EDITOR'S NOTE:
The near-bottom of this page has all the images from the 1P Pin-Up mode in the game which aren't strictly not safe for work but, I dunno, maybe don't read this page at work unless your work is at the short skirts factory.

Namco isn't necessarily one of the first names you think of when it comes to the Mega Drive, but they were busier than you'd think on the system. They published a total of seven arcade ports (nine if you add in the Western-developed Pac-Mania and Ms. Pac-Man ports, ten if you throw in Klax) ranging from Rolling Thunder 2 to Kyūkai Dōchūki (yes, the baseball spinoff of Yōukai Dōchūki, sometimes referred to as Shadow Land depending on who you ask) as well as a whole bunch of original games like Splatterhouse 2, Wrestleball and Ball Jacks. What's surprising is that a lot of them got released outside Japan, a bit of a change compared to the dozen or so unlocalised SNES games released by the company. Hell, one game for the system, Rolling Thunder 3, was only released in America! The few that didn't make it included the aforementioned baseball game (too weird), games based on Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Chibi Maruko-Chan (anime / manga licenses)... And then there's Megapanel (and Dangerous Seed too, I guess). This is an odd one on the surface- one of Namco's first console-exclusive games for the system, Megapanel was released in 1990, an epoch in which there was so much time for Klax that Namco published their own version of it for the Mega Drive in Japan. Puzzle games were big in the wake of Tetris, and so it seems a little odd that this, of all things, was one of the ones left in Japan to fade into obscurity. I'd never even heard of it until reading about it on The OPCFG, which speaks both to how relatively unknown it is and just how long I've been on the internet. Puzzle games are a universal language, surely?



... Oh! Oh. Maybe the scantily-clad girls were a part of it. And the bunny girl on the cover.

Before we get to that though, we actually have an unreleased game to talk about!



So, the game shown above is Puzzle Club by Namco, which has a copyright date of 1990 but was never finished or properly distributed, although according to maniajiru's website (original GeoCities version archived here), the writer remembers seeing the game on location test although where is unclear, but I think they explain they played it on a Consolette 26 cabinet, mangled by machine translation as 'carrot', helpful. Fortunately, it was dumped sometime around 1999-2000 and it's playable in MAME, although it's sadly incomplete (the title screen is unfinished and some of the graphics, especially later in the game, are completely corrupted). It's a sliding block puzzler where you have to make create rows of the same symbol to take them out of play and completely clear out each pre-filled board to advance to the next problem. Weirdly, there's two modes- a Kids Mode called Pac-Man Family with Pac-Man tiles and illustrations between stages (including, alas, Ms. Pac-Man from happier times) and an Adult Mode called Floor Exercise which uses slot machine tiles, includes bonus segments where you have to reorganise an animated picture of a girl exercising, and has less frequent illustrations between rounds of a blue-haired girl that are a little more risque than normal Namco fare (move your mouse over the images above to toggle between Adult and Young). It's a pretty simple concept with somewhat bland presentation beyond the illustrations (and music reused from Boxy Boy / Souko Ban Deluxe, most likely as placeholders) but it's not too bad for something that's not quite finished, and there's quite a lot of it too, with 30 puzzles in the Young set and 60 puzzles in the Adult one.

What's this got to do with Megapanel? Well, there's a solid connection because both of them were designed by Satoshi Norimatsu- in Puzzle Club he's credited with Game Design & Graphic and in Megapanel he's credited under Main Planner & Graphic as confirmed by the Hamster Arcade Archives stream for one of his other works, Rompers (at 26:33). Additionally, Megapanel was released very late in the same year, 1990- 22nd November according to Sega Retro to be exact. That's assuming the copyright date on the prototype is accurate too. I don't want to theorise too much without more solid info on the development history of both these games, but that's a pretty interesting connection, right? Two games from the same company taking a sliding-block approach to a puzzle game, possibly developed in the same year, but one got released and one didn't... That's neat, right? Besides, let's face it, when am I gonna have the opportunity to talk about Puzzle Club again, especially since it has such a fascinating staff connection to the game we're looking at today?



Speaking of, I suppose I'd better talk about the game itself now.

