Seriously Play | Retro Video Gaming

Yume Penguin Monogatari is a platform/shooter game by Konami for the Famicom. This game was only released in Japan, and I can understand why with it’s bizarre story!
You play as Penta, a chubby penguin who has lost his girlfriend Penko to a cool penguin with dark shades, and he needs to win her back!

In this game you don’t have a life bar and there is no way to die on the stages, but there’s a fitness bar, showing Penta’s current obesity status! Penko’s new boyfriend is sending out troops of enemies to throw foods at Penka. If something hits him he automatically eats it and becomes a bit more fat! When you reach the fattest phase he can hardly move and his only attack is to throw himself on his belly and wiggle around! lol

You can find fitness drinks around the stages that will get Penka to Shape Up! When you’re less obese you can kick enemies, and if you get really fit you can shoot out the japanese letter PO (ポ) from your mouth “PO PO PO” ^_^

If you reach the end of the stage and your fitness bar is pink, you will have to replay the stage, because Penta was too fat for his ex to take him back! This is just hilarious! :D However, if he’s fit enough (when the meter is blue) he will begin to win her over and you get to go to the next stage. You have unlimited tries (as far as I know) on each stage.

The second stage is a shooter, once again you will have to get fit and avoid flying apples and rise balls (onigiri) that the enemies will chuck at you. You will reach a boss at the end of the stage, when you shoot him you’ll get fitness drinks, but he will also constantly shoot food at you. Even if you beat him you will still have to be fit to be able to continue on to the next stage. If you’re obese you’ll just have to replay the stage again.

There’s various stages in this game, both platform and shooter stages. It’s really funny and obscure! The music is great, just what you would expect from an 8-bit Konami game :) I love how the feeling of the controls change with Penta’s various obesity phases, it’s fast and easy when you’re fit and really slow and troublesome when you’re obese, your attacks also change. It’s brilliant! You should Seriously Play this game! :D

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! SPOLER ALERT ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

When you beat the game you will get to fly away with your girlfriend. She will take you back and you will get a kiss and start blushing.. after that you sit under a tree under the star sky and then Penko turns around and starts eating and gets OBESE!! irony ^_^ lol

Seriously Play are games that I think you Seriously Should Play! In this post I will re-visit a game I wrote about a while ago, but only briefly, namely Spin Pair for PC Engine!

Spin Pair is an HU Card game, so you don’t need the CD unit or a duo to play it. It’s a puzzle game in the style of Tetris or Columns where you have shapes falling down, which you can flip or move left or right. However, in Spin Pair the shapes are very different and it makes the game more complex. Not only can you switch places of the pair of shapes falling down, but with the second button you can also rotate the contents of these two shapes! So basically what you need to do is get half a shape to fill up the opposite half of a shape in the same type/colour.

There is also another aspect of Spin Pair that I really like. If you have shapes of the same colour/type lining up horizontally in the same row and you remove ONE, then ALL of them will disappear! This makes for a great way of being able to plan ahead and arrange your shapes so that you can easily remove them all in one drop ^_^

Another trick I’ve learned is that you can separate the pair that is falling down, if you get the first one to land on a higher row then you are free to move the remaining shape to the side and also rotate it :D

There’s a story mode you can play, where each level gets a little bit harder. You will have to remove certain amounts of each shape, and this number will increase for each stage, also the amount of shapes will increase making it much more difficult since you will have to survive longer. You’re not always lucky to get the shapes you need either.

Each stage also has new shapes, they go from being quite normal shapes like squares, triangles and circles to really complex shapes.

Allt he different shapes represent various object. Everything from animals to robots and vehicles. Sometimes it can be hard to know which one it is you’re lacking. Since you can rotate the content of the shapes in four different directions it’s easy to make mistakes.

Once in a while the game will speed up, making it more difficult, and the only way to get it to slow back down is to remove shapes!

There is an endless mode instead of story mode where you just play to see for how long you can survive. It starts off easy with few objects and then increases. There is also a 2 player mode where you battle each other. Every time you remove a row with several shapes of the same type your opponent will get punished, having a pair of 3 or 4 objects falling down in their next move.

Already from the start I really liked this puzzle game, but I found it to be quite difficult. The more I played it though the better I got at it. Now I’ve managed to beat the story mode and it’s still a lot of fun to play! The final stage comes as a surprise with the words “COME ON BLACK WIZERD!!” lol… and then you have to remove loads of the same shape but in different colours, and you’ll see two cute little wizards fighting with their broomsticks.

I recommend anyone who’s into puzzle game to try this little gem out. The music is good, the animations are cute, it’s a challenge and most of all very different! You should Seriously Play it! :D