Puyo Puyo Tetris Port Report: Of Blocks and Blobs (PC Port)

    I might have mentioned it before, but Steam's update to the wishlist page seems to be acting a bit iffy when sorting by release dates. Not counting anything involving Early Access, it can't really decide where it should put unreleased games, even if they have an announced release date. For example, a game I'm curious to review is slated to release April 3rd, but it ranks as having a release later than that of games coming in late April, late May, and even those with a TBA date. This, along with a lack of interesting games (interesting for me. I know about Far Cry 5,) I've made an executive decision to look at a recently released port of a game released last year. We're going mainstream, folks! It's the Steam version of Puyo Puyo Tetris, by Sega (Patch 3 Version!)

     Unless you haven't even heard of video games, you probably don't need me to explain Tetris. Meanwhile, Puyo Puyo (also known as Puyo Pop,) is a falling block puzzle game that is relatively unknown in the West, but it's a very influential series. The game has you dropping Puyos (the blobs on the title screen above) two at a time as you try to connect four of the same color to clear them all. This doesn't get into more complex features, such as garbage Puyo or the ability to chain together Puyo clearings, but it should be enough for a review.

Well, the last American release I remember was on the Gamecube so.. yes. I don't play Puyo Puyo, Ringo.

    This version has all the stuff the console releases have: A single-player adventure mode, six single-player arcade modes (seven if you count VS as having one for Puyo Puyo and one for Tetris,) five multiplayer arcade modes (six with the same reasoning as above,) and an online mode. We've got sixteen characters, plus the eight unlockable ones. There didn't seem to be any special features for the PC version, if you were curious. I know some games do that, and it's either infuriating or awesome, depending if you're on the receiving end or not.

    I recall hearing that the adventure mode had some problems with bugs, so I decided to give that one a good examination. I didn't see any bugs there, so either I missed them or the patches that have been released since the game appeared on Steam have done their work. I did learn a few interesting things about the lore of Puyo Puyo though:

• Apparently, popping Puyos sometimes cause the poppers to be teleported, like a portal. It doesn't seem to have caused too much disaster in the world of Puyo Puyo so far, but I'm still holding my breath for a character being warped into deep space. Or maybe even Hell or some other afterlife place? I'd expect those games to not last very long.
• Anyone can become a communications officer on a spaceship. You don't even have to know English or whatever the most common language in that world is! Just grab a monkey or Pikachu, slap a radio headset on that sumbitch, and you've got yourself a capable crewmember! I'll have to let the others know if I ever play Space Station 13 again.

I'm guessing someone back at base had it out for Tee if they gave him a communications officer who can't even say two words in English.

• Puyo Puyo/Tetris battles are apparently quite calming. That's not how I'd normally describe any sort of battle, unless maybe it was one where the participants wielded dart rifles loaded with horse tranquilizer.

    I spent a decent bit of time on adventure mode, but I didn't notice any glitches or crashes (to some disappointment.) This isn't to say there aren't any glitches there, though.

    I also spent some time in the solo arcade mode, where you can play against CPU players in a variety of game modes. The two modes I checked out were VS mode (a best two out of three match of either Puyo Puyo or Tetris) and Swap mode (a best two out of three where you have a board for both game, but you swap between the two on a timer.) It was mostly to sharpen my saw because, as I established earlier...

Yeah, I'm Tee here. Well, not anymore, at least.

    It took a little while to not keep fumbling the controls (Z and X rotate, C swaps your held piece if you use that rule, SPACE slams down your tetromino,) but after being beaten a few times by Zed (or as Proton Jon called him in the Japanese version 'A Mother****in' Robot') and Risakuma ('Bear With Science',) I managed to get the hang of it. It's here that I found the only glitch during my time with this game. I was playing VS mode and had chosen Suketoudara ('Bub and Bob's younger brother') and the character randomly chosen as my opponent was Zed. The voice clip that played for him, however, was from Feli, one of the unlockable characters. When I entered the match itself, I was somehow playing against her, despite having not unlocked her yet

A picture of Swap Mode, complete with Kremlin in the background. *Cue Joel trolling Russian Counter-strike players*

    From what I had read, I thought there would be more bugs in the game, but I was pleasantly surprised to only find one bug. And it technically gave me access to stuff I didn't have yet, so it's not the worst bug in the world. The controls also seemed responsive, so that important issue wasn't a problem as well. Before I sign off, I should let you all know that I'll be at Anime Boston this weekend! I'll be there each day from about 10 or 11 to 3 each day, so if you see a guy named Brian with short brown hair and glasses, be sure to say hi!