"Or, how I learned to stop romanticising and loathe the blobs"

What a cute game Pengo is! A flock of pastel penguins cruise