Puyo Puyo first came to my attention due to the campaigning of the classic UK Snes magazine "Super Play" who sang the games praises at every opportunity. At the time the Arcade board was very popular in Japanese arcades and both the Mega Drive and Super Famicom ports of it sold very well over there.
Puyo Puyo follows a very simple premise. Different coloured blobs fall down the screen, these are then rotated and arranged by the player. When 4 blobs of the same colour touch each other then they explode. Simple enough but the skill comes in arranging "chains" so that when you explode one set of blobs the rest of them move down so that four are touching again and explode.
Exploding blobs will cause "solid" blobs to fall down on your opponents screen and vice versa if they explode any. These solid blobs can only be exploded themselves by clearing out the blobs around them. This is where chaining comes into play as if you chain 3 or 4 blob explosions together then this will dump a large amount of the solid blobs on your opponents screen and fill the screen up to the top (causing them to lose the round)
Like all classic puzzlers Puyo Puyo is fiendishly addictive. It has since seen numerous sequels over numerous formats but for me the original and it's immediate sequel are still the best. The more recent sequels have tried to introduce different elements to the core gameplay and have lost some of the purity found in it's original form.
The game was released in the west as Kirbys Avalanche on the SNES and of course as the massively popular "Dr Robotniks Mean Bean Machine" on the Mega Drive which is also on numerous compilations so there's no real excuse for not being able to play this classic!
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