Techno BB

Techno BB is just waiting for its time to shine as a profile picture machine; the adorable half-panda half-bumblebee main character looks like a archetypal blind box figurine, with its little ears poking out over its aviator goggles. An obscure Konami title from the twilight years of the PlayStation,¹ it’s an elevated match-four puzzle title with an extremely light malware aesthetic, letting your bear buzz about the grid to eliminate tiles before they turn into skull-marked viruses. Where the backgrounds would maybe reflect this in another game, here they instead favor eclectic psychedelic and toybox patterns, all matched up to a menagerie of electronic tunes. Mix this with a lengthy, educational puzzle mode and a rare PocketStation minigame, and it’s a cute budget package for someone looking to round out an emulator library with a pick-up-and-play title.

“Elevated” might be a stretch for the gameplay, but it has a solid enough grasp of the tile-puzzle fundamentals to make it work initially. The game lasts for ten stages on a 7x7 grid, with random tiles spawning up in empty squares and quickly decaying until refreshed by an adjacent match. While matching requires four tiles in a straight line, any additional adjacent tiles will also be cleared on a successful match. Tiles rotate either clockwise or counter-clockwise around your avatar, meaning every action moves a whopping eight tiles unless performed at the edges of the grid, where tiles can “skip” across the frozen tile you stand on if they’re rotated into the boundary. If all of the tiles surrounding you are viruses, no rotation can occur, shrinking your available play space rather quickly if you don’t keep tiles active. This decay occurs rather quickly too, ruining an active board in around a minute in the later levels. To solve it, the player is encouraged to frequently clear the board by matching white tiles, of which only four can exist at any given point that spawn one by one over time.

There’s a combo system shown on the left side, where successive matches will refill the draining meter and increment a chain counter. It’s not quite clear the exactly multiplier it gives towards the number of “bits” that each match reduces from the tracker in the upper right, but skilled players can chain through most levels without screen clearing just by catching groups of fours when they spawn in. [src]

This dynamic, while exciting for a couple hours with the game, reveals a few universal grid-based puzzle game issues in the process. The quick decay weighs heavily on the player, and it provides the scaling you desperately need to see from an action puzzle game by increasing decay speed through each level, but it’s tuned so drastically that it necessitates the level-based structure, as any given level becomes unplayably hostile after five or so minutes. This removes continuity in the playfield, something that would lack teeth in a game this limited, but an aspect that is still missed in terms of long-term placement planning and combo setups. It also puts the powerful screen clear tiles front and center, causing the rest of the game to orbit around managing their proximity and keeping them active in a loop that can suppress the actual matching and chaining. While finding all of the different layouts and setups that lead to the most efficient matches is still a major facet, the difference between success and failure hinges too greatly on the moment when you realize that setting up a screen clear comes before everything else, making few risks worth it in comparison to manicuring the middle of the playfield and keeping the white tiles active. At the same time, this further ruins the continuity; wiping the playfield every 60ish seconds means you’re always matching on the fly from fresh tiles. It’s an unfortunate balancing choice that limits the ceiling for this game long-term, although it does keep clear times down to a tidy ~20 minutes even for mediocre players like myself.