GUNPEY

Heresy, we hear you cry. Sheer madness! This is not a Game Boy game! And you’re absolutely correct, but it is named after the guy who invented the Game Boy so shut up.

Gunpei Yokoi is a man who we look up to quite a lot. His philosophy of ‘lateral thinking with withered technology’ has given us some of our favorite things, like the Game Boy, Game & Watch, and the Virtual Boy. Quick aside we’ve played an actual Virtual Boy and if the effect doesn’t make you naseous like it did our friend then it’s actually a magical experience. As you may know the ol’ VB flopped hard, so Yokoi took that as a good time to retire from Nintendo. But he formed a new consulting company called Koto Labs, and their first major project was developing a Game Boy killer called… The WonderSwan. They also made a game named after their founder, but it’s spelled GunPey so yea.

There’s lots more interesting history than what we just said here, but that’s all you need to know for GunPey. It’s called GunPey because of mr. Gunpei, it’s western themed because the word Gun is in the title we guess. The game itself? A tile swapping puzzler. The gameplay is dead simple: you have a five by ten grid and tiles that you can swap horizontally. They come up from the bottom, top out and you’re out. You have to make connecting lines from one side of the screen to the other, and the more pieces you use the better your score, you can add more pieces for a brief time after the chain is made.

And that’s it! That’s the whole game, it’s dead simple and it’s incredible. It took us a minute to understand but when it clicked it clicked so hard, this game is addicting in the same way Tetris is. Seriously, this is an absolute system seller, it makes us want a WonderSwan. You may have noticed, by now, that the game is playing in tate mode, or landscape. That’s because the WonderSwan has controls set up for landscape and portrait gameplay, nifty!

There’s the standard endless mode where pieces keep coming, stages where the screen is cleared after a while, puzzle where you get a preset and you have to solve the puzzle, free where you never top out and you can make crazy combos, and story where you go up against opponents like Puyo Puyo. All of the art is very cute, and the out of left field western theme ties the whole game together in a very fun way. Makes us wanna go touch a cactus. Yeowch! OK we’re back. Gunpey is also on the DS and PSP, we urge you to go try, it’s so much fun. Of course, this is not a Game Boy game and it will not be ranked, but if it could be it would probably be at the top.