REVIEW: PoPo Team
Game Title: PoPo Team
Genre: Arcade Action/Puzzle
System: Watara Supervision
Developer: Sachen
Release date: 1992
Genre: Arcade Action/Puzzle
System: Watara Supervision
Developer: Sachen
Release date: 1992
As our quest to plunder the obscurities of gaming's past continues, we have to admit to taking something of a shine to the boys and girls at Sachen.
Sure, they may have produced any given number of cynical clones and rip-offs, but every now and then you can see glimpses of how, in another life and with better funding, they could have ended up producing something special.
There are the snatches of humour found in the ending of the otherwise mundane brawler Beast Fighter and the simple yet original gameplay twists of something like Magic Tower. Meanwhile, cutesy character designs that would not have looked out of place in a HAL Laboratories title are a common motif.
PoPo Team falls somewhere in between Sachen's fervent cloning of existing franchises and its desire to give them their own bit of graphical polish. Yet it does it with such panache that it's hard to begrudge Sachen the stolen idea.
PoPo Team is the arcade classic AntEater in all but name and sprite design. While we're not privy to the backstory, our heroes in this version appear to be a waistcoat wearing dinosaur and a weird bouncing ball who can be pumped full of liquid to extend his body into snake form.
Even if you've never played the arcade game it borrows from it won't take much looking at the screenshots below to figure out the gameplay. You move your snake like appendage around an underground maze, with the idea being to gobble up all of the dots, Pac-Man style. Indeed the gameplay can neatly be summed up as Pac-Man crossed with Snake. As you move through the maze your snake's length increases. Doubling back on yourself will be fatal as will the edible enemies who wander through its corridors if they collide with your serpentine body (The Snake's head is impervious to damage, unless it eats one of the occasional bombs that fly through the maze).
Fortunately a quick stab of the A or B button will reel in your body, in a manner akin to the button for the cord of a Henry Hoover. The tension of the game, therefore, comes from trying to grab those last few dots at the end of the maze before the next wandering enemy collides with your body. It was a premise that proved highly addictive in the original Ant Eater arcade game and ione that is perfectly replicated here through increasingly tricky and varied level design.
Sure, they may have produced any given number of cynical clones and rip-offs, but every now and then you can see glimpses of how, in another life and with better funding, they could have ended up producing something special.
There are the snatches of humour found in the ending of the otherwise mundane brawler Beast Fighter and the simple yet original gameplay twists of something like Magic Tower. Meanwhile, cutesy character designs that would not have looked out of place in a HAL Laboratories title are a common motif.
PoPo Team falls somewhere in between Sachen's fervent cloning of existing franchises and its desire to give them their own bit of graphical polish. Yet it does it with such panache that it's hard to begrudge Sachen the stolen idea.
PoPo Team is the arcade classic AntEater in all but name and sprite design. While we're not privy to the backstory, our heroes in this version appear to be a waistcoat wearing dinosaur and a weird bouncing ball who can be pumped full of liquid to extend his body into snake form.
Even if you've never played the arcade game it borrows from it won't take much looking at the screenshots below to figure out the gameplay. You move your snake like appendage around an underground maze, with the idea being to gobble up all of the dots, Pac-Man style. Indeed the gameplay can neatly be summed up as Pac-Man crossed with Snake. As you move through the maze your snake's length increases. Doubling back on yourself will be fatal as will the edible enemies who wander through its corridors if they collide with your serpentine body (The Snake's head is impervious to damage, unless it eats one of the occasional bombs that fly through the maze).
Fortunately a quick stab of the A or B button will reel in your body, in a manner akin to the button for the cord of a Henry Hoover. The tension of the game, therefore, comes from trying to grab those last few dots at the end of the maze before the next wandering enemy collides with your body. It was a premise that proved highly addictive in the original Ant Eater arcade game and ione that is perfectly replicated here through increasingly tricky and varied level design.
