Sega's Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is the Sega Genesis' attempt of a classic puzzler design called Puyo Puyo, and it was released in November of 1993. Curiously, Sonic himself is nowhere to be found in this game. It's just the good old Dr. Robotnik, his army of robots, and a mighty stack of beans.
The beans cascade into a pit, where players rotate and place them on the stack below. This is a "falling block" puzzler. Like Tetris, Dr. Mario and Columns before it, it's based on the idea of spinning falling pieces and arranging them to eliminate other pieces already in play. It takes four like-colored beans to fuel elimination in Mean Bean Machine, and each group cleared away causes gravity to take hold of any beans above. Chains and combos, then, are a big part of winning against Dr. Robotnik's robots.
Fun Fact: The robots you face off with in this game, are also involved in The Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog series.
And that's exactly the point, for the primary Scenario Mode of play -- a parade of puzzling opponents are presented to players, each one more difficult than the last. This game isn't built on the idea of a single pit, where you endlessly play against only yourself and the clock. There's almost always someone opposing you from the other side of the screen, sending non-linkable garbage beans into your pit and trying to drive you to stack yourself up, up and away into oblivion.
The design is clearly intended to encourage two-player competition, and longtime puzzle genres fans will tell you that Puyo Puyo is one of the best head-to-head games ever crafted. Luckily, the Dr. Robotnik version has held up well, especially in the audio department.
Overall, discriminating gamers of the 16-bit days may argue that Kirby's Avalanche (from the Super Nintendo Entertainment System) is a superior representation of the Puyo Puyo puzzler design. But the differences between that game and Mean Bean Machine aren't major or important enough that fans should skip this. Go ahead and grab it, puzzle people.
Rating: 4 / 5
