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Review: MacPuyo 2Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Date: December 29, 2002
There are two things I don't understand about society. First, this sudden concern about white teeth. Seems that less than a year ago, people didn't really care--or at least weren't permanently scarred--if their teeth weren't the perfect shade of white. I guess the marketing execs realized that instilling false complexes in men about the loss of their hair only tapped into half the demographic. Why exploit only men's insecurities when there's money to be made on both ends of the spectrum...and at all age groups! It's a good thing for manufacturers of pointless products that we're not all perfect, huh. Second, I don't understand society's fascination with games about things that fall down. Short of perhaps only solitaire, things-falling-down games have to be the most oft released titles on the market, certainly now surpassing the trusty knocking-out-bricks-with-a-paddle games. Pretty much all of these, I've noticed, are shareware games. I suppose updating/altering/ripping off these games is a good way for young game developers to cut their teeth on programming. I'm all for it. I'll play them all, and most of them I'll enjoy, then I'll dump them when the next one comes along. Well, provided the next one doesn't cost too much. The latest things-falling-down (TFD) game I've tried is MacPuyo 2. I missed MacPuyo 1, which is still available for Mac OS 9, but I can't imagine it would've been much different from this. MacPuyo 2 has drawn comparisons to Tetris, the game that started the things-falling-down sensation, but that's not entirely accurate. In Tetris, you just had to fill blank spaces with the blocks that fell. It was all about shape. MacPuyo is all about color, which is more like Jewelbox (another TFD game that has come and gone).
The eyeballs also tend to look around the screen as you play. I'm not sure if this serves a purpose. At first, I thought maybe the little guys were giving hints as to where I should drop my next piece, but that didn't seem to be the case. Back to the game. When you touch four or more like colors, the little head things pop and disappear. The colors can be touching in any way except for diagonally, so it's quite easy to chain more than four together. As one color disappears, the heads above it will fall into their place. If this again aligns four or more of a like color, that color will disappear as well. The game ends when the freaky head things reach the top of the screen. The game starts at a fairly simple speed, but that, of course, doesn't last very long. After about the third or fourth level increase, I found it practically impossible to drop the game pieces with any degree of control. Oddly, my games kept going for quite some time because I kept accidentally creating the matches. That was on easy mode, though. I can't imagine this would've been the case if I'd been working with six colors instead of four. It helps that the next pair to be dropped is shown at the top of the playing area, but I never had time to look up there on the higher levels.
The presentation is fairly nice. The playing field shows the kind of mossy-stone waterfall image normally reserved for backlit photos in Chinese restaurants. Surrounding this is the sort of technicolor marble pattern you always get in those free web-design background clip-art CDs, but would never think of using. There, they're useless. Here, it works. Unfortunately, neither the play field photo nor the surrounding pattern ever change. Or at least it didn't when I played. Maybe if you get some kind of amazingly high score. MacPuyo 2 offers nothing new to Mac gamers, but I don't believe it was trying to. It's a quick download, it's a quick play, and it's priced accordingly. It doesn't offer the features of competitive games such as Freeverse Software's Burning Monkey Puzzle Lab (which is also now OS X compatible), but maybe you don't want the extra features. If you're just looking for a fun, attractive way to add more anxiety to your day, MacPuyo 2 will do the trick. And who knows? Play it long enough, the glow from your monitor just may whiten your teeth!
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In MacPuyo 2, these freaky little head things fall in pairs and in an assortment of colors (four to six, depending upon the difficulty setting). Your job is to group like colors together to make them disappear. When like colors touch, they morph together to let you know a connection has been made...and to creep you out. See, these things have eyes, which give them a living quality, which makes their morphing somewhat odd to see. It's actually a pretty cool effect, inspired by the Aqua look of OS X. Imagine if the red, yellow and green control buttons at the top of your windows in OS X had eyeballs, and if they occasionally just started slipping into each other, and you'll get the idea.
So, what separates MacPuyo 2 from other games such as this? Not much. Two people can play at once, but only by using the keyboard. That makes for a crowded gaming area, especially on an iBook for TiBook where games such as this are otherwise so well suited. In the two player game, you can drop metallic alien-head-things onto your opponent to screw up his color matching. Otherwise, the gameplay is the same.