The charming character design and cute characters that populate the PoPo Team's world are straight out of a Kirby game (in some cases rather too literally). This isn't the first Sachen title we have come across that illustrates how in another life and with the correct funding,the talent was there for these notorious bootleggers to have actually made a name for themselves outside of producing knock-off Nintendo games.
You are given three lives with which to tackle the increasingly fiendish mazes, plus unlimited continues for the patient. After every fourth stage you are rewarded with a cute and slightly bizarre static cut-screen presumably explaining what is going on in the story in the minds of Sachen's graphical artists, who, it must be said, have absolutely knocked it out of the park with this one.
For such an inherently simple game, there has been real care and attention to detail shown in the graphical department. From the moment the joyful looking protagonist blinks at you from the game's title screen, the game brings a smile to the player's face with its cutesy feel good characters, rendered beautifully, as they are, on the Supervision's jumbo screen.
Another triumph of PoPo Team is just how beautifully it puts the Supervision to use. While previous efforts such as Super Pang were badly misjudged ports to bring to a hardware that struggles with fast moving graphics, the static screen and slow moving nature of Ant Eater makes for a perfect Supervision title. Indeed the only ghosting that is to be found here occurs on the mid-level title screen, where your bouncing companion gets a little lost in motion. During actual gameplay, however, everything moves like a smoothly programmed dream, which is hugely important in a game where precise movements are so important. Sound is also a superior effort with some reasonably jaunty tunes making way for sound effects only in game (again, much like Pac-Man). It's a wise decision not to mirror the mildly repetitive nature of the game-play with equally looping music and one that works well in a game where concentration is required and music could well prove an irritant.
For such an inherently simple game, there has been real care and attention to detail shown in the graphical department. From the moment the joyful looking protagonist blinks at you from the game's title screen, the game brings a smile to the player's face with its cutesy feel good characters, rendered beautifully, as they are, on the Supervision's jumbo screen.
Another triumph of PoPo Team is just how beautifully it puts the Supervision to use. While previous efforts such as Super Pang were badly misjudged ports to bring to a hardware that struggles with fast moving graphics, the static screen and slow moving nature of Ant Eater makes for a perfect Supervision title. Indeed the only ghosting that is to be found here occurs on the mid-level title screen, where your bouncing companion gets a little lost in motion. During actual gameplay, however, everything moves like a smoothly programmed dream, which is hugely important in a game where precise movements are so important. Sound is also a superior effort with some reasonably jaunty tunes making way for sound effects only in game (again, much like Pac-Man). It's a wise decision not to mirror the mildly repetitive nature of the game-play with equally looping music and one that works well in a game where concentration is required and music could well prove an irritant.
More quirky artwork. We've absolutely no idea what is going on in the second picture. The last screenshot demonstrates just how tricky things can get as early as the fifth stage.
When a game is as deceptively simple as this one is then it can be easy to dismiss it as limited or past its sell by date. However to do so would be to not only misjudge its very nature but to completely misunderstand the charm and appeal that games like this had and still have to those of us with a fondness for an obsolete time and place that has been all but forgotten in today's technicolour sandbox universe.
PoPo Team shines through a sea of Supervision mediocrity. It doesn't have an original bone in its serpentine body but it uses the hardware to perfection, is graphically glorious and has tight, addictive gameplay that is perfectly suited to the handheld and its crisp, giant screen.
We still have no idea what the little waistcoat wearing protagonist is digging for, but in trying to discover it, it has been pleasing to find a true hidden gem for the much bemoaned system: a very real diamond in the rough.
PoPo Team shines through a sea of Supervision mediocrity. It doesn't have an original bone in its serpentine body but it uses the hardware to perfection, is graphically glorious and has tight, addictive gameplay that is perfectly suited to the handheld and its crisp, giant screen.
We still have no idea what the little waistcoat wearing protagonist is digging for, but in trying to discover it, it has been pleasing to find a true hidden gem for the much bemoaned system: a very real diamond in the rough.
Score 9/10