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There are Minigame collections, and then there are honest Compilation Games. The difference
tends to be scope and depth, along with the length of the average game. Culture Brain
published one such compilation back in �03 (and again in �05) titled the Puzzle & Tantei
Collection, bringing together a detective investigation (that I don�t feel like bothering
with because I am NOT Benedict Cumberbatch), a hamster-related puzzle game (what we�ll
dig into tomorrow) and Minna no Puzzle Kuru Kuru Pon. Obviously trying to ride the coattails
of Nintendo�s ridiculously successful Panel de Pon series. But that was a game about fairies
and magic and whatnot, while Kuru Kuru Pon concerns itself with spinning around... mice.
Lots and lots of mice. And one lucky, lucky cat.
So, it kinda looks like a Bejeweled or a Zoo Keeper or some similar grid-fulla-objects
puzzle game. Your cursor is a 2x2 area that can be plopped down with the B button, whereupon
you can cycle the contents of the frame clockwise or counterclockwise with the D-pad. The mice
don�t disappear when lined up, though, nor arranged into blocks or other figures... nope,
these mice have to be HUNTED DOWN. And here�s just the cat to do it. If the cat�s facing
a mouse of a matching color, you can press A to wake up said cat (thus risking your life
in the process, but follow me for a minute) and have it... um... detonate the mouse in
front of it, as well as every adjacent mouse of the same color. Not sure how that happens,
but we�ll deal with it. Anyway. With the mice detonated, the cat will walk forward
one cell, and change color. Said colors always cycle the same way: Red, Green, Purple, Blue,
Grey, Yellow. Should this change leave the cat in a position to immediately attack another
mouse or collection of mice, it will do so as a chain, eventually making its way to the
opposite side of the screen, at which point it�ll turn around. The cat can�t look
up and he can�t turn around any other way, so you�re gonna spin yourself dizzy trying
to accommodate his whims. (In other words, a typical cat.)
In the standard head-to-head mode, you and an opponent are tasked with eliminating a hundred mice
inside a time limit, with the first to complete the task declared the winner - or, being reasonable,
the one with the most mice eliminated inside said time limit, as I�ve never seen it done.
There isn�t much interaction, though, as the only way to be pushed back from your goal
is to wake up the cat when there isn�t an appropriate mouse immediately before him.
A time attack mode takes away the threat of a second player, and focuses on score and
completion and that�s it. (Though, as we�ve learned through countless puzzle games, score
and success don�t always go hand-in-hand.)
Finally, there�s a puzzle mode - a regular requirement when dealing with games like these,
that give you a limited number of moves and cat-wakings-up to completely clear the board
of mice. It�s all well and good, and certainly nothing that other games of its ilk haven�t
done before, but there is one new wrinkle: a puzzle editor. Yes, you can put your own
gravity-based cat-and-mouse strategies to the test to configure a layout of your own
choice... and then, since this is a physical cart, you�ve kinda gotta hand it off to
someone physically in order to share the experience. It�s a weird sort of twist on a style of
puzzle I�ve played many times before, in that your entire focus is on the area around
this darn cat. But while it�s certainly not bad by any stretch... and we thank Felicity
in Worcestershire for sending it to us, even if its primary purpose is as a Hamster Conveyance
Module... just playing thing makes me want to fire up Pok�mon Puzzle League.