Looking at the screenshots and the name will almost certainly bring to mind another puzzle game- Intelligent Systems' cute panel-em-up Panel de Pon which released several years later. There are some strange similarities for sure- both involve moving coloured panels and differ from other puzzle games by having new pieces appear from the bottom of the screen rather than the top- but those are only surface-level things they have in common, they otherwise play very differently, so I'll resist the urge to constantly compare the two as best I can. The manual specifically mentions the game being inspired by the 15 Puzzle, a sliding-block puzzle where you move the panels to get them in a specific order. You'll mostly recognise this from being a puzzle in other games and your gut reaction to their very mention is a good indicator on how you feel about them. However, Megapanel isn't about you creating a picture (not in the traditional sense anyway, more on that later) or specific order out of these panels- you're here to destroy. The game board consists of a 6 x 11 grid (with an extra row at the bottom for the incoming panels) filled with different-coloured panels (the designs on them change depending on the game mode) with a single black square always present. If you've seen a sliding puzzle before you know the deal with this black square- that's how you move stuff! The D-Pad slides panels next to the black space into it, leaving another black space where it once was, and so you're constantly shifting this black space to move panels about. As was the style at the time, matching together three of the same colour either horizontally or vertically (no diagonals, sorry Columns and Klax fans) removes them from the field, and new pieces appear from the bottom periodically, the only warning you get being the NEXT text flashing just before things shunt upwards (although pressing A shifts them up manually). If the pieces reach the top, that's game over for you! As you progress through each round, your level increases similar to Tetris and the rate of new pieces sharply increases just before you reach the next level, so watch out for it.

Unfortunately, as clever an adaptation of the ol' 15 Puzzle as this is, the entire premise immediately causes problems. See, the important part of the game mechanics there was 'panels next to the black space', meaning that there has to be a panel next to your black space to do anything. If there's no panel next to your space then there's nothing you can do and this can happen far, far easier than you'd expect because, to get to move panels you actually want to match up, you have to shift other panels about a lot, and with no gravity or free cursor movement to speak of, your options are more limited. Essentially, to make a panel move across the pit takes a lot more moves and involves more panels than in other puzzle games, and will almost inevitably lead to you accidentally setting off other matches which can, at best, ruin the match you wanted to make or, at worst, strand your black space with no way to properly move panels before shifting the pile up, which might end your game. This is a very strange problem to have because, in other colour-matching puzzlers, if you get a chain reaction by mistake, you can say you 'totally meant to do it' and gloat about your brain size to your opponent in versus mode. In Megapanel, such an accidental chain can completely screw you over, leaving you with precious little options to dig your way out of the hole through little fault of your own. Worse still, if you have a large single column of panels built up, you have to wait for new panels to appear before you can even start to do anything about them (all you can do with a single column is shift blocks up and down not to the side).



As you play the game and learn how its mechanics work, you can sort-of play around these issues. The simplest method is to just never match any panels if they're the only panel on the bottom row, keep columns around the same length as best you can and keep up with the advancing panels as they appear... However, there's only so much you can do to mitigate the core problem. Again, you have to shuffle about so many other panels just to move one in place (especially if you want to score a four or five-panel combination) that inevitably, unavoidably, you will screw up your own pit and because you're so restricted in what you can do, digging your way out is often either unviable without shifting the pit closer to the deadline or actually impossible. Now, there are other puzzle games that make digging your way out of a bad spot difficult, sure- I noted that Cleopatra Fortune can get real rough with you when you're in a pinch due to how slotting blocks into place and work sometimes, and there are ways that sloppy play can screw you over like leaving mummies buried without jewels. However, in that game it's still exciting to try and dig out of that, and it feels satisfying when you destroy blocks (especially by accident). There's no such feeling in Megapanel just because setting something off accidentally is such a blow against you, and it's just going to happen. To play amateur game designer for a moment (emphasis on 'amateur'), it's hard to find a way to fix these issues without starting from scratch, although perhaps some kind of system where you can delay blowing up panels until you press a button (there's two other buttons not doing owt, after all) would help a little, but then that might overcomplicate things. I said I wouldn't compare this too directly to Panel de Pon but let me have this one, as a treat: they were on to something when they let you have full reign over the board!

Weirdly, there's no true 'endless / marathon' mode in Megapanel, with only two modes available for solo players. 1P Exercise is the closest the game has to a standard no-frills game mode and mostly resembles the single-player set-up of Atari's classic puzzler of the nineties, Klax. Rather than playing 'til you drop, each of the 30 rounds (utilising a vague Inca Empire and Peruvian culture motif in the backgrounds, including the Nazca lines) has a different objective, starting off simple with things like making a certain number of matches of any panel colour or a small score target, to more complex things like specific panel colours in four or five-panel matches and increasingly-ludicrous score targets. I feel this is the weaker of the two modes because it highlights the issues of actually getting panels where you want them far more harshly. In particular, trying to arrange for four or five-panel matches, an increasingly-common objective as you progress (and multiple ones at that) is a frustrating challenge especially when you think you've got it and you make an inadvertent match that completely ruins what you were trying to make, and the more time you spend in a round, the higher the chance that the speed is going to spike sharply and ruin things even more. One nice feature is you can pick one of four starting points of the 30 rounds, but there's no continues otherwise so good luck!



