Sometimes even a simple game of Pong can be a lot of fun. That’s the driving principle behind one of the Saturn’s newest games, Pixel Poppy Pong, a two-player homebrew developed by Nando for SegaXtreme’s Saturn 29th Anniversary Game Competition.
Players guard their respective goals with cat paws — featuring very cute toebeans — and bounce a big spinning cat head named Poppy back and forth over what looks like a football soccer pitch. Each side has nine lives (ha!) represented by hearts in a life meter at the top of the screen, and after they’ve lost all of them, they lose the round.
The latest version of the game can be downloaded from its Resources page on SegaXtreme.
But Nando added a little more nuance to Pixel Poppy Pong than you might expect. When blocking the goal, a player can hold down the A, B or C button to make Poppy react differently: C button is a fast attack, B button is slow and A button is in between.
There are also items that occasionally pop up on the field during a match, and whoever bopped Poppy last when she runs over the item gets it. While there are rare secret items, the three most common ones are:
- Hearts, which give you an extra life.
- Bombs, which take away a life.
- Fish, which can give you either three extra lives or bonus points, depending on Poppy’s mood.
Poppy’s mood, you may ask? That’s another wrinkle — Poppy has 12 different moods that affect scoring and what the items do to the player who touched Poppy last.
If there’s no second controller in the Saturn, the game automatically has the first player compete against a computer AI. “It’s definitely most fun played with a second person,” Nando said in their contest entry, “the AI is probably too hard.”
There’s currently no sound or music in the game, although Nando said they want to try to use Ponesound eventually. They also want to add a title screen once they have time to draw one.
Despite being a bit incomplete, Pixel Poppy Pong is nonetheless a fun, charming entry to this year’s Saturn competition.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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