It's new to me: Megapanel

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

You know those sliding piece puzzles where you can move one square at a time? Usually to complete a picture or a specific pattern? The earliest known version of a sliding puzzle is the “15 puzzle,” named thus because there are 16 slots but 15 pieces in the puzzle, with the one open spot being how you maneuver the rest around the board. You can’t pick up and move any pieces around, but have to slide them — that’s the whole point. You can find them in little physical toys, in video games, there’s basically no chance you haven’t actually encountered one, even if you didn’t know what the name for them was.

I am… alright at this kind of puzzle. I get where I need to eventually, as evidenced by my having completed every Resident Evil and Legend of Zelda game out there, but it’s not the kind of puzzle that makes me feel like a genius afterward. Instead, I’m expecting a C+ to pop up on the screen at some point to let me know I could have done a much better job of things than I’d managed. If I needed to complete one while Mr. X was chasing me down instead of having puzzles like this in their own little isolated safe rooms, I never would have wrapped on some Resi games, that’s for sure.

In 1990, Namco — through their home-console publishing wing, Namcot — released Megapanel for the Mega Drive in Japan. While Namcot’s work in the west is probably better known for their extensive publishing on the Famicom, given the mass release of Namco Museum Archives collections, by this time Namco was also focusing on Sega’s 16-bit console, too. Here, with Megapanel, they made the whole thing out of 15 puzzle, except the number of pieces to be slid around, and the playing area you were working within, were variable. The lone constant was the number of blank squares to work with and through: one. And also there are pin-up girls. Hey here’s one now.

Just to be clear, there’s no nudity here — nothing more scandalous than some short shorts, a bit of cleavage, some evidence of tanning, a suggestive wink, a tiny pervert man pointing at a bunny bum — which all makes sense given this was a console release in 1990, and not an arcade game meant for adults in an adult-only space, hoping to glimpse to catch a glimpse of a topless lady if they were skilled enough a la Toaplan’s Pipi & Bibi’s. It’s probably the kind of game that you would find on the Nintendo Switch eshop in the present that makes sure the word “Hentai” is front-and-center like a flashing neon sign in the title to grab your attention even if again, it’s something being sold on the Nintendo Switch eshop, so nothing as scandalous as that implication.

Your enjoyment of Megapanel is going to come down to two things, outside of how much you can appreciate some detailed pin-ups that Namco’s artists made sure felt like a reward for getting through some fiendish puzzling. There is your ability to contend with said fiendish puzzling, for one — see above re: my C+ brain for this kind of puzzle — and your patience for working through the game’s specific designs that make completing these puzzles even more difficult than usual. As previously mentioned, the number of pieces you are working with at a given time, and the size of the playing area you’re sliding them around in, are variable. This is because of the fact that you clear blocks from the playing area, which can create an uneven distribution of them that might even be disconnected from where the free space — the one that allows you to slide the other pieces around — is.

Meaning! If you stick in the middle of the puzzle area for too long, then you’re going to build up these taller columns on the side, and you might not be able to access them. Which means whenever new lines of pieces are introduced from the bottom, those towers will go up another layer. When they reach the top, you lose. You can’t just match, match, match without some consideration to it, basically, and have to instead let the number of lines build up a bit so you have more room to work with, and can bring in those pieces from the sides

The playing area is a grid that is six blocks wide and 11 blocks tall, and it will continually add entire lines from underneath at set intervals. You can also manually add the next line yourself, if you need the blocks to make your next move sooner than later, which also helps keep things moving along. Given how much taller than it is wide, you can infer how easy it would be to keep making clears in the middle horizontal parts, which would then allow vertical columns to rise above the rest. You can get away with that strategy early, too, but by the time the speed of the game increases — or the complexity for what it’s asking you to do in order to proceed — you will pay for your lack of planning.

There are three different modes. There’s a two-player versus mode, which is pretty self-explanatory and a matter of survival as they so often are. What we’ll focus on here more are the Exercise and Pin-Up modes, which play fairly differently in terms of how you are going to approach things, as they force you to focus on different processes and therefore slightly different ways of playing Megapanel.

Exercise is a single-player experience in which you are trying to clear specific colored blocks in whatever number the level requires. So, in the first stage — as seen in the above screenshot — you need to clear five 3×1 red blocks to proceed to the next level. Matching three blocks of a single color is the minimum match, so it’s not asking much of you there. As you progress, though, additional colors are added in to the pool of colored blocks that can make an appearance — you start with three, but additional colors like yellow and pink make their way in eventually — making it more difficult to isolate the required number of one block color in one place. In addition, Megapanel will start requiring matches of more than just three of a kind in order for the match to count toward your goal. Anyone can match three of these blocks — I’m living proof! — but having to make sure your maneuvering doesn’t match three because you actually want to match four and haven’t set up for that just yet is a whole different beast.

