Once more into Humble Monthly games, today I played "Pirate Pop Plus". Which is pretty much a single-player "Pang" clone. But with pirates and gravity.

I remember as a child when we were visiting Adelaide, and at some point my dad had to stop off in the hills and drop off some forms to a client. When he returned to the car we had the issue of the car not starting. Calling the RAA we were told it would be a 40 minute wait before service would arrive.

The family of the house invited us in and we played Pang on their Amiga until the service man showed up and did whatever he had to do to get the car running.

It would then be about two decades until I played Pang again, with the Nindendo DS version of Pang: Magical Michael. I think at this point with two more decades of gaming in me the magic of that one afternoon on the Amiga was lost. This was confirmed once again when I played Pirate Pop Plus.

Part of the issue is nostalgia towards the Gameboy. I didn't have one of the things, instead I owned the Sega Game Gear. More than four colours! And I had the TV module and could sneakily watch late night 1990s SBS without family knowing ;)

So there's no real draw on this feature. And although it is likely based on something closer to the Mini-Gameboy, I found the screenlayout more in touch with said previously mentioned Game Gear. Which makes it rather unusual for me due to the deliberate limitations.

Pirate Pop Plus's story is that you are a pirate, and the Bubble Pirate has captured other pirates in bubbles. You need to shoot the bubbles with a gun that shoots a hook chain. All done is classic 8bit retro storytelling too, it is something really minimal to get you into the game and nothing more, just as it should be.

If you've not played pang, the basic game is that bubbles appear on the screen and must be cleared. You move along the floor of a room and shoot a chain up to the roof. If the head or length of the chair hits a bubble, the bubble pops and splits into two or more smaller bubbles. Hit these smaller ones again to make tiny bubbles, and hit then the tiny bubbles to finally burst them.

When the chain hits a bubble or the roof it will break, and by default you can only have one on the screen at any one point. Making the game one of object avoidance as bubbles hurt if they hit you, and timing to shoot the chain off at the right point.

Sometimes when hitting bubbles you'll get fruit drops to help prevent scurvy along the high seas. Or possibly just give you extra points...

You'll also get actual powerups as occasional drops too. These change your weapon to clamps which latch onto the roof until hit a bubble or time out, and a double blaster laser gun to quickly mop up everything on the screen.

There's also coin drops. Which are a rare drop from bubbles, but have a higher chance if you hit the pirate that appears temporarily to spawn bubbles. They do nothing more than customise the screen, soundtrack and pirate appearance.

In an odd quirk, you can get them from unlocking a high score. Meaning if you do really well early on, you'll miss out on bonuses as it is harder to beat your own score.

The game's final twist is that sometimes gravity will change and you'll walk on the sides or the top of the screen and shoot towards the new opposite roof of the screen. You're given warning with lots of flashing arrows for a few seconds before this happens.

To make it easier on the player to avoid getting hit when gravity flips, you can STOMP on the bubbles like it is the best part of your day. Doing so gives you a little jump allowing you to chain stomp and clear a wave of bubbles.

It's not a bad game, but unless there's some love for Pang, the genre, or Gameboy throwbacks it feels a bit lacking.

Controls are tight, music is repetitive, and unlock progression feels awfully slow.

But it was fun, and I'll likely keep it installed for a while to see how high a score I can get in it.

Game Acquisition: Humble Monthly (November 2016).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 25 March 2017
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows XP SP2+
Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
Graphics: DX9 (shader model 3.0) or DX11 with feature level 9.3 capabilities
Storage: 109 MB available space