And it's very good. Nicely addictive once you get your head round the combo system. I think the fever thing though is too powerful in normal mode though. Once you get there 99% of the time you're guaranteed to win.
In answer to a previous poster, there are no XBL options on the box at all not that it matters but just to let everyone know
and ed you naughty man! raised a giggle here.....
Can you cancel out the other person's combo attacks with your own carefully timed ones, like in PP4?
Yeah, thats how you fill your fever bar.
Once the bar is full the game switches to fever mode, where sets of combo-ready puyos fall down. The bigger the combo chains you manage to pull off the longer fever mode lasts. Its a smart addition to the basic gameplay, and works really well.
My Dreamcast copy turned up today, I've given it an hour or two and its really good fun. Its a shame that the four player option from Puyo Puyo 4 isn't here, but apart from that its the slickest home version of the game yet.
The Dreamcast version boasts a couple of cool extras, you can load a new vmu icon and DC system menu background onto your vmu. Heres one of the new Dreamcast menu images:
very cool, I've not seen any DC games do this before. The DC checks for a certain vmu filename on boot, and loads it as an alternative background image if present.
You can also change the written and/or spoken language to English.
Charlesr PP on DC modifies the bios a little bit. It's as if sonic team were saying to DC hackers "look, you can do this now, we don't mind...have fun with our old hardware." And they did. You can change the BG pic to anything you want.
I've not been able to get the rotation effects to work - how exactly are they triggered? I've read www.segagagadomain.com, but it doesn't work for me.
*edit* a-ha, I've figured out how to get the 'Real' (3D) Dreamcast system menu
If you save the Puyo Puyo Fever VMU icon onto your VMU, you can switch the Dreamcast System menu to 'Real' (3D) mode.
You don't need the Puyo Puyo Fever background image or game save file for this to work, only the custom color VMU icon (which takes up 2 blocks).
You need to make sure you have a controller connected to any port with a VMU that has the Puyo Puyo Fever icon plugged in. Switch on the Dreamcast without a game disk, press Start, and the System menu will switch to 3D.
In 'Real' mode you get a 3D representation of the 2D menu, which seems to run at 30fps. Instead of the rippling cloud texture at the bottom of the screen you get a rippling reflection of the screen buffer. You can rotate the screen with the R and L triggers, and move your pov with the analog stick. If you play a music CD the background fades to black and the spinning CD label glows as it plays. Sadly the CD glow is not sound reactive.
As with the background image, this is something built into the Dreamcast bios, it must check for a special flag in the VMU icon in order to allow you to switch to 3D mode. Very, very cool
I think it is funny that the Japanese Dreamcast version has an English language option and Western copies don't have a Japanese language option (even though the language is on the disc).
Stupid Sony Europe won't let ANY Japanese audio in the game literally because they "can't tell if they are saying **** or not" (their words, not mine), Microsoft TCRs "suggest" that language options are only taken from the dash (meaning no mixed voice/subs unless it is really demanded), and multiplatform GC games just get ported from the other platforms. The same problem with Sonic Heroes! Don't know who to blame
Oh yeah, anyone know if the DC version is a port of the brilliant Naomi arcade version or the "new" Renderware one ala Xbox, PS2, GC? I only ask because its not as if Renderware was made for Dreamcast, surely? And the puyos in the Naomi one are 2D instead of these dodgy 3D things.
Comment