You wouldn't think a humble little puzzle game could have such an affect
on me, but Baku Baku (or Baku Baku Animal if you have the Japanese
version) is one of my favorite games on the Saturn.

There were a number of games during the Saturn's life that used
pre-rendered CG instead of real-time polygons or hand-drawn/hand-crafted
pixel art, and Baku Baku is among that list. At the time, I really
wasn't fond of that kind of art style. Baku Baku just looked really
busy in the screenshots. Like there was a little too much going on and
an art style that didn't jive with me.

Thankfully, as a dutiful Saturn owner, I put my hesitations aside and
tried it own. The music was certainly jaunty, but that first level
theme seemed a little too hillbilly for its own good. But the more I
played, the more that music started to worm its way into my heart.

As far as the gameplay goes, when it works, it works well. Build up your
stack strategically to shoot for combos. You send more blocks to your
opponent for each successive step in the combo, and it goes up
exponentially. So it's easy to set up 2-step combos where you get one
piece of food eaten, which leads to the second step in the chain having multiple foods eaten. And since it's exponential growth with each step,
that second step is worth twice as much just for having it be in a chain.

The downside to how the game works is that there are often very
frustrating moments as well when you have all the animals in the world
(or alternatively all the food in the world), but you can't get the one
block you need to get your chain going.

It seems to have done well enough for Sega that they also released a
Game Gear port, which is pretty decent. It has the CPU player (or
player 2 in a link battle) in a much smaller window on the side of the
screen side of the screen to make sure you have sufficient resolution
for your play area. It's a really smart way to do it on the smaller
Game Gear screen.

It is kind of funny that the back of the box of the Game Gear version advertises the game as "Strategic Columns? puzzle play!" I guess when
Tetris and Columns were the two main block-droppers people recognized,
they hadn't decided on the genre label "puzzle" yet. Even though by
that time Puyo Puyo (Or Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine for the west), Bust-a-Move, Klax, Dr. Mario, and several others had already made their
mark on the industry.

I guess it also got a PC port back in the day. Anyway, I was just
thinking about it and wanted to post to the newsgroups, so here you go :-)

See you next time.

--
~~ benstylus ~~
Yes, this is the same benstylus who posted here from the late 90s to mid
00's.
NO-SPAM is obviously not my email domain. You might try the Roman
version of Hera if you really need to email me.

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