Woody Pop (Game Gear)

Ever since I reviewed Devilish almost two years ago, I’ve been very aware of the fact I’ve only covered one Game Gear game on this site and have been constantly hoping to rectify that. The problem is, most any Game Gear game that catches my interest is almost always said to be an inferior version of a Master System title. Searching for a Game Gear exclusive that piqued my interest and wasn’t just a worse version of a Master System game eventually lead me to Woody Pop, a game that DOES have a Master System version, but that version is exclusive to Japan. Only after I started playing it did it really set in for me that after over two years of not playing a Game Gear game, I ended up playing one that’s pretty similar in concept to Devilish, both games attempting to expand on the brick-breaking formula of the arcade hits Breakout and Arkanoid.

Woody Pop’s manual tries to spin a yarn that would add greater weight to controlling a paddle to knock a ball around and break blocks, but it falls apart under scrutiny pretty quickly. The game claims you are playing as a wooden toy named Woody Pop, presumably that fearsome looking figure on the box art, but in game, you’re just a log with a rather cute face. Your mission could almost be applied to the game though, Woody Pop’s adventure supposedly being about taking back a mansion where enchanted toys are made, but while it frames the takeover as being perpetrated by something called the Mad Machine, the capsule vending machine you face at the end of the game feels more like a bonus game than a climactic final fight. The idea of a toy factory on the fritz does at least feature in some ways, toy soldiers, wind-up robots, and trains serving as obstacles as you try to smash apart the bricks laid out in the mansion’s many rooms.

Woody Pop follows many of the fundamental ideas of games like Arkanoid when it comes to the actual moment-to-moment play. When you enter a room, there is an arrangement of bricks that come in many different colors and compositions. Finishing a stage involves you destroying every block that can be broken, most of them only requiring you to hit them with the bouncing ball once. As the ball ricochets around the play area, bouncing off the boundaries and eliminating the bricks it touches, you need to be ready to move Woody in position because the little log has to keep the ball from falling into the hole at the bottom of the screen. Successfully blocking it will deflect it back towards the bricks, the ricochet determined by factors like where on your paddle it hits and if you were moving when contact was made, but if it slips past your guard, you lose a ball. Losing all your balls isn’t too much of a concern since it allows you to start from the room you left of in, but there is a point penalty for running out of lives to try and motivate you not to get careless.

To make the game about more than just bouncing a ball around, there are special blocks you’ll want to keep in mind. Question mark bricks are hazards, the player spawning in robots or toy soldiers if they hit one and those little marching toys blocking your ball when they’re around. They’re easily replaced upon defeat as well, the blocks that spawn them only possible to destroy under special circumstances. The crystal bricks, on the other hand, are almost entirely helpful. Hitting one will cause a power-up to drop down towards Woody, and if you snag it, you can get access to plenty of helpful little abilities or changes to the gameplay. The diamond power up will let the ball destroy any block type it touches, flames will cause the ball to burn up adjacent bricks to the one it touches, and shot will let you fire air blasts up to destroy bricks yourself instead of being dependent on the ball entirely. Some power-ups can give you a second bouncing ball in play, expand the size of your ball or your paddle, or let the ball stick to your paddle so you can adjust it before launching it back into play. Not every power up is beneficial though. One can expand the size of the pit to make it easier to lose a life, and while there is a power up to slow down the speed of the ball to make it easier to keep up with, it can mess with the rhythm of your play, especially since power ups often replace each other so it can abruptly speed up again and catch you off guard.

The speed of your ball can be a problem, it increasing fairly quickly once a stage starts and the different difficulties pretty much just making it harder and harder to manage the high speeds it achieves. This wouldn’t be too much of a problem if there was more screen real estate, but the Game Gear’s screen does crunch the action down to fairly compact rooms, meaning it’s pretty easy to be blindsided by the action suddenly speeding up. In many stages you can still keep up even at its max speed, but things can be a bit annoying if the level layout has many barriers and bricks placed near the bottom of the screen.

