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| josh TX | Nov 12 2007, 06:26 PM |
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Review: Pooyan (Arcade, 1982) You might be wondering already just from reading the title, "What the hell is a Pooyan?" Honestly I'm not even sure myself, but it is the title of this 1982 Konami game starring Wolves and cute little pigs, so i'm guessing it has something to do with that... In Pooyan players control a "Mama" pig trying to save her young from a pack of hungry wolves who use baloons to float either up or down the screen (depending on which level) to reach the piglets. As Mama pig, you ride up and down the side of a cliff in an elevator like contraption, shooting arrows at the wolves to pop their baloons and keep them from the piglets. Occasionally a piece of meat (huh?) will appear and it can be fired at the wolves as well, with the added ability to pop multiple wolf baloons in one hit. Sound weird? It most definetly is an odd little game. The whole of the game includes 2 stages plus a bonus stage, then starts over with a slightly amped-up difficulty. In the first screen wolves appear at the top of the screen and try to float down on baloons to the bottom to reach Mama's piglets. They usually come in waves of 4 or 5 wolves at a time, and present players with a sense of urgency to kill them before they reach the bottom, somewhat similar to the feeling you might experience in space invaders when you are trying to blast up all the aliens before they got to the bottom of the screen. In the second stage, the wolves start at the bottom of the screen and blow up baloons to try to reach the top. If too many reach the top, they will eventually push a large boulder off the cliff to kill the Mama pig. The bonus stage looks similar to this second stage only that you can't die in this one as the ascending wolves don't throw stones at you as they go up like they do in the regular stages. As players complete level after level in Pooyan, the difficulty will ramp up pretty quickly. Boss-like purple wolves that can only be killed by meat will appear more frequently, wolves will use small shields in front of their baloons to block your arrows, and bigger waves of wolves will advance faster. It can be quite the challenge even for greatly skilled players. At the end of the day, Pooyan feels like a cute shoot-em up style game with some new ideas and plenty of charm thrown in to set it on its own. The graphics are well done for it's time, the cutesy sounds and "O Sussana" tune feel in line with the cartoon-like presentation, and the game is forgiving enough at the begginning but becomes tough enough even for seasoned gamers to get their fair challenge. A little more variety would have been nice though, maybe a couple more screens to cut down on the repetitive nature of it, but hey it was 1982. Pooyan is a quirky little title I could recommend to anyone who enjoys games like centipede or space invaders. It's no classic, but it's original enough to stand apart and avoids being a clone of these games, and it's presentation alone is enough to warrant checking it out just to see how weird it is. My Score: 6.5/10  Promo Flyer   1st and 2nd stages from a home version of the game |
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| Josh's Retro Reviews · Toggle Up-Video Gaming | |
12:28 PM Nov 28
