Gameplay Today - Because You're Always Gaming

Puyo Pop on N-Gage is yet another game in the long-running series, so popular these days that it nearly rivals the almighty Tetris. The name itself may not be too familiar to some people, but the game play certainly will be, as it's been disguised by numerous names in the past, including Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine and Kirby's Avalanche.

The N-Gage version of Puyo Pop is decent, but surprisingly, it's not as technically sound or jam packed with content as the Game Boy Advance release of the same name. For those not familiar with the series, Puyo Pop is a puzzle game based around colored beans. These beans fall from the top of the screen to the bottom, and players must line three or more colored beans up with one another in order to make them pop. The objective is to prevent your screen from filling with beans.

Game play is spiced up via the ability to cause chain reactions if forward-thinking players position beans on top of soon-to-be popped beans. That's about all there is to the series, but the puzzlers have always been extremely enjoyable, thanks to their simplicity and fast pace. Having said that, you'd expect a version for N-Gage with Bluetooth multiplayer support to be a must-have. Surprisingly, it's not.

Puyo Pop is a much better puzzle game than Taito's Puzzle Bobble VS for N-Gage, but it suffers from exactly the same two problems which plagued Taito's title the bean colors aren't distinguished clearly, and the pacing seems too slow.

For some strange reason, the developers chose to stick with the five bean colors normally seen in the series - red, green, yellow, blue and purple. While the green and yellow beans are fine, it can be extremely difficult to distinguish between the blue, purple and red beans, which makes the game much harder to play than it should be. This is made more frustrating because you only have to look at the bright blue score at the top of the screen to see that, if the developer had been more aware of the problem, it could have easily been fixed.

Puyo Pop for N-Gage also feels quite unresponsive at times, largely thanks to its frame rate problems. Believe it or not, even though the N-Gage has the ability to play fully 3D games like Tomb Raider and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater nearly flawlessly, it seems to have significant problems handling ten year old 2D games. This unresponsiveness, which is in part a control issue, limits the fun that you'd normally have with the game.

There are three modes to choose from in Puyo Pop, including Scenario, a story mode where you battle through 12 opponents, Exercise, which is a practice mode just for fun, and Puzzle, which requires you to perform certain tasks like clear a screen of one color of bean. On top of that, there's a high score posting feature for N-Gage Arena, and there's the game's multiplayer Bluetooth support, which is enjoyable if both players can both look past the game's problems.

Graphically, Puyo Pop doesn't exactly push the N-Gage, but what is on screen looks decent. It would have been nice if the colors were more vibrant, and the game's slow down problems are as embarrassing for the developers as they are irritating for the players, but you'll see some decent anime-style graphics in-between rounds, which should ease the blow.

Like most N-Gage games, Puyo Pop sounds decent, but there's simply no music. The sound effects are crisp and clear, but where's the music? Once again, the ability to listen to the radio while you play will come in handy, as (like most N-Gage games) Puyo Pop is completely devoid of music.

If you have to have a puzzle game with your N-Gage, Puyo Pop is the best available, but it's a shame that technical issues hamper what has, up until now, been an unbreakable formula. If you are going to purchase the game for N-Gage, do so knowing that you're better off with a Game Boy Advance and a copy of the game for Nintendo's portable platform.