Now here’s a beloved relic from my childhood! This game predates Tetris for me, and I consider it my very first puzzle game. Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine is one of the many re-skins of the long-running puzzle series Puyo Puyo. Although today the original name and characters are proudly used internationally, in the 90s the anime-centric series was perceived as a little too much for Western audiences to stomach. Nintendo decided to rebrand its Puyo release as part of the Kirby series, and Sega rebranded its as a Sonic game, more specifically from the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon.
In this falling block puzzle game, your goal is to align four or more ‘beans’ of the same color causing them to disappear. Any beans resting above are affected by gravity and can drop in to make new color connections. As you can imagine, chain reactions are the name of this game, and successful chains will send proportional garbage beans (or ‘refugees’) to your opponent’s side of the field. New beans drop in faster as the game goes on, and if no more new beans can enter, the bottom drops out and the opponent wins. It’s simple to understand, tough to master, pleasant to look at, and devilishly addictive. Puyo Puyo is a series that continues strong to this day, and with this basic mechanic it’s easy to understand why.
Presumably, you play as Sonic in this game, though he makes no appearance in the game and is never mentioned once, not even buried in the manual! Instead, the stars of the show are literally the stars of the TV series: Dr. Robotnik and his band of sentient robots. In the main scenario mode you compete against 12 robots, and finally the doctor himself. TV viewers will recognize the three primary robots, Scratch, Grounder, and Coconuts, as the gatekeepers of each third of the lineup. After beating each of them, the stage music changes and the difficulty noticeably jumps up. The remaining robots are much more obscure, most of which made their only appearance in the show’s first episode. (I theorize the game and show were developed at the same time, and the game assumed the show would use these secondary robots more often in episodes than they actually did.)
MBM is fondly remembered among its Puyo Puyo contemporaries for its diverse lineup of foes. The opponent robots come in all shapes and sizes, and the Genesis really shines with showing their emotions. Each stage starts above ground with a monologue displaying their personality. Some are calm while some are overconfident, but all of them have massive egos. You’ll really want to keep playing just to see who you encounter next. After their spiels, the camera moves underground to the bean dungeons and the game begins. Your opponent stares you down the entire time, subtly animated as they make their moves. If you seem to be having trouble, their expression changes to taunting happiness. But if they’re having a hard time, they humorously change to shock, anger, or disbelief. Defeating them shows one final expression that is wholly unique and true to the personality they’ve crafted through the whole match. Each robot has a fully realized beginning, middle, and end to your time with them, and a special hats off goes to the graphics department for the bright and cartoonish animations. Beating the game rewards a cast roll where you get one last, almost nostalgic look at these memorable robots.
The game plays great against the computer, but of course even more so against a friend. MBM is one of the Genesis’ premier head-to-head games with endless hours of fun to be had. What a smart move including two controllers with the Genesis Mini! Only as you sharpen your skills do you see the game’s only flaw, one that was immediately remedied in future games in the Puyo series. You can play the most perfect game you can, but if a huge wave of garbage is headed your way there is no way to stop it. You could even have a great chain reaction underway but the garbage will still overwhelm you afterward, dooming you to a loss. Future games would have an offset feature that let your combos break down impending garbage, nullifying enemy attacks and even sending it right back onto them, but MBM predates this rule.
So unfortunately, expert play breaks down to just creating the fastest and simplest 4 or 5-chain you can. Anything above a 5-chain will drop down more garbage than there is space on the board, guaranteeing an automatic win. This kind of takes the fun out of the back and forth of it, and I’ve tuned my play more for quicker 2 and 3-chains instead. Even a simple chain can drop just the right garbage in the right place to mess up your opponent.
For an extra challenge, I completed my playthrough on Hard and it was thrilling. (For the record I have cleared the scenario on Hardest before, but only once.) After each win, you’re given a password, except for the final stage where the password is replaced with an ‘ALL CLEAR.’ There’s something so cathartic about seeing that message, you’re so accustomed to seeing a password there it almost comes up like a fakeout. I also always turn the voice samples off—chain reactions are joined with ‘Yippee!’s and ‘Yee-Haw!’s in a rising pitch that sound garish and out of place. Just because the Genesis could do decent voice samples doesn’t always mean it should.
MBM does suffer from ‘first game syndrome’ a bit, with later games offering more favorable rule sets, but its top-notch presentation still makes it worth the occasional play. Puyo Puyo will always be Tetris’ eccentric cousin, and that really isn’t a bad thing.
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