Platform: Gameboy Advance

Developer: Sonic Team

Publisher: Sega

Genre: Puzzle

ETA: Out Now (Japan)

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Puyo Puyo

There are some genres of games that have nearly dropped off the face of the Earth, with a disparaging lack of space shooters, and Omni could talk your ear off about the 
disappearance of adventure games over the last five or so years. It would appear that not even puzzle games could escape gravitational pull of the black hole sucking up these genres. We've had Chu Chu Rocket, Mr. Driller, Devil Dice and a few other puzzle games came along, and there'll likely never be a stop of the flood of Bust-a-Move games, but really, there hasn't been much to get excited about in puzzle town. Nonetheless Sega is marching on with one of their oldest puzzle franchises, Puyo Puyo, on the Gameboy Advance now.

The series has never been released under its own name in North America, but did have two incarnations come this way with Dr. Robinik's Mean Bean Machine (Sega Genesis) and Kirby's Avalanche (SNES). For those who have no idea what Puyo Puyo is outside of being a puzzler, it was one of the first games with the whole dropping colored blocks theme, trying to separate itself from the king of dropping colored blocks at the time of the first game's release (aka Tetris). Players will move dropping blobbie teardrop shaped objects, trying to combine four of the same color in order to make them disappear and get the points, while finding ways to chain them together to get a number of blob groups disappearing at once, resulting in much better scoring. Now, about a decade since the series came out, this may not sound like anything special, but the simple fact of the matter remains that it's a damn good formula, simple and to the point. What better than this type of game for a portable system?

Puyo Puyo is a cornerstone in the realm of puzzle games, and though we have almost never seen it here save in a mildly altered state. Whether this trend will continue with us only hearing about the series but never seeing them hit North America has yet to be seen. 

- Mr. Nash