Speaking of which, I love the adorable pieces of art that accompany this game's character bios. Of course, I probably would've picked up a copy of Pop'n Pop even if its disc contained nothing more than high-quality scans of its beautiful cover art and manual illustrations. Wikipedia describes this colorful arcade port as 'a hybrid of Puzzle Bobble and Space Invaders,' and that's a pretty spot-on assessment based on my enjoyable experience with it so far.

The other Taito-published PlayStation title included in the aforementioned photo (as well as the one above), by the way, is 1998's Pop'n Pop.

I'm still not the biggest fan of the way Taito's artists decided to alter Bub's and Bob's designs around this time, but at least the gameplay of this pair of Puzzle Bubble titles makes up for these artistic miscues. Specifically, I bought and played Taito's (Japanese) PlayStation ports of Puzzle Bubble 2 and Puzzle Bobble 3DX, both of which can be seen in the photo above. What's changed in the interim? Well, I bought and played a few of them, for starters. That's mostly because I lacked a general awareness of this portion of Taito's output, I have to admit, but it's also because the few releases I was aware of from this period-like 1991's PuLiRuLa, 1995's Psychic Force and 1996's RayStorm-failed to impress me the way predecessors like Bubble Bobble, Don Doko Don, Elevator Action and Insector X did.Ī couple of months ago, you could have thrown the company's many Puzzle Bobble sequels onto the same pile as the one that contained PuLiRuLa, Psychic Force et al. As much as I've long loved Taito's earliest console efforts-such as the titles the company made and released for the Famicom, PC Engine and even Mega Drive-I haven't been able to say the same about the titles that flowed from their offices during the 32-bit era (and after) until recently.

Pop n pop ps1