PNICKIES
Developer: CAPCOM/COMPILE Year: 1994 Genre: Puzzle
■ If Pnickies looks a bit like Puyo Puyo, that might be because it’s quite similar. Coloured blobs fall down in pairs and can be moved and rotated as usual, with blobs of the same colour joining up into one enormous mass. Occasionally, your blob will contain a star, and when two stars are present in the same mass, the whole thing disappears. Combos are possible from the resulting collapse of other blobs, too.
The game soon becomes an exercise in building up huge stacks of a single colour. But this is a tricky balancing act, as you find yourself caught between disposing of excess off-colour pieces while still maintaining a safe area in which to dump the stars that might prematurely destroy your hard work. Excellent players can dispose of as many as 50 or 60 blobs at once, but you’ll struggle to achieve that early on.
Pnickies didn’t manage to get an arcade release outside of the Japanese market, which might suggest that it wasn’t a hit in its homeland – either that, or Capcom didn’t have confidence that it’d be worth a Western release. With a lack of other compelling reasons behind Pnickies’ non-appearance in homes, we’re guessing the former.