GAME TITLE

Zoooop.

Zoop! Not to be confused with Zoom or Zool. Zoop is a game developed by a studio called Hookstone, who only made Zoop. Founders of Hookstone also made PC ports of Bonanza Bros, a Sega System 24 arcade game we played a lot on a plug and play genesis back in our youth. Zoop was released by Viacom, and featured in a Blockbuster game tournament called the Blockbuster World Video Game Championship II. Contestants would first play NBA Jam: tournament edition and Judge Dredd (both by Akklaim) in participating Blockbuster stores, and if they won (by whatever mechanism) they would go to the headquarters of GamePro magazine in California to compete in Kirbys Avalanche, NBA Live ‘95, and Zoop. The grand prize games being two puzzlers and a sports game is very funny to me, somehow. Also one of those finalists is from our home town, so shoutouts.

Ok, the actual game. Viacom wanted Zoop to be the next Tetris, so naturally they had it released on every imaginable platform: SNES, Genisnes, game boy and game gear, DOS and Mac OS System 7, Sega Saturn, PlayStation and Atari Jaguar. Not since the first Rayman have we seen this many ports of a game. Also, Jaguar Zoop. Lmao. We played the Game Boy version, mainly because we had it confused with Jennifer Reitz’s Boppin, but came away thinking it was rather fun!

The game works like a four-directional Klax; you pick up blocks from the tops of stacks and place then on other blocks to create vertical rows. When you clear a block you automatically grab the one under it, assuming there is one, and then have to combo to another area of the board to avoid getting overwhelmed. It’s a little complicated at first, but once you get into the flow it’s easy enough to clear the board. It’s not a combo-heavy game, you don’t get extra points for successive chains so there’s not much incentive to set things up. It makes more sense to let stacks of three or four of the same block occur naturally, then target them.

The game can be played either in a continuous mode or in set stages. I prefer continuous mode because of the ramping difficulty and high score rush. The graphics are pretty good, sprites move smoothly across the screen (which may cause some motion blur on a DMG but on my game boy pocket it looks great.) There is no option to set one looping background song, it changes with each stage cleared based on a certain number of blocks destroyed. The tracks are fun, and with the pace of the game you don’t hear any one song for more than a minute or two. I would recommend Zoop on any platform, since every version of the game is nearly identical. That includes the jump from 16-bit to 32-bit CD systems, something in us hoped that you could swap the game disc for a music CD like Vib Ribbon and play with that in the background but, dare to dream. I recommend Zoop, and since it’s the first piece in this Game Boy Puzzler section, I put it at the top of the ranking. Thanks!