XP Arcade: Pop 'n Bounce

There is a lot more going on here than in your standard Brick Breaker-style game.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Breakout was a huge hit when Atari released it in the 1970s, one that inspired a whole bunch of imitators and developers looking to advance the gameplay of this runaway success. The best known of those, for some time, was Taito’s Arkanoid, released in 1987 to massive success in both Japan and North America, but plenty of developers, even ones as significant in the industry as Nintendo, took their own stab at a Breakout- or Arkanoid-style block-breaking paddle game in the years that followed: there is both a Mario-branded Arkanoid-esque title, and a Kirby-branded one, too, both released for the Game Boy.

The genre remained popular where it spawned as well, with the arcades still seeing paddle titles well into the 90s. The one we’ll be looking at today is Video System’s Pop ‘n Bounce, which is basically a cute-em-up, but for brick breaking. A cute-em-up, if you weren’t aware, is a shoot-em-up game that trends towards the adorable and sugary sweet: think the difference between Konami’s Gradius series of shmups, with its emphasis on sci-fi, and their parody of their own series, Parodius, which trades in the aliens and sci-fi elements for cute and bubbly and very bright color palettes. Or something like TwinBee, which is a legitimately difficult shooter at times, but is also cute as a button always. “Cute” does not mean “easy” in the world of cute-em-ups, and that holds true for the non-shooter, Arkanoid-style Pop ‘n Bounce, too.

Video System released Pop ‘n Bounce in arcades on the Neo-Geo MVS, and while it was not available for the at-home version of the Neo-Geo (the AES), you can still play a digital version of it via emulation at home, either through your computer or on the recently released Neo-Geo Arcade Stick Pro. Pop ‘n Bounce — or Gapporin in Japan — was not released as one of the 40 games on the ASP, but that “mini” system is not immune to some soft-modding that makes otherwise unavailable titles like Pop ‘n Bounce available.

Pop ‘n Bounce has you playing as one of two protagonists, depending on if you’re using the first or second player spots — player one is the young woman, Riccia, while player two is the guy, Acorus. You don’t see them during gameplay itself, but you do see the character you’re playing after you successfully complete a level, or fail it: they’re either posing in a celebratory manner, or the type of enemy they lost to in the stage is bouncing on their head while they look as defeated as they are. Otherwise, you are a paddle that a ball bounces off of, repeatedly.

Those enemies are the “blocks,” and I have that in quotes because these blocks are things like penguins, and kitties, and adorable little hippos, and cute octopi, and so on. There is your standard Arkanoid-style gameplay here in Pop ‘n Bounce, with you bouncing a ball off of your paddle and occasionally picking up some items that change how you play, giving you more offense or defense and so on, but there are also changes to the central gameplay that make Pop ‘n Bounce very much its own thing.

For one, when you pop a “block,” the block above it falls down into that open slot if it’s the correct size to do so. Falling blocks can merge with the blocks around them if they’re the same color, creating larger blocks for you to have to hit, which can be a bad thing (tougher blocks to break) or a good thing (better rewards for breaking this new block, including an extra life or a stage-clearing “Lucky!” for the largest of blocks). If you take too long to complete a stage, too, the entire wall of blocks starts to move down. You won’t fail when they reach the bottom, but instead, the entire slate of blocks turns into an enormous block enemy, and you’ll have to hit it again, and again, and again, and about 40 times more than that in 30 seconds in order to avoid losing the stage and starting it over. So, you know, don’t take so long that this happens.

You’ll want to move faster than that, anyway, since you get a time bonus for completing the stage in a hurry. It takes 500,000 points to earn an extra life through your score, which is a few stages’ worth of work unless you’re putting together some masterful combos, so yeah, you’ll want those extra completion time bonuses when you can get them. Sure, you can just keep feeding Pop ‘n Bounce non-quarter credits if you’ve figured out how to play at home, but if you want a high score, or to see what the highest score you can get is, you’ll likely need extra lives to get them, since your score resets when you hit the Continue screen.

There are four worlds in Pop ‘n Bounce, each themed in some way, which mostly impacts the kinds of enemies you’ll be seeing: the octopi, for instance, are in the sea region. Each world has four stages within it, and if you lose all of your lives and need to pop in another credit, you will continue from the stage you failed in. With enough persistence, you can complete the whole game by just hitting select as many times as needed to get that many credits, but it was just a little more expensive to master in an arcade.

As this longplay shows, you can play the whole thing in under 20 minutes once you’ve mastered it, but it will take you much longer than that to get to the point where you can do that.

Just completing it is one thing, but to rack up that score, you’ll need to figure out how exactly the game works. Your combo builds up every time you bounce the ball off of your paddle and hit at least one “block” with it. If you bounce the ball off your paddle and only get wall before it hits the paddle again instead, your combo will be reduced by 10, and, of course, missing a ball entirely and losing a life resets your combo.

Sneaking a ball up through an opening in a wall of blocks so that it’s stuck at the top bit of the screen is a great way to increase your combo, and you might also manage to hit and light up each letter of the word “ATTACK” that you see at the very top of the puzzle area when you do that, as well. When you do light up every letter in “ATTACK,” multiple balls are suddenly in play, and your paddle is nearly long enough to take up the entire width of the puzzle area. You only have these for a short time, but it’s often long enough for you to clean up whatever is left of the stage, and there is no penalty for losing the extra balls to the abyss, either.

There are also multiple blocks labeled with a “B,” which are essentially bombs. They correspond in color with blocks in a given stage, so pop a yellow B and see yellow blocks also pop, but there are also some purple B blocks that are more like a localized blast for whatever is directly around them, and some black B blocks that are required for defeating certain enemy types, regardless of how strong your ball might be.

Otherwise, powers are pretty standard for the genre: there is the longer paddle, as well as the ability to shoot blocks from your paddle, and a “power” upgrade that makes your ball stronger, reducing the number of times you need to hit certain blocks to pop them. These are all well and good and have their uses, but you might breathe the biggest sigh of relief when you collect the capsule that slows the ball down: every time you pop a block in Pop ‘n Bounce, the ball speeds up, and some stages have a whole lot of blocks in them. Getting to slow things down again when you need to be more precise with your ricochets is a huge help.

My only real complaint with Pop ‘n Bounce is that the level of precision required from you and your arcade stick is significant enough that it can feel like the controls are just… off. The more I played, though, the less time it would take for me to adjust to how much movement was necessary from me to get the movement I wanted on the screen, so it’s something you can acclimate to, for sure. It’s just very annoying at first when it feels like I’ve forgotten how to play because I took a few days off. Luckily, again, re-acclimating myself doesn’t cost quarters, unless I somehow find an MVS out in the wild that has this cartridge in it. (And the MVS that is near my house does not, so that will stay a hypothetical problem.) I also found this to be a little bit less of an issue when using the gamepad that comes with the ASP rather than the ASP itself, but regardless, it is something I adjusted to enough that, eventually, any mistakes I made felt more like they were on me than any fault with the game or its inputs.

If you’re into Breakout or Arkanoid and that whole paddle scene at all, you owe yourself a few rounds with Pop ‘n Bounce. There is enough here that’s different, that pushes the genre ahead in some intriguing ways to make it fit comfortably in the realm of “inspired by” rather than “clone of” territory when it comes to the paddle genre. Plus, it’s cute, and not in a sickly sweet, overkill kind of way, either.

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