Gunpey

Overview

Gunpey (also known as Gun Pey) is a 2D tile-matching puzzle game developed by Koto and published by Bandai as a launch title for the WonderSwan exclusively in Japan on March 4, 1999.

In Gunpey, players aim to clear tiles of line fragments from the 5x10 grid playfield by swapping them with a vertical cursor and forming lines from one end of the playfield to the other (similar to Pipe Dream). The game itself features a cartoony anthropomorphic Wild West theme, with its main story about a frog named Vincent aiming to rescue a cat named Sherry from a group of outlaws.

The game's title is a tribute to the founder of Koto (and one of the key designers of both the WonderSwan and the game itself), Gunpei Yokoi, who died over a year prior to the release of the console.

The game received an enhanced console port by TOSE for the Sony PlayStation on December 16, 1999. This version received its own arcade port by Banpresto in 2000.

Along with a special themed version of the game (Tarepanda no Gunpey, featuring the San-X character Tarepanda), the game itself received three handheld sequels, including Gunpey EX for the WonderSwan Color, Oto o Tsunagou! Gunpey Rebirth for the Nintendo DS (which received an international release as Gunpey DS), and Gunpey-R for the PlayStation Portable (which received an international release as Gunpey). Neither of these games use the same cartoonish anthropomorphic Wild West theme as the original.

Gameplay

The game consists of a board five tiles wide. Tiles which contain one of four different lines (connecting at the top or bottom corner on the left and right sides) move up from the bottom of the board. Tiles can be moved by a cursor which covers two vertical tile areas. Moving the cursor will "flip" the tiles that the cursor covers. By positioning the tiles so that a line is created which goes across the screen, those tiles will disappear and you will score points. The longer the lines, the more points are scored. Tiles will continue to move up from the bottom of the board until a tile reaches the top of the screen, at which point the game is over.