TGS 06: Gunpey-R Hands-On

TOKYO--One of the gems on the TGS show floor that may be overshadowed by all the crazy next-gen madness is Q Entertainment's Gunpey for the PlayStation Portable. The title is a reimagination of the Wonderswan puzzle game released in 1999 and named after the late, great Gunpei Yokoi. Though the Wonderswan handheld never enjoyed massive success in Japan, Gunpey was a huge hit. And the simple and addictive puzzle game made quite an impact on one Reo Yonaga who went on to work at Q Entertainment as a game designer. In the wake of Q's success with funky titles that fuse music and puzzles, Yonaga opted to take the classic game and give it a Q-style makeover. The result is a slick mix of style and substance that marries the simple gameplay with trippy visuals and modern tunes. We had the chance to try out the game and are very pleased by what Yonaga has done with the classic puzzler.

At the heart of Gunpey is a simple puzzler in the vein of Tetris. Your goal is to create a solid line that runs the length of the screen by manipulating panels that are scrolling upward from the bottom of the screen. The panels will either be empty or contain lines that face any number of directions. You'll move around a square that highlights two panels horizontally and move the lines either up or down with the press of a button. The goal is to align the various panels to form a solid line that then clears the screen of those panels. As with any puzzler, there's an element of danger, as the game ends if any panel containing a line goes past the top of the screen. Gunpey-R takes this concept and runs with it in two different directions that make great sense.

The most obvious tweak to the game is the new audio-visual makeover that is straight out of Lumines. You'll now have various skins appear behind the puzzle grid. As with Q's PSP launch title, you'll work through various skins as you play and unlock them for the game's single-skin mode. Each skin will have a music track associated with it that will be enhanced by the different sounds triggered by you moving your square around the grid.

The next tweak is a more subtle one. While Gunpey is a blast to play, it's plenty challenging, so Q has added a new mode that modifies the challenge and makes the game more accessible. The break mode adds a fairly conventional puzzle twist to the experience and clears the panels that form your line, which causes anything above it to drop. This is essential to survival and can buy you some extra time while playing if you can take out a line and get some breathing room when you're close to losing.

Beyond the two game styles, there's a variety of different modes in the final game that get a lot of mileage out of the concept. The four main modes are quick start, single play, time attack, and versus (which you can do via Wi-Fi). In single- player, you'll find challenge, single skin, double skin, and Gunpey 10x10. Challenge is a basic marathon-style game where you'll unlock skins as you come across them. Single skin lets you pick any available skin and play on it. Double skin is an insane bit of multitasking that has you playing two boards at once by toggling between them on the fly via the shoulder buttons. Finally, Gunpey 10x10 presents you with a playfield that's double the size of a normal grid, which offers all sorts of trouble to deal with.

Control in the game is simple: You'll have a single button to swap whatever's in your two-panel square and another to speed up the block movement if you need some more pieces to work with. When you're playing the double-skin mode, you'll need to use the shoulder buttons to toggle between the two boards you're juggling.

The audio and visual component to Gunpey-R is a slick assortment of animated backgrounds and funky tunes that are really fantastic. The game displays a goofy visual charm that ranges from slick, avant garde backgrounds that would be at home in Lumines to funny ones that star a dog assuming the position to do his business. The music that accompanies the visuals is a perfect complement and features a wide array of club tones from some notable faces in the Japanese music scene.

From what we've seen, Gunpey-R looks like it could be a great addition to the Q Entertainment library. The game is a good fit for the PSP and looks likely to be a fixture in ours when it hits. Gunpey is slated to ship later this year for the PSP in the US, and a Nintendo DS version is also on the way. Look for more on the game soon.