Pop - First impressions
The first game decided to try on Nintendo’s new WiiWare service was Pop, Nnooo’s bubblicious arcade title, which looks like it’ll be a real hoot in multiplayer. Being a big Billy-no-mates, however (not really; I’m just not at home currently) I’ve only had chance to sample the solo game. And it’s great fun.
As the name (and the shot above) suggests, it’s all about popping bubbles. There are between two and four different colours in each wave - these last a couple of minutes, and the screen scrolls in a different direction from the last time. There’s a time limit which ticks down, with chunks sliced off whenever you aim and miss (you can use either A or B topop), and is increased by piercing bubbles fairly quickly. Large ones give you more time but fewer points, smaller ones are harder to hit but give you a substantially better score. To further increase your tally, you need to chain the same colour bubbles for as long as you can to increase your score multiplier - you don’t have long to do this, but if you spot which colour is the wave ‘favourite’ you should be able to keep it going until you unlock one of the medals - Achievement-like rewards for popping a continuous stream of bubbles, playing for a certain amount of time, and so on.
Further tweaks are provided with bubbles which contain a haz-mat symbol, which explode, taking out many nearby bubbles - this might ruin your combo, but it should net you a bit of extra time and plenty of points. Be careful not to take out the skull bubbles in the resultant chain reaction, though. Oh, and you can grab a bubble, shake the remote to inflate it, and burst it to take out several others in the vicinity. I didn’t use that much, but it’s one of several nice touches - for example, if you’re colour-blind, the game considerately changes the shape of the bubbles. Lovely.
With loads of online leaderboards, four different game modes (Chill, which simply allows you to pop at your own leisure to the hypnotic, looping beats looks like a potential stoner fave) and what’s sure to be a chaotic and fun multiplayer game, Pop is an easy recommend, even at this early stage.
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