1P Pin-Up is the other solo mode, my preferred one of the two, and helps explain the bunny girl on the box art- you're playing through rounds to uncover pixel art of cute girls, truly the noblest pursuit to be found in any video game. This time, the column you destroy panels in (the middle column if it's a horizontal clear) makes a bomb drop in the corresponding column on a pit on the right of the screen, gradually revealing a picture, although scoring a four or five-panel clear grants extra bonuses (vertically you'll drop multiple bombs in one column, horizontally the whole horizontal line will be targeted). Each set of five rounds starts with a very small picture but they get bigger before the next set starts with small ones again, and as you get further in you'll see more green blocks that need an extra bomb to get rid of them. So, it's a bit like those nudie versions of Qix you'd find in the arcades, but obviously for a console release this is more on the side of 'ecchi' content like a bunny-girl outfit, a dangerously-short skirt or a swimsuit. And also just a normal witch to get the attention of those hex maniacs like me. Ahem. Again, this runs into the problem of being able to screw yourself over but it's definitely the more enjoyable of the two for me- positioning and requiring so much board space to get anything done is again a problem but here it's just what column you're destroying the panels in, which is much less of a frustrating challenge than arranging for four and five-panel matches. You can absolutely still screw yourself, but you also start this mode with three lives and can earn more through score extends so there's a little mercy in that regard, you get to do a mulligan a few times! Still no continues or passwords though, which is pretty mean for a game with this many rounds.

Finally, we have 2P Versus which I don't have too much to say about, but as The OPCFG review noted, this is a fairly early example of the versus puzzle game style that would become a much more prominent genre later in the '90s with Puyo Puyo Tsu's influence on Japanese arcades, as talked about in this puzzle game developer roundtable that I link to pretty much every time I talk about '90s puzzle games. Not the very first, of course- Tetris on the Game Boy, Dr. Mario on the NES / Game Boy and Columns II: The Voyage Through Time in arcades are all examples of 1989 / 1990 puzzle games with versus modes- and not even the first on the Mega Drive (Namco's Japan-only port of Atari's Klax includes an exclusive versus mode not found in the overseas Tengen version or other ports) but it's not a mode you were guaranteed to get. It actually adds a couple of extra features too- as well as yet another graphical style (this time going for a Chinese theme with two bun-haired girls fighting for puzzle supremacy), this is definitely one of the first versus puzzle games to add items specifically to attack the opposing player (Tetris on the Mega Drive had items but they were for all modes), as special attack and defense panels will appear in your pit, sending invincible garbage panels to your opponent (also done by making four and five-panel combos) and wiping out garbage panels in your pit respectively. You can even turn these on or off individually for each player before a match, in case you want to create a more even playing field for experts versus beginners! As neat as these features are, they're still stuck in Megapanel, so there's not much else to say about them. Alas.



I can't wrap things up just yet as I really have to mention the presentation, a true land of contrasts. The visuals are quite nice and the fact that each mode has its own visual theme is cute, as it changes the mascots in the middle of the screen, the background image and the designs on the panels. The game also does pretty well on colour blindness simulators, with the different panels mostly being different enough from one another, but I think the very soft shading on the designs on the panels don't make them stand out very well, so the game really doesn't work for monochromatic vision impairments (as the game itself proves with a special option). However, it's the music I really want to talk about- all three modes use a different song but they also only use one of them each, and they're fairly short loops too (although they don't restart between rounds at least). Not an uncommon thing in other puzzle games of course, but these aren't on the level of Puzzle Bobble or Cleopatra Fortune's music, and they'll honestly drive you a bit batty before you're done playing. I had to mute the sound in the end and put music of my choice on instead when researching this article. It's pretty rough.

Time to wrap things up here then, I'm sure I've come across as a little harsh here but it's because Megapanel is close to being alright! It definitely went for something different from other puzzle games of the time, especially on consoles, and in the 2P Versus mode especially there's a few things you didn't see in other puzzlers, and I think maybe with a few concepts being reworked it could've been pretty good... The big irony though is I think Puzzle Club, the prototype arcade game from the start of this article, is actually the better game. A sliding block puzzle it may be, but I think the core concept works a lot better, mostly that it's way harder to completely screw yourself over in that game but it's still challenging enough to be interesting. Megapanel just ends up quite frustrating for me due to many core problems with its premise, despite some of its neat ideas and presentation chops (not the music though, definitely not the music). I dunno, maybe reading what I've said about this one has your eyes lighting up but its core problems mean it's really not for me. Still, don't feel too bad for Namco- they'd eventually distribute a much better puzzle game in arcades, a little thing called Starsweep by Axela which also has vague Panel de Pon vibes to it, so that's nice. In the end, its import-only status and lack of rereleases outside of a few Tectoy Mega Drive consoles in the 2000s and 2022's Mega Drive Mini 2 meant that it'd fall into such obscurity in the West that I'd only hear about it via a website focusing on obscure games. So we're back where we started. It's nice when these articles manage to do that, huh?

