Looking for a fun pick-up-and-play puzzler? Look no farther than Hot Potato!
There is no story – just you, and a bunch of potato-like “creatures.” Or maybe they aren’t creatures – maybe they’re really just simple personified potatoes, who knows? Whichever option you choose makes no never-mind, as there isn’t much outside of the actual gameplay that your opinion could affect.
Gameplay is simple – you control the left/right/up/down movement of a constantly progressing cart filled with six potatoes, each potato being one of three colors – blue, red or green. As the cart moves along, you can use the L and R buttons to rotate the potatoes on the car and then launch the three in the top horizontal row out into the road ahead of you, which is also filled with stationary potatoes of the red and blue persuasions. The object, then, if you haven’t already guessed, is to launch blue potatoes at other blue potatoes and red potatoes onto other red potatoes. The green potatoes, being the rarest of the three, allow you to eliminate the entire vertical row that the potato first hits. If this is at all confusing to you, look at some screenshots, and it shall become clear.
There are two modes of play – “Mission” and “Score.” Mission is exactly how it sounds – you start with a very slow moving cart, and very few potatoes on the screen ahead of you. Your goal is to eliminate a set amount of certain “special” potatoes, as designated by an arrow flashing over their head. Reach the set amount by the end of your road and you pass the course. Moving on to the next levels – the cart gets faster (with the aid of 30, 40, and 60 speed marks in the street for you to roll over) and the amount of potatoes ahead of you increases – greatly. This added amount of potatoes may seem like nothing, but when you are flying up the screen, trying rapidly to rotate the potatoes, all the while trying to avoid the walls in front of you – it really gets challenging. Not to the point of “Ugh, forget this!” but to the point that it really makes you want to push on.
The “Score” mode is basically the same thing, but rather than trying to eliminate “special” potatoes, you are just trying to reach a “high score” by the end of the level.
The sound is your basic hand-held soundtrack – nothing to get too excited about. It is nice, however, that it’s not so overpowering as to distract you from the task at hand. On that same token, the graphics in the foreground are bright and detailed, but the roads and such in the back are calm enough to not be distracting.
So, while the overall premise of “Hot Potato!” might seem a bit redundant, the rapidly increasing level of difficulty keeps the proverbial spark alive. Hot Potato! may not be the most popular of the hand-held titles, but it is one of the best.