RETRO REBOOT | Zoop (Sega Genesis)
Intense puzzle mayhem
RETRO REBOOT
"ColonelFancy" Mike Lind
7/28/20263 min read
Developed by: PanelComp
Publisher: Viacom New Media
Release date: June 1st, 1995
Zoop felt like it was going to be a sweeping new style of puzzle game. Even by the mid-90's, Tetris was the quintessential puzzler, with some solid contemporaries. Puzzle Bobble (formerly known as Bust-A-Move) was always fun, Dr. Mario had an intense quality to it. Even its blatant rip-off Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine was one I played a lot of back in the day. Zoop kinda came out of nowhere, had a big promotional campaign behind it, and still stands out as a very intense puzzle title that should have stuck around longer than it did.
The premise is a little tricky. Encroaching shapes build on four sides of your triangle. When you shoot a shape of the same color, you "zoop" it to clear it off the board. If a piece behind it matches that same color, it also goes away and you score. If you shoot a shape of a different color, you swap that color, and that piece remains in play until you are able to successfully zoop it. Meeting the conditions will speed up the board, and that's when it begins to get insane.
Special items like line bombs and proximity bombs can help clear play field, but it's up to the player to keep up with the frantic pace. The gameplay is quite good. It does take a little bit of time to acclimate yourself to the rules Zoop establishes, but the responsiveness of shooting and moving is crisp and quick. Then the game starts to get a little bit twisted, as you try to remember the basics once things speed up.
The graphics have an abstract style to them; there may not be much to look at, but after a certain length of time, I start to see these shapes in my dreams. A nice touch is the game's backgrounds, as another means of Zoop messing with the brain is they will routinely change the longer you go on. The colors get more intentionally obnoxious to throw you off. I approve of this, making your game deliberately more annoying to heighten the challenge is a unique art. Doesn't mean it doesn't drive me crazy, and revisiting this game in my older years is probably an incentive to stay sharp.
The music. Oh boy, the music. Like the visuals, the OST is designed to throw you off with a sense of increasing urgency the longer you endure. As the shapes speed up, the music begins to pick up the tempo, starting as this soothing, free-flowing jazz becomes a zany cartoon, playing a trick on your brain. It's like if the running out of oxygen audio cue in Sonic the Hedgehog was constantly playing, and subtly building from the moment you begin the game. It's a very creative way to make other intangibles beyond the controls feel like an integral part of the challenge.
I've only ever played the Sega Genesis version of Zoop, so I have no idea how other versions fare when it comes to presentation and controls. It's a pretty straightforward game at surface value, with the real meat and potatoes being discovered the better you get at it. When it comes to challenging puzzle games, only Intelligent Qube rivals it for me.
As home game development was beginning to burgeon in the mid-90's, Zoop had enough weight behind it to hang with the bigger titles of the era. Perhaps the rights holders held its potential back (Viacom New Media did dissolve in '97", but I remain surprised that it never became an evolving series of titles. It was ported to practically everything, but perhaps the obtuse design did sit well with the masses. It is a strange game to approach, and isn't as friendly as Puyo Puyo or Arkanoid. Even after all these years, there's very few things to compare it to, so in a lot of ways, Zoop is quite the unicorn of puzzle games.