For being a frustrating kind of panel-em-up, Megapanel is awarded...

In a sentence, Megapanel...
Has probably found itself compared unfavourably to Panel de Pon more than once in its life, and you can add another one here.

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And now, it's that time, folks!
EXTENDED PLAY!

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First up, a few extra things in the game itself.



The game has a 'sepia tone' colour option, just sitting there on the Options menu!



I mean... This option certainly isn't here for any colourblind players out there, the panel designs are too tough to discern!



There's also a little extra feature in 1P Pin-Up mode not mentioned in the manual.

Press C at any point and the little navigator lady will get a mask with an X put on her face, stopping her commentary for the rest of the round.

Don't do it though, it's rude, she's alright she is.

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Next, no article on Megapanel is complete without a gallery of the 1P Pin-Up mode art! So let's do that now.



Before we get started, a few notes. While there's a few places on the internet that show this art (most of which are actually linked in this article, shocking), I promise you I ripped these myself, that's just the kind of thing I do, no borrowing on this one. Not through any great skill or anything, mind, but while I can make it a fair bit into this mode legitimately, there's a bit of a spanner in the works here- we're at the mercy of randomness. There's ten total sets consisting of five images each (although the second one is always a truncated version of the fifth, to egg you on to finish the set) but 1P Pin-Up ends after Round 30. You then get the message shown above, teasing you that there's some girls you haven't seen yet, before a slideshow of the ones you did see with their names and ages listed. What's the deal? I fought with the mode a little, trying to figure out if it was something to do with playing well or selecting Hard on the options menu, but after my own testing and according to GAMEYA BANNENDO, it turns out there's no real trick to it. The first and final image sets are always the same (Mia Takai and Jane Brown) but every five rounds inbetween those, there are two possible image sets and the one you get is random. This seems to be selected once you start the mode by the way, so you can't use savestates to reroll- if you get Hiromi Matsuda in Round 26, your playthrough will forever be bereft of Finny Frorin, sorry.

Anyway, the daunting task of not only beating this mode, but beating it multiple times and hoping the game deigns me worthy to get the image sets needed in a reasonable amount of runs was too much responsibility for me to bear. Luckily, GameHacking.org has a set of Pro Action Replay / Game Genie codes by GForce to automatically drop bombs constantly, allowing for easy clears and multiple runs without melting my tiny brain. Bit of a relief, that! So, here are all the Pin-Up images, in the order you'll encounter them in a playthrough. You're welcome.

Mia Takai (always appears in Rounds 1-5)

Yumiko Hoshino (randomly selected for Rounds 6-10)

Keiko Yamashina (randomly selected for Rounds 6-10)

Combat Doll Milia (randomly selected for Rounds 11-15)

Anna Regina (randomly selected for Rounds 11-15)

Yukie Kawano (randomly selected for Rounds 16-20)

Akiko Tanaka (randomly selected for Rounds 16-20)

Finny Frorin (randomly selected for Rounds 21-25)

Hiromi Matsuda (randomly selected for Rounds 21-25)

Jane Brown (always appears in Rounds 26-30)

Again, this was possible thanks to GForce's codes on GameHacking.org. Thank you for your hard work!

If you'd like to try yourself, activate these codes mid-game then disable them to end the stage:

FF1080:00FF
FF1081:00FF
FF1082:00FF
FF1083:00FF
FF1084:00FF
FF1085:00FF

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Megapanel has had very few rereleases since its 1990 debut. Here they are!



First, as pointed out by FM Sundae on cohost (thanks!), a few Tectoy Mega Drive plug-and-plays have the game, as well as other Namco games.

You can see it on the menu in the video above!

As documented on Sega Retro, three models definitely had it: the 2007 Mega Drive 3, the 2008 Mega Drive 3 and both versions of the Mega Drive 4.



The other rerelease is also in a plug-and-play. As seen in the title introduction trailer, Megapanel was one of the 60+ games included on the 2022 Mega Drive Mini 2, but only the Japanese version, naturally. It's one of three Namco games included on the Japanese set of games but not the Western one (alongside Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Starblade) with Splatterhouse 2 being included on both and Rolling Thunder 2 subbing in for the missing games on the Western unit. I don't have one of those myself (only have the European model with Sewer Shark and... Vectorman 2?!) but the streamer PICORHYTHM has three Megapanel streams showing most of the Pin-Up mode, confirming that no changes were made to any of the images. They're just as ecchi-sketchy as they were in the '90s.

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I mentioned Panel de Pon once or twice, but I think I got away with it.

I have no plans to review Pac-Attack. Not yet, anyway.