Plump Pop was released in 1987 by Taito. The game is arguably the best Breakout clone you'll ever going to find. The game is entirely nonsensical as far as story goes. You control a couple of dogs, cats, or pigs who are holding a trampoline and must bounce another dog, cat, or pig into the air to smash items out of the sky. The items will just be a menagerie of different things. Hot dogs, flowers, balloons, zeppelins, you name it, it'll be in there somewhere. The arcade game used a paddle knob type controller where you would just turn it left or right to move them either way. It also had a jump button. You need to clear all of the items out of the sky to go to the next stage. To go beyond Breakout, they added the jump button, clouds you can walk and bounce off of, warps, bosses, moving patterns of items, and bonus items for points and use. You can make the projectile character jump when he's on a cloud. You can make the trampoline characters jump for a few reasons. One is to alter the projectile character's course more dramatically. The other is to be able to avoid the dragons who will occasionally come out and push your trampoline characters around. They can't kill your characters, just impede their movement across the bottom of the screen. That's why you'll want to jump them. The game follows a pattern of progression. The first stage of a section introduces the new background, and it has the items in a new pattern. The second stage introduces new items in a new pattern. The third stage is the bonus stage where you're timed in catching fruit with your trampoline. You need to have the fruit land dead center for it to count otherwise it just bounces back up. The bonus stages start to alter after a while. Stage 3-3 for example has a giant chalice in the stage that you need to fill up by bouncing the fruit into it. Part four of a stage is always a boss battle. Usually a giant disembodied head that will come floating out. It normally will spew a bunch of items that you'll need to clear to get to it and start smashing into it. After enough damage the boss will be defeated and you'll be off to a new background. The game is very fun and wonderfully weird. It's graphically bright and colorful and the music follows suit. I really like this one.
Rainbow Islands is the sequel to Bubble Bobble and it was released into arcades in 1987. It's something quite rare as far as arcade sequels are concerned. It's an entirely different gameplay experience from the original Bubble Bobble. Fukio Mitsuji took a chance and used his Bubble Bobble characters in a new game and continued the story established in Bubble Bobble. They were successful in being turned back into boys from dinosaurs at the end of Bubble Bobble but now they're stuck in the Rainbow Islands and need to figure out how to get home. The player has to climb up each stage and reach the goal. There are the era's usual items like fruit and ice cream cones along the way for him to collect. The player has to avoid the enemies of course, and to that end he has the ability to create rainbows. The purpose of the rainbows are twofold. First of all they act as your attack. Hitting an enemy with a rainbow converts it to a bonus item for you to collect. The second purpose is to aid you in reaching the top of the stage. There are the typical platforms and the like for you to use to reach the top, but most of those are beyond your jump ability. You have to use the rainbows to create your path up through the stage. Pressing the rainbow button creates a rainbow that's slightly taller than the player character. Walking into the rainbow allows the player to walk up the outer edge of the arc. Creating another rainbow at the top will allow you to chain them together and create another step up essentially. You have to get up to the top of each stage within the time allowed. There are seven islands and four stages in each one. The fourth stage has a typical boss battle to be fought. Hit it enough times to kill it while avoiding its movement pattern. The graphics are again bright and colorful and the music is cheery. The game is fun and thoroughly enjoyable.
Super Qix was released in 1987 by Taito and it's the sequel to the classic game Qix. The gameplay is identical to Qix with some tacked on concepts. You need to draw in a specific percentage of the map to clear it. You hold the button to draw over the play field. You connect the shapes you draw to clear them away. Instead of having to avoid the Qix this time you need to avoid a gremlin sprite as it moves around the field erratically. You can't let it hit your line that you're currently drawing. So you have to be careful in trying to take too much off at one time. The gremlin doesn't bounce off the walls so you can determine where it's going to be headed. It changesdirection randomly at any given moment. Chasing you along the lines are two sparks you must also avoid. What they've added to this one is backgrounds images. Removing seventy percent of the screen causes a witch to come out and clear the screen revealing the hidden image and coloring it in as your reward. Then it's on the next stage. The game seems tougher to me than Qix even though it's essentially the same gameplay. Qix is a classic. Super Qix for some reason isn't quite all the way there.
Taito released Rastan in 1987. The golden age of the arcades for me was the five year block of 1985 to 1990 and this is an example of why. This games represents the standard console action game experience we'd see through the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. In Rastan you play as a barbarian out to rid the land of evil. You carry a big sword. You can swing the sword to either side while walking or jumping, you can also thrust it downward and upwards during a jump. You have standard platform hack and slash here. Cut through the enemies as you run and jump from platform to platform. You have to avoid spikes, and time your jumps while sliding down slopes, and you have to time your jumps when swinging from vine to vine, all while dealing with the enemies. You can find weapons to use for a limited time. You start with the standard sword, but can use a two-headed axe, a mace, and a flame sword. You can find potions to refill your life partially. There are icons to fill your life bar entirely. Icons to increase your defense and other to make you stronger. Rastan is a fun and challenging game that features everything that would be coming home in the genre for years to come. The impressive conversion of Rastan on the SEGA Master System remains one of my favorite titles to this day and I loved the arcade game. It's great to finally own this one.
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