Puyo Pop

Puyo Pop brought one of the most famous Japanese puzzle series to the Neo Geo Pocket Color and proved that a two-player duel of stacking colorful blob creatures works just as well on a small screen as it does in arcades. The rules are simple: pairs of puyos fall from above, the player rotates and places them, and once four matching colors touch, they vanish. Everything that was resting above them falls down, and if that creates another group, a chain reaction begins. Chains are the whole essence of the game, and they separate beginners from those who know what they're doing.

The competitive logic is merciless yet beautifully readable. For every link in the chain, the opponent's field gets flooded with transparent nuisance puyos, which can't be removed directly, only by clearing a colored group next to them. A match is therefore a tug-of-war in which both players try to build the longest possible cascade before the opponent's buries them first. This creates a tension that classic puzzle games simply don't offer: the screen fills up, palms sweat, and one badly placed piece decides everything. The campaign against computer opponents serves as practice, but the game finds its true purpose in a duel between two people over the link cable.

The presentation is lighthearted and colorful, with cute creatures reacting to events with facial expressions, and a clear split screen for keeping an eye on the opponent's field. The tunes are cheerful and deliberately simple, so they don't distract from the ever-increasing pace. At the time, the game was seen as an obvious staple of any handheld console's library and one of the reasons to buy a link cable for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Today it's still one of the best-balanced competitive puzzle games there is, and a good example of how little is needed for a perfect design. Learning to build a chain of four or more links takes a long time, and that's exactly where the game's longevity hides: you'll understand the rules in a minute, but you can spend years getting better at them. The solo mode, meanwhile, mainly serves as a warm-up before the real duel.