Rating of
3.5/5
Ding-a-Ling
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/18/17
“Pop’n TwinBee” (“PnT”) is the 6th in a long line of cute, cartoony SHMUPs, developed by Konami as an alternative for those who weren’t taken in by their more well-known SHMUP series, ‘Gradius.’ Interestingly, ‘TwinBee’ proved to be insanely popular in the Japanese homeland, but only ever received one North American release: The second game in the franchise, “Moero TwinBee,” was localized as “Stinger.” Fortunately for fans of the series, Europe received a few more localizations of ‘TwinBee’ games, including “PnT,” which can be enjoyed by English speakers everywhere thanks to the magic of emulation.
Presentation
“PnT” is a top-down vertically-scrolling SHMUP. The game is entirely 2D and sprite based (as one would expect from a title released in 1993), and features large characters sprites for both the player’s Bee aircraft and enemies. The design for everything in ‘TwinBee’ is colorful, goofy, and somewhat childish at times, with the Bee crafts themselves looking like chibi anthropomorphic smart cars wearing white boxing gloves, and the enemies ranging from killer flowers to wandering fruit to gigantic killer toys. Everything in ‘TwinBee,’ including “PnT,” shares this unique style, and the 16-bit power of the SNES really makes the colors and styling… pop. Unfortunately, pink does seem to be a rather prolific color in “PnT,” and it can make it more difficult than it should be to see – and therefore avoid – the pink bullets fired by enemies as they traverse pink backdrops.
Audio-wise, “PnT” features a few digitized voice samples, which is impressive for a game of its age. The soundtrack is pleasantly innocuous, and its bouncy cheerfulness matches the game’s visuals perfectly, but I can’t say any given track is particularly memorable.
Story
“PnT” really falls flat in explaining what’s going on. It seems that the reason the game received any localization at all is the sheer lack of text. The only narrative value contained in the game comes from the ‘demo’ screen that runs if the player leaves the game alone while it’s sitting on the title screen.
Apparently TwinBee and WinBee – a boy/girl team of mech pilots – are out ‘patrolling around one day’ when they receive a distress call from a girl named Madoka, who informs them that her scientist grandfather went insane and started trying to take over the world with his inventions after hitting his head on a pole.
…
…
Yeah, I can’t really say anything that can condemn the writing in “PnT” more than letting the opening scene speak for itself. We never even learn the name of this scientist in-game. Perhaps there’s some material in the instruction manual that can shed some light on the game’s plot and the world’s backstory and lore (being the 6th game, you’d think there would be quite the buildup of cruft to sift through… Hell, by the time we hit the 6th ‘Mega Man’ game, there was already enough canon to fuel horrible fanfiction). “PnT” does feature brief anime-style cutscenes at the end of each mission, but these are entirely devoid of text and feel more like anime postcards than cutscenes.
Gameplay
So-called ‘hardcore’ SHMUP fans hate the ‘TwinBee’ series for its relative friendliness to newcomers. I’m not a SHMUP fan by any stretch of the imagination, and it was the accessibility of the first few stages of “PnT” that invited me to give it a longer, more scrutinizing look. It was the last few stages of “PnT” – along with a few archaic Arcade holdovers – that prevented me from giving it a perfect score.
Whereas most SHMUPs kill the player’s ship in a single hit, “PnT” grants the Bee craft health bars that allow them to absorb a few attacks and allow the player to make a few mistakes without being screwed over (there are power-ups that provide hit protection as well, plus certain enemies drop hearts that partially refill the health meter). “PnT” also features an incredibly robust difficulty scalar, with 1-7 available from the outset (the default difficulty is 4), and an 8th difficulty available via a cheat code. I barely managed to squeak through on the default difficulty, and found that the inviting nature of “PnT” turns far more hectic and serious at the halfway point of the game’s 7 stages. I would have enjoyed the experience more on 2-3 rank difficulty, and I couldn’t even complete the first stage on difficulty 8.
Each of the game’s 7 stages features a fairly long, auto-scrolling vertical flightpath with a boss battle at the end. Each stage takes roughly 8-10 minutes to complete, hard-capping “PnT’s” length at a little over an hour. With a few mistakes and restarts, the game can take a couple of hours. With a LOT of mistakes and restarts, and running out of continues, and having to start from scratch on the higher difficulties, “PnT” should provide those dismissive ‘hardcore’ SHMUP fans with all the abuse they want.
And therein lies the crux of my conditional praise for “PnT.” Each time the player’s craft is destroyed, they are sent back to the beginning of the current stage. There are NO mid-stage checkpoints. Each death also uses up a continue, as the health bar system replaces the lives system from other SHMUPs. With only 7 continues available, dying more than once per stage makes for an impossible victory scenario. If “PnT” had unlimited continues, it would have been fine as-is. If it had a password system, it would have been fine as-is. But with neither of those things, “PnT” suffers from the same Arcade mentality of padding via repetition that makes so many other games feel dated and inaccessible. At least there is a stage select… but it’s locked behind a cheat code.
Regardless of some problematic basic design decisions, “PnT” plays beautifully. The controls are simple and responsive, with the Bee craft able to fire a main gun straight ahead at airborne targets or drop bombs on ground targets. It’s also possible to charge-up a punch attack, but I never found any openings to use it due to its ridiculously short range. “PnT” is also the only game in the franchise (as far as I know) to feature a screen-obliterating super-attack, which releases even chibi-er versions of the Bee craft that bounce around the screen, scoring multiple hits on everything and granting temporary invincibility. These chibis are a limited asset, however.
The ‘TwinBee’ franchise is also well-known for its bell-based power-up system, in which shooting a friendly, happy cloud releases a bronze bell, and shooting that bell cycles it through a series of colors, with each color granting a different power-up to the player’s Bee when collected. The bells can also prove to make the game more challenging that other SHMUPs with straight-forward power-up systems, as juggling bells at the top of the screen takes finesse, and accidentally shooting a bell too many times while fending off enemies is incredibly easy, possibly changing a life-saving power-up into a useless one. Cycling a single bell through all the colors too many times will also just destroy it, resulting in a crumpled bell that can no longer change colors.
Overall
“Pop’n TwinBee” is a cute little SHMUP whose disarming exterior hides the ability to be as brutally difficult as any other SHMUP of the time. The difficulty slider and some novel mechanics, however, go a long way to counter the obsolete Arcade design decisions that still slipped into the game, making this the single 16-bit SHMUP with the widest audience appeal.
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 0.5/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