The Pin-Up mode asks quite a bit of you, but in a different way. Instead of specific arrangements of colors and numbers of blocks, it instead has you clearing away blocks to reveal an image, with the actions taken on the left part of the screen in the playing area having an effect on the to-be-revealed image on the right. The playing area is the same size as with the other modes, but the image you’re trying to reveal can be larger or smaller, and the game can even throw in the added wrinkle of needing to clear specific spaces more than once in order to actually reveal what’s underneath.

You make your matches on the left, clearing the three or four or however many blocks from the playing area, and whichever block is at the center of the match will be the one that is triggered on the right. Bombs fall from the top of the screen on the right to blow up the blocks underneath, revealing more and more of the image as you go. So you can’t just clear whatever to proceed, but have to be purposeful — clearing the middle-right again and again does nothing for you if you need to clear the middle-left to reveal the image and advance to the next stage.

It also makes vertical clearing a required skill, especially on the ends, since the only way to get a center clear on the leftmost and rightmost parts of the grid is via vertical clears. And the only way to be able to maneuver these pieces around in those spaces to get those clears is to make sure you haven’t accidentally built skyscrapers with nothing next to them and no way to access them. This is important from the start, but as said, when the game begins to require that you successfully blow up a block on the right multiple times in order to actually clear it, it’s even more important that you are doing all of this with intent.

Each five rounds has a specific pin-up that you’re revealing images of, some set and some random. This means you have to complete the Pin-Up mode multiple times in order to actually see every single image within, which is simply not happening for me. Looking around the ol’ internet, it also appears as if it just isn’t happening for anyone else, either, though thanks to the wonders of Action Replay and Game Genie codes, all of the images have been revealed and put online for your unearned perusal. The excellent Gaming Hell has them all laid out for you, as well as which rounds which ladies can and will appear in, if you care to take a look, but here’s an in-game example, as well:

You might have noticed the woman in the middle of the screen there, sweating and pointing at your playing area as the blocks rise ever-closer to the top and your failure. There is some advice about what to do coming out of her/that portion of the screen real estate, though it’s in Japanese like the rest of the non-menu and scoring text in Megapanel. If you find all of that distracting, you can press the C button to mute her and the incoming hints. Above her are the number of lives you have left on a given stage: while the Exercise mode ends once you fail, in Pin-Up, you get three chances to retry before you see the Game Over screen.

I’m a little torn on Megapanel. It feels like it almost has the juice, but how strict it is — and how quickly it gets that strict — about not letting the sides grow too tall harms it for me, but that’s also just because, again, I am not wired for this kind of puzzle game. I want to be, though, and I feel that way about Megapanel while I play it, too — I kept going back to it again and again despite my struggles, because what little I was able to string together did feel satisfying in the way that puzzle games do when they’re hitting right. Which suggests that the issue is with me more than the game itself — that’s good news for those of you who are wired to succeed at this sort of puzzle.

If there is a complaint to be made that isn’t just about me, though, it’s that there just isn’t enough music here. Each mode has its own track, but it’s the only one, and none of it is as catchy as what you’d find in Tetris, or Dr. Mario, or Puyo Puyo, or Columns, or… you get the point. Not an earworm, and more grating after a long time, both of which seem like a problem when it’s all that’s on offer.

Visually, though, Megapanel sings. The blocks aren’t just colored, but also have designs on them that range from a tree to a bag with a dollar symbol on it to hey that’s Pac-Man isn’t it. There is a sepia-tone mode if you want to play with that — though I’m not entirely sure why you would want to, given that it makes it tough to know which blocks are what color, and forces you to go entirely by the symbols on them. I might be missing something that simply isn’t obvious to me there, though, so don’t take that as me putting down the mode’s inclusion. Obviously, the standout on the visual side is the Pin-Up art: Namco’s artists — who do not seem to be listed in the credits anywhere, as those just include the planner, composer, and programmer — made sure that there was variety there in both appearance and scenario.

As for why Megapanel wasn’t released overseas? At a time when puzzle games were the thing going, thanks to the rise of Tetris as an international sensation? Let’s just say every look at Megapanel that does exist out there in the present is wondering the same thing, with no definitive answer given. It’s unlikely that it would have been a huge hit or anything, but still. It would be nice to play the game with the hint system actively working for non-Japanese speakers. The best guess I can manage is that some of the pin-up ladies are pin-up girls — high schoolers — and Namco didn’t want to have to deal with any redrawing or aging up of this risqué (but again, non-eroge, non-nude) art, but if that’s the case then explain the existence of Wonder Momo. [Remembers Wonder Momo was a Japan-exclusive until very recently] Okay maybe I’m onto something there.

Still! Megapanel is entirely playable in the present via emulation, through an Everdrive, what have you, even if you can’t access that advice or the text that goes with your next goal in Exercise mode. You just need to be able to sort out sliding puzzles in a timely and strategic fashion, which is a much larger problem than some text you can’t read for some of us,

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