Anyone who has played SNES-era Konami games should find the excellent soundtrack instantly recognisable, with the boss battle music in particular giving me flashbacks to when I used to play Turtles in Time on the very same system. It’s completely and totally bonkers but in a really endearing and fun way. You fly around shooting at giant pieces of fruit whilst flinging bombs onto cute critters on the ground in the hope that doing so will provide you with hearts to replenish your health. Released for the Super Nintendo and hitting European shop shelves in the autumn of 1993, Pop’n TwinBee is a thoroughly Japanese game in all the ways that a Japanophile would enjoy, down to its wacky artwork and vibrant soundtrack. I normally don’t tend to play that style of game, but I found myself attracted to Pop’n TwinBee after having a quick go on it and decided to hunker down and play it some more so that I could write about it this week. Whilst perusing the library of games on offer, I noticed one called Pop’n TwinBee, a relentlessly cute shoot ‘em up (or “shmup” as fans of the genre like to refer to them as) from Konami. The regular golden bells are worth a handful of points, but other colors will generate various effects depending on their color.I’ve still been waiting for Retromania Wrestling to make its way to the Nintendo Switch over here in the UK, but thankfully, I’ve finally gotten around to downloading the Super Nintendo and Nintendo Entertainment System emulators that you can get on the Nintendo Store, and I’ve tried delving into games that I haven’t played before.
The player can also shoot bells that float through the air: each shot sends the bell flying further ahead, and the player can juggle them until they change color. Before starting a stage, the player can choose between a few configurations of how options follow the craft, maximizing their offensive or defensive capabilities. The player has a few power-ups, such as options, and has a finite number of "bombs" which create a dozen smaller TwinBees that clear the screen of enemies for a few seconds. GameplayĪs a vertically-oriented shoot 'em up, the player's goal is to simply make it to the top of the stage without getting hit by any enemies or their bullets. There is a Game Boy game of the same name in Europe, but this is based on a separate and much older TwinBee game (known as TwinBee Da!! in Japan) from 1990 that was brought over to Europe in 1994 and renamed Pop'n TwinBee to capitalize on the success of this game. The game was followed by Pop'n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures the subsequent year, which is more of a side-scrolling platformer.
Pop'n TwinBee uses the advancements to the series introduced with the prior game Detana!! TwinBee. The SNES version was released in Japan and Europe in 1993. The TwinBee series is a notable example of a " cute 'em up", and Pop'n TwinBee is the Super Famicom debut of the series. Pop'n TwinBee is a vertical-scrolling shoot 'em up from Konami featuring TwinBee and WinBee, two anthropomophic robots colored blue and pink respectively.