Monday, June 19, 2023

PrinceWatercress plays Tiny Toon Adventures: Wacky Stackers - Part 1 of 11


There's not much on this game on the Internet as far as I can tell. Let's change that!


Tiny Toon Adventures: Wacky Stackers is a Puyo Puyo clone made for the Game Boy Advance back in 2001. At this point, Tiny Toon Adventures had been irrelevant for some time, and there had not even been anything new in the franchise for about half a decade. This makes it all the more odd that this game came out with the Tiny Toons license, making it one of the last games to have it. Did it really need the license? Not really. But that's just the first issue with the game. Read on.

There are a few modes with this game: Vs. Com, Survival and Puzzle. There is also a multiplayer mode that goes along with it. I start with the Puzzle Mode, since people are probably going to be looking for the solutions for that.

Puzzle Mode lets you play up to two, five or eight stages. Playing eight gives you the real ending. When you start, Buster and the gang go to a stadium in Wackyland to see people tackle Puyo Puyo-style puzzles in a tournament hosted by the King of the Dodos (an original character for this game), and the difference between the official Warner Bros. art and the art made for the game by the developer is both striking and obvious. If you ask for an explanation, pay attention: you'll see how some of the puzzles in this game get completed.

Puzzle Mode is fun, but it has a few big, glaring flaws. There is no password system and therefore no way to continue back from where you left off, so if you're playing Puzzle Mode, you'd better be ready to complete it in one sitting. Second, if you fail a puzzle, you only have five continues, and if you use them all, you're going all the way back to the first puzzle of the game. The fact that there are continues makes the trial and error nature of completing some of the puzzles much worse than it already is, and the lack of passwords and limited continues is the exact opposite of what Yoshi's Cookie on Super Nintendo did, which makes this game look completely undesirable once you're played older - and better - puzzle games from the 1990s.

The first opponent is Calamity Coyote. Guess what? His puzzles are really easy.

As far as the controls go, Left and Right move the eggs, and holding Down drops them. B rotates the eggs counter-clockwise, while A rotates clockwise. If you have coins, you can press L to use a special ability to get rid of some eggs.

When you chain four eggs next to each other in some sort of line, you'll eliminate them. If you put them in a square formation away from any other like-colored eggs, they will form one big egg. If you create a line of eggs around it, you'll eliminate the big egg and automatically get a coin for it. Making a big egg is not the same as clearing a group of four eggs in Puzzle Mode.

The white number to the left is how many moves you have left. When you run out before clearing all the eggs, the game is over and you're forced to quit or use a continue before the timer runs out. 

Calamity Coyote

Puzzle 1

Just drop the blue eggs in the horizontal nature that they are in. Done.

Puzzle 2

With this puzzle, you can set it up so that you can get rid of the red eggs first, then get rid of the blue ones. 

When the blue eggs drop to be cleared after the red eggs clear, that creates a chain combo. Chain combos will give you coins that allows to perform special abilities which I will mention when the time comes.

Puzzle 3

Get rid of the green eggs on the left. This will create a chain combo that gives you a coin. From there, by using your other move, you can then press L before the eggs at the top disappear to summon Dizzy Devil. Dizzy Devil will eat up all the eggs on the bottom two rows of the playfield, allowing you to empty the playfield easily.

Puzzle 4

Get rid of the red eggs on the far left to get rid of all the eggs in one move.

Puzzle 5

Clear the red eggs at the bottom. This will cause a chain combo with the blue eggs. Use Dizzy Devil to get rid of the rest of the eggs before you get a game over.

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