In the immortal words of Terry Hall, I think I’ve just lost a very nice part of me. The more I played the puntastic Dr. Popper, the more I felt part of me slip away – the part I like to call “hope for the future of mankind”. Y’see, as some of you will already be aware – I’ve a massive fondness for accessible gaming, yes – I like to see titles that are simple and easy to pick up and play, but occasionally something comes along that makes me throw my hands up to the sky and shout “WHY? WHY MUST I HAVE THIS INFLICTED UPON ME?”.
There’s just no point to Dr. Popper. It resides at the bottom rung of the matching colours ladder existing on a plane of reality somewhere between bubble wrap and suicide. Folks at home, please don’t try and combine the two for real. You’re presented with a board of bubbles, match some of the bubbles up and try and clear as much of the board up before you slide into a coma. There’s no real skill to it, no fancy rewards just seemingly neverending streams of monotonous clicking that makes “spot the difference” seem like the peak of our culture.
Now, sometimes I feel I may be a little harsh so I have a back up test I like to employ. If I think that perhaps there’s something I’m missing out on, without mentioning a word of my own opinion I’ll pass the controller over to either the good Mrs Bob and/or my four year old kid to have a play. Both of them were, to say the least, a little nonplussed by the game also and I’ll probably have a few weeks worth of apologies to make to both to make up for the looks of extreme boredom on their faces.
Video after the jump:
This title was 200 Points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 80 Points.
Other posts you might find interesting:
- Word Soup Word Soup is a port of the functional looking...
- Wordzy Wordzy is essentially a word-based version of Mastermind. The...
- Battle Bubbles – Four Corners Battle Bubbles describes itself as a multiplayer strategy game...
I never got the game to run, actually. Got to the title screen, hit A and whisked away to a magical far away land of unexpected shutdown errors. That makes my emoticons sad.
I got that first time – straight to a code 4, a rerun of the trial seemed to sort it.
There is a new release that will be available as soon as it passes peer review that I think should fix the crash issue.
Sorry you didn’t like the game, it’s really not about clearing the board, it’s about gathering the bubbles into big groups because the scores jump exponetially, so that’s where strategy comes into play.
I originally wrote the game for my daughter so maybe you need to be a 5-12 year old girl to really enjoy it, although a few of the playtester’s girlfriends enjoyed it as well.
I think this game can work for those who are into games like Bejeweled. I don’t understand the appeal of Bejeweled, but the fact remains that it’s an extremely popular accessible game, so there is undoubtedly a market for it.
Reminds me of SEGA Swirl (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC-_J_voczo), and that game had a decent reception among enthusiasts for being a fun laid back game.
But again, I don’t see the appeal personally. Good visuals though, nice option to change the look of the colors with different objects (little touches like that make games like this more worth their asking price), and hey, it uses a non-typical font (way too many games are using fonts you see every day!).
But yeah, I just wanted to say that despite my personal tastes, I know for a fact people like this stuff, and while most of these people are at their PCs, there could possibly be a market out there for this on the 360 userbase.
Just wanted to let you know that the new version is out that fixes that crashing problem on startup.
Bill Reiss