Gunpey DS

Gunpei Yokoi - creator of the Game Boy and Metroid, among many others - is my hero. He was one of the original game engineers, responsible for bridging the gap between our video game fantasies and electrical reality. Before he died, he conceived a puzzle mechanic that would help debut his brainchild, the Wonderswan, and which now lives on in a PSP and DS reiteration. It's really, really too bad.

The game is, in a word, boring. The basic mechanism is fine enough: connect a line from the left side of the playfield to the right, using differently shaped joint panels. More panels are better, e.g. forks connecting to and/or diverging from the line. It's an interesting concept. Unfortunately there's little else to the game at all; playing "against" someone is a minutes-long affair of waiting for the playing speed to ramp up enough for the other player to lose. Survival is easy, and launching "attacks" is pointless, as most of them don't even do anything.

The music is the game's second bullet point, and this, too, falls flat. It's little more than the same thing everyone's gotten used to in puzzle games, where the music ramps up as the stack increases, and sound effects flare when moving and connecting pieces. Meteos does a much better job. Not to mention that most of the BGM compositions in Gunpey are utterly dull.

I'll keep going to see if I might be missing something, but as of right now, this is far from a worthy legacy to Gunpei.

Progress: Finished two Frontier characters