Gunpey Yokoi is remembered for essentially making everything you ever loved about Nintendo in your youth. The Game Boy, for example. You know, like, it, as a thing, is thanks to Gunpey. Even earlier than that, the guy is praised as the creator of the D-pad. Where would you be without that, eh?
What he won't be remembered for is Gunpey, a puzzle game with a lengthy history, but a DS release that has the unofficial honour of being the game I played for the least amount of time before noping out of.
I think I've already taken the same amount of time to write this intro than I spent playing Gunpey. That's how quickly I backed out of it. So let's get this over with, I guess.
Frustrations
The game Gunpey has its roots on the WonderSwan, and no, I haven't got a clue what a WonderSwan looks like before I click on this Wikipedi-yeah, never seen one of those. Blimey. Compatible with a PocketStation for a select few games, you what?
Gunpey, yes, sorry. Gunpey is a puzzle game, the DS incarnation of which I'm emulating in all its garish colours. Oh, it's hideous. I've just gushed over Ashley Wood's artwork in Portable Ops and that is literally various shades of brown in the vague shape of a beard. This cartoon look is just wrong - and the character descriptions don't help either.
Lord help us. A puzzle game doesn't need characters, though. It needs a puzzle. And Gunpey's puzzle is... uh...
No tutorials or written rules to reference, ok. Good start Gunpey. Really making it easy for me to absolutely hate you, eh? Can't leave it like that, though. We've got to at least try and play this game. You can switch things. That's all I managed in the twenty seconds it took before losing to a furry. Let's maybe try that again, hmm?
Your screen - assuming you can make it out against the equally bafflingly coloured background - gradually fills with lines, some going up, some going down, some a mix of the two. Don't ask me why there are red and green bits, because I don't know.
You've got to move these elements up or down their columns such that, when linked together, they form a line from left to right across the board, where they'll glow red before disappearing, probably scoring you some points. I mean, that's as basic a guess as you can make. If creating a line in Tetris scores you points, a line in Gunpey probably does as well, right?
If it wasn't abundantly clear, I'm on the bottom screen, and this is me forming what is my second line in Gunpey. Ever. And look at what Patrick, the Easy AI opponent is doing up top. Utterly dominating, that's what he's doing. What happened just a few seconds later?
I don't even know what triggers a Game Over! First to clear X number of lines? First to score X points? First to make heads or tails of what they're even seeing?
Final Word
The timer for this run-through didn't even hit 5 minutes, and half of it was spent searching the menus to make sure I hadn't missed a description of the rules. Gunpey was awful. Like, day-ruiningly awful. And now I have to expose this crap to the world, because, like a fool, I thought it'd be good to go through a 1001 video games list.
Maybe I should have played the PSP version. Do you think I'd have a better time? If the screenshots are anything to go by, I would have, but this is Gunpey Yokoi's baby (one of them, at least) - surely it's better home is on a Nintendo console?
Evidently not. Gunpey DS is quite possibly the worst thing I have played for this 1001 list. The game of Gunpey itself might be redeemable. This incarnation of it has tarnished it and then some, however. Avoid like the plague. Avoid like you should be avoiding COVID.
Fun Facts
Gunpey Yokoi also gave the world the Virtual Boy, which I'd much prefer to play rather than Gunpey DS.
Gunpey, developed by multiple, first released in 1999.
Version played: Gunpey DS, Nintendo DS, 2006, via emulation.