Of all the WiiWare games that Nintendo had on display at its recent media summit, Nnooo’s Pop was easily the simplest, with sights seemingly set on the much-discussed casual contingency of the Wii audience. There’s a visual style that evokes the dreamy aquatics of Sony’s flOw, though instead of weirdly abstract sea creatures, there’s just bubbles. Lots and lots of bubbles.
These multicolored bubbles will float up from the bottom of the screen, and your job is to pop them using a Wii-remote-controlled cursor. You get points for simply popping bubbles, and you can create combos by popping like-colored bubbles, earning you exponentially bigger scores. All the while, there’s a countdown timer at the top of the screen that replenishes as you pop bubbles, though any time you might earn during a combo isn’t added to the clock until the combo is broken, requiring you to be somewhat mindful of how much time you have left on the clock and how long you let your combos go on for. You’ll occasionally see special power-up bubbles that can slow down the speed of the bubbles or increase your combo multiplier, as well as skull bubbles that will automatically kill any combo you’ve got going.
The multiplayer game in Pop, which will support up to four players, changes things up a little. It’s neither purely competitive nor cooperative, since each player maintains their own score, and you can trigger power-ups that have a negative effect on the other players, but everyone shares the same countdown timer. An interesting idea, though in practice it seems like you’ll either play cooperatively, or you’ll play like a big fat jerk that doesn’t want the game to last very long.
Pop definitely comes across as a pretty thin wisp of a game, verging closer to tech demo than a full-fledged game, though there’s something to be said for exploring the various limits of WiiWare, even if its the lower limits. Based on what I played, I’m not sure I ever need to play Pop again, but then again, it would seem that Pop isn’t really meant for me.