detonate it before impact. There are quite a few tricky moments in this chapter, but in general it makes for an intense ride. Speaking of epic, the final boss fight is against some kind of evil clone Earth, and feels like an updated take on Space Invaders. When Sin & Punishment puts you in these larger-than-life scenarios, it's easy to get wrapped up in the excitement and discard the half-hazard story behind the action.

As with many elusive products, Sin & Punishment seems to be viewed by many critics through rose-colored glasses, glossing over the game's faults in favor of hardcore allegiances. To be fair, it does appeal to those tastes, but all in all it didn't live up to the expectations I've harbored for this game over the past decade. Perhaps the best news to come out of the Virtual Console version of S&P is that Nintendo plans for an international release of Sin & Punishment 2 for Wii this year. I have to imagine this sequel will control much more naturally given the light-gun style aiming that will be implemented into the Wiimote controls. The original Sin & Punishment still remains a stylistically unique, frantic shooting experience, but one would do well to keep their expectations in check before getting all huffy towards Nintendo for depriving US and European gamers of it for so many years.

:screenshots from Giant Bomb and IGN: