Baku Baku Animal - Sega Master System (Full Playthrough Hard Mode)
1Baku Baku Animal was a 1995 arcade game that was later ported to a bunch of different platforms in 1996. The best version of which was on the Sega Saturn, with a similar port on the PC. The game completely missed the Mega Drive but there was an 8-bit release on the Game Gear and on the Master System as a Brazil exclusive via Tec-Toy. As far as I’m aware the Master System version here is a direct port of the Game Gear original and that’s why there’s no 2 player mode.
The story is fairly simple with the King’s daughter having too many pets to care for and decides that they need a zookeeper to care for them all. So naturally rather than send people into interviews and carefully screen people, they decide to hold a tournament to find the best person for the job. A young girl named Polly decides she wants the job and decides to enter the tournament.
The game itself is a versus puzzler, much in the same vein as Puyo Puyo or Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine where tiles drop from the top of the screen and your simple task is to match up blocks. Blocks disappear from the field when you place them next to the animals, so bananas for monkeys, bones for dogs and carrots for rabbits, simple stuff. Every time you feed enough food to the animals it transfers a block to your rival and whoever fills up their screen to the top loses.
Whilst the 8-bit port is certainly not as colourful or has the backdrops that are present in the arcade original, it still has some clear visuals, some good animation and does look similar to the original. Overall the user interface is very nice and everything works as smoothly and glitch free which some nice music to boot.
If you’ve played Mean Bean Machine or Columns then you will know what to expect in terms of the controls. It plays great with the 2 button setup. It’s also a fairly challenging, the AI can actually be a right pain at times if you play in either the normal or hard modes, but it’s such an enjoyable game you will want to play again even if you do lose badly.
This is a great on any of the platforms but unfortunately the Master System is by far the most expensive because it was only released in Brazil. If you can’t play it elsewhere then personally I would prefer to buy the Master System version of Doctor Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, it’s cheaper and has a 2 player mode.
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