The stage design is actually one of Woody Pop’s shakier elements. There are plenty of levels where the bricks are arranged in interesting shapes or with barriers you’ll need to try and work the ball around, but while power-ups and good play can help you play a more active role in beating those levels, some stages feel incredibly hands off. One example that stood out was a stage where the bottom area was completely empty, cut off from the top area by an impassable barrier. You needed to hit your ball into some portals on the wall to have it appear on the other side of the barrier where you had no control over it after it made the trip. Your role in this level is to just watch and hope the bounces work out in your favor. While the game features many stages with more interactive designs than this, there are a few that stray into these bland designs where it feels like it stops being about trying to keep up with the action and influencing the brick destruction where you can and instead just becomes a boring show where you hope things work out in your favor and if they don’t, you easily send it back in and roll the dice again.

Luckily, there is a way you can avoid these stages, although you don’t have the proper information to pull it off reliably. The main difference between Woody Pop and its Arkanoid inspiration isn’t the little marching toys the story emphasizes but the mansion itself. Clearing a stage will reveal a few doors you can take to new rooms. The player is incentivized to pick certain ones by how many points they’ll get for choosing that option, but the path forward can instead be determined based on what you hope will be a more interesting design. There’s no way to scout ahead save to have played the game before, but finding a route through the mansion is not just an interesting wrinkle to the progression of the game. Exploring the mansion lends itself well to repeat playthroughs as you go off in search of the other room designs the game has to offer. There doesn’t seem to be any congruity between the points offered for a path and its difficulty, which is a shame since it feels like Woody Pop is definitely held back by some of its more tedious and poorly conceived levels that are essentially unavoidable due to this ambiguity. While repetitive music and visual stagnation also don’t help it last the entire trip through the mansion, it’s the unfortunate paths through barely interactive rooms that really make your otherwise enjoyable brick-breaking adventure start to lose its shine.

THE VERDICT: Woody Pop’s interesting form of stage progression gives this brick-breaking Arkanoid imitator a layer of exploration in addition to the action-packed paddle play, but even the best power-ups can’t make up for the fact that most paths through the mansion will lead you into a few rooms where you’re hardly playing the game at all. While the game type does mean the ricochet of the ball does do much of the work technically, removing the influence of your paddle in these dud rooms slows down the game. While the blistering ball speed could use a bit of a reduction, Woody Pop still has plenty of good levels where keeping up is part of the challenge. The few watch and wait levels aren’t so bad they bog down the experience, but Woody Pop is still not the kind of Breakout variation that will keep the player hooked for too long.

And so, I give Woody Pop for Game Gear…

An OKAY rating. The power-up system in Woody Pop gives the player decisions to make in the moment, the progression through the mansion adds an extra layer to the game to explore on repeat visits, and the simple enjoyment of gradually clearing the screen of the bricks visualizes progress well and requires quick reactions to avoid losing a life. Woody Pop had the makings of an enjoyable twist on the brick-breaking genre, but then its level design and ball speed threw things off. The ball speed is less of a problem because it is difficulty dependent and the moments where it can get a bit fast too early are mitigated by a forgiving continue system, but the rooms where the ball is basically trusted to carry all the work on its own really drag down the game’s otherwise decent pace. As you send it off through portals or into areas it won’t be escaping any time soon you pretty much lose any influence over the action on screen, the only test of your skill being to hit it back up there if it manages to come back down towards you. A game made up exclusively of this style of stage would be awful, but Woody Pop instead sprinkles these around the mansion in a way where you won’t hit too many if you’re lucky. You can still cut a path through the mansion that involves levels with properly challenging shapes or ones that are just fun to play around in like power-up heavy rooms, but a wrong turn can always take you to a level that reduces the action to a boring crawl.

Woody Pop is still a decent way to get your Breakout fix on the Game Gear and one whose ambition was reserved enough that it didn’t stumble the same way Devilish did, but some of its more unusual level designs risk dampening your enjoyment on all but the most fortunate paths through the mansion. If you accept that possibility then it’s definitely not a bad game to play during some downtime, the simple fun still able to shine through enough of the time.