It's new to me: Trip'd

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.

Warp might be best-known for titles like 1995’s horror game, D, but the studio of Kenji Enjo was involved in much more than just that series. One of their early philosophies, while developing games for the 3DO was still a thing that studios did, was to have small teams work on smaller titles to be released while the ongoing work on larger, “significant” projects — like D — continued. It gave the developers the chance to flex some other muscles and maybe get weird with it, while putting Warp’s name out there and increasing the chances to make some money on something besides the big swings.

Warp’s second title, Totsugeki Kikan Megadasu!! (or, Rush ‘n’ Fire Megadas), was one such smaller game. As was their first release, Uchū Seibutsu Flopon-kun, which released just four months prior in the middle of the summer of 1994. The “small team” thing is not hyperbole, either: Flopon-kun lists five people in its credits, total: Eno as director, Hideki Miura and Hirofumi Hayashida as programmers, and Tomohiro Miyazaki as graphic designer. Conversely, the original 3DO release of D listed 22 people in its credits. That’s not a massive team, either, but compared to Flopon-kun, it’s enormous.

Flopon-kun would end up with a few different versions, with Asmik porting an enhanced variant to the Playstation in the spring of ‘95, while Panasonic — the initial manufacturer of the 3DO — published a North American edition. There, it was renamed to Trip’d — a nod to 3DO founder Trip Hawkins — giving it something in common with the WonderSwan’s Gunpey, a puzzle title named after that handheld’s founder, Gunpei Yokoi. Eno was on the record as being a fan of Hawkins, telling 1Up in an interview that, “I think he's a great guy… So, yeah, I respect Trip a lot in that way, and he influenced me a lot. He showed me how to create the atmosphere, and how to balance the creators and the management.”

Trip’d divided critics for two reasons. One, this was still the period of time where simply being a falling block puzzle game had everyone comparing you to Tetris, which, Tetris being what it was, tended to be used to knock a game down a peg whenever it wasn’t at the level of Columns or Puyo Puyo. Two, one of the things that separated Trip’d from the rest of the games of this ilk was that it only let you change the position of one single block in its triads at a time, rather than the entire piece flipping or shifting at once. Combined with the inability to shift pieces at all if a wall at the edge of the playing area is in the way, Trip’d ended up requiring a little more foresight and planning than some critics wanted or were used to. Which, to be fair, is understandable, given the weirdness of Trip’d’s rotation system already causing some adjustment issues.

However, if you meet Trip’d where it is, there’s something fun and different here, that actually does stand out from its contemporaries in a way that’s both notable and enjoyable. Trip’d uses a system similar to Capcom’s Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo — a game that would not release for another two years, mind you — where placing four of the same color block in a two-by-two square creates a much larger block, that can only be cleared when blocks of the same color are cleared elsewhere in the playing area. This allows for some combos and cascades of falling blocks that results in points for one player, and, in multiplayer modes, torment for the other, since a special effect, based on the color of the large block, is deployed at this time.

Not only did Warp beat Capcom to the punch with that setup, though, but they went a step further. If you make four of those two-by-two monstrosities together in a larger square, it creates one gigantic creature, further multiplying the special effect. So, in a single-player mode, 12 additional blocks would be cleared as a reward for getting rid of a single creature — that effect is now quadrupled. In multiplayer, say you clear one of the gray two-by-two creatures. That drops a different creature on your opponent’s screen, and, when that’s cleared, a bunch of blocks will fall on their screen, as well, making getting rid of it something of a punishment. If you were to clear a giant gray creature, well, it’s probably game over for your opponent, since they’d be hit with four of those time bombs at once, which would all go off at the same time with the right/wrong clear.

Of course, pulling this kind of move off is difficult, and requires a high level of play. It’s tough enough sometimes just getting to the point where you can clear out the single two-by-two creatures, never mind piling four of them together into a huge mass, the building of which doesn’t somehow tank your own chances of success. The reward is great, though, that’s pretty obvious, so it’s something to work to, and a level of strategy that shares nothing specific outside of “hey look what I just did to you” with Tetris, Columns, and so on.

Let’s talk about the design of Trip’d a bit. The blocks falling from the top of the screen come down in sets of three, with you able to shift the position of just one of them at a time — a decision that makes everything take that much longer, which you’re going to be mad about when you’re running out of real estate to place new blocks. These blocks are different colors, each of them little monster eggs. When four eggs of the same color/monster are placed together in a two-by-two square, they hatch the adult version of that monster, and it can only be cleared by matching the same colors in a group of four or more elsewhere. Like with Puyo Puyo, the four pieces don’t have to be all in a row, they just have to be touching in whatever configuration allows for that. Pieces of the triad will fall off of the edge if, say, the middle piece lands on an existing egg, and only stop when they reach another egg beneath, allowing you to pull off some similar maneuvers to, again, Puyo Puyo. But it’s not just like Puyo Puyo, either, given the whole thing with hatching large monsters, and with the way the shifting around of eggs works, either. Trip’d is very much its own thing, and you’ll lose in short order if you don’t adjust to play it like such.

In addition to figuring out how to use the larger creatures to your advantage, both to enable special effects and to create opportunities for cascading clears and combos, you’ll learn to lean on one other event. Every time you ascend to a new level of difficulty in Trip’d, you’ll be able to clear existing eggs from the screen — not the two-by-two creatures, but unhatched eggs. It’s just enough to give you some breathing room, and, depending on the placement of any larger monsters, it might even cause a little bit of an avalanche, depending on what’s above and what falls how far after the clear. It helps, too, that the speed that the blocks fall at resets when you reach a new level, as well. You can be right on the cusp of losing, move to the next level, and then see a resurgence, without that even being a sometimes thing. That move up will eventually cause problems, yeah, but at first, it’s a gift you can use to recover and get right back into plotting out moves instead of just reacting in a bid to survive.

Visually, Trip’d was not universally beloved — in no small part thanks to “grotesque” changes made for the North American release that bothered some critics — but it’s got a lot going for it. The eggs and larger creatures and art direction are gross but also cute, making for a fun combo. Everything is just a little deformed and wrong, which is a change of pace from the outright cute or more static imagery of a Tetris or Columns, with their emphasis on squares and gems.

What Trip’d also had going for it was a variety of modes. The single-player endless mode and multiplayer, sure, those are pretty standard, but there was more to it than that. There were two multiplayer modes, with you being able to face off against another human, or going up against an array of computer opponents, which had differing difficulty levels. Lastly, there was Trip’Dance, which lets you create music via button presses, with each of the buttons on the controller mapped to a different sound effect and accompanying visual. It’s meant to be, pardon the pun, trippy. And you can tell even via static image that this is the case:

There were no shortage of ways to experience Trip’d on the 3DO. Or, at least, Flopon-kun. While North America just got Trip’d, that was a later version of Flopon-kun modified for worldwide release. There was a second title released in Japan, Flopon World, which included Uchū Seibutsu Flopon-kun 2, otherwise known as Trip’d. And the Trip’d version was also included in Short Warp, a compilation that marked Warp’s final 3DO release, which was, again, only released in Japan. It never found life beyond these (and the Japan-only Playstation release), with Kenji Enjo not being interested in revisiting it — or any other release — unless he absolutely had to in order to make a living. As he told 1Up in that same interview:

That’s a depressing paragraph to read in the present, given Eno passed away at the age of 42 just five years later, but his philosophy is still worth noting. It was on to the next thing unless circumstance dictated otherwise. If Warp were able to make the games they wanted to make without expending precious commodities like time on looking into their past, then things were going well. Warp would eventually become From Yellow to Orange, or fyto, which Eno led until his death in 2013. Now, fyto focuses more on digital music, with games being left behind, but if you’re curious about Warp’s past, then at least you have the option of emulating. Even if the video game industry at large won’t be given a second chance to appreciate what a game like Trip’d has to offer, you can still make your own decisions on it three decades later.

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