This week on Two-for-Tuesday, I’ll review a couple of my favorite off-the-beaten-path puzzle games from yesteryear. I mean, everyone’s played Tetris, but how many of you have saved rockets full of mice from hungry cats, or saved the entire world through your puzzling skills? I wonder…

Puzzle Posers (Chu Chu Rocket, Impossible Mission)

Target #1: Chu Chu Rocket (Dreamcast, 1999)

Chu Chu Rocket holds several special places in my heart. It was the first Dreamcast game I purchased, and to this day, it’s the most entertaining competitive puzzle game I have ever played. The game is played in a series of levels on a grid, with up to 4 players competing to fill their rockets with mice first. Players get a typical assortment of power-ups, power-downs, devices with which to confound one’s opponents, and the like. The core gameplay mechanic is dead-simple: one places directional arrows on the board to influence the travel paths of mice (and hungry cats!) alike, in an attempt to direct mice TO your rocket, AWAY from an opponent’s rocket, or AWAY from those damn cats! The pace is frenetic, and the mice spill out in a manner reminiscent of the classic puzzle game Lemmings. For the times when you have less energy, there is also a more static single-player puzzle mode. The graphics and music are cute (and pretty danged nice for the time it was released), and the commercials are downright bizarre.

Takers:

• A little quirkiness can make a simple game stick with you. It gives you something to remember. Or to shout randomly when drinking. “Chu Chu Rocket! BANZAI!”
• Creative unity: Keep the premise simple, and write a clean game around it.

Leavers:

• This was probably intentionally part of the difficulty of the game, but the screen could get incredibly confusing, leaving a player floundering to find their own marker, etc. Try to help the player stay focused on the key action.

Target #2: Impossible Mission (Commodore 64, 1984)

The sinister uttering of Professor Elvin Atombender — real SPEECH in a game!! — sets the tone for this platformer-puzzler classic. The staticky 8-bit “Another visitor… Stay a while… STAY FOREVER!” is a line not quickly forgotten for the folks who attempted this game. For what it’s worth, I’m going to agree with the title; while I believe that SOME people have actually completed this game, I certainly never came close. The game consisted of several components: 1, explore Prof Elvin’s massive underground lair. 2, collect items to help you and pieces of a massive puzzle. 3, Solve the puzzle before time runs out and the world is destroyed.

“Rooms” in the game contained elevators, attack robots, and items to be searched. Searching items could yield puzzle pieces, “lift inits” that would reset elevators in a room to their initial status, and “snooze bombs” that would temporarily freeze the robots. Several special rooms contained a giant music and color puzzle, which would yield additional lift inits and snooze bombs upon completion. Puzzle pieces could be rotated, flipped, superimposed, and changed in color. A “dial-up computer” would give some limited advice; the only advice I remember is whether or not you had half of the pieces yet. (In only a few games did my mediocre jumping-puzzle skills lead me even that far…)

Takers:

• Combining several genres can be effective. Of course, I think we hadn’t yet clearly defined many videogame genres…
• Random arrangements of rooms, items, and puzzles led to quite a bit of replayability — no two games were the same!

Leavers:

• I found it very difficult to understand what progress, if any at all, I was making on the puzzle. Perhaps it was my tender young age, or a general lack of spatial puzzle skills, but a complex task such as arranging a huge puzzle (while able to see only a handful of pieces) should probably be accompanied by very clear progress / success / failure indicators.