Holiday Card: Pirate Pop Plus

There are various points in the nostalgia triggering spectrum that is gaming where gaming was, in a word, pretty ugly. Truly retro pixel art, that is, atari style is pretty hideous. Early 3D is pretty grim - I don't mean the sprite based faux-3d of Duke Nukem or Doom, but the shortly after those titles. But one of the true stand-outs for ugliness is the original gameboy.

I played many hours on the original Gameboy, so the four "color" LCD stylings of Pirate Pop Plus look fine to me. The faceplate, seen in the screenshots, adds to the effect and reminds me of playing Gameboy Color emulators (or whichever, the one Metroid Fusion was on) which is pretty pleasant. But I would totally understand if you took one look at these screenshots, turned three hundred sixty degrees and bubble-walked right out of the room.

Anyway, PPP is a rehash of a decade(s) old arcade game, Pang or Buster Bros or honestly who knows which? I can remember playing this game years back in the arcade, but I could never remember the name. Essentially, in this case, a pirate appears on screen and produces a bubble. When you hit the bubble with your harpoon, it pops in two or three smaller bubbles. Repeated down one size and once you've obliterated the bubble or take too long he's back again with another bubble. And repeat til you lose. PPP distinguishes itself with a world-flipping mechanic, in which the pirate appears at random and picks up, down, left or right to be the new down. Often he'll pick the direction you're already facing, but then you can shoot him in the ass.

PPP also has a currency system, in which gold coins drop and can be traded into a vendor for new characters, new music and then a lot of silly stuff that doesn't do overly much but is sort of fun. The cosmetic side is cute, but requires a lot of grinding that likely goes beyond how much fun you'll get out of the game. I had a good two hours with it, and I'd probably play it more, but I have so many games to work my way through you know how it is.

The gameplay on the most part is quite enjoyable. When the gravity gets flipped, you have a weird bonus round where you can 'land' on bubbles to pop them very quickly. If this happens at the right time, you can rack up quite a few bonus points, but it's also the most dangerous point. When you first touch the ground, you bounce, and you can't fire while you're in the air. The end result is a period of extreme vulnerability, which isn't much fun and is basically the main point I die at. The other thing is your spear can ONLY ever pop one bubble, which frankly isn't well thought out on the developer's part. You can end up in the later levels with piles of bubbles all clumped together and chain spearing just won't get through them all. Not sure why it doesn't linger for a split-second to pop multiple.

You can also run into an issue where you fire a spear as the pirate appears, and drive it into his rump while expecting to hit something else. End result is much the same.

In conclusion, I'd say PPP is good if the graphical style tickles your fancy. It's a fun little game with a little grind on the side to make it a bit more interesting. I do wish it had more power ups, or perhaps more interesting power ups as most of them are pretty dull. Definitely a lot better than, oh, quite a few titles I fired up while grinding cards only to find them utterly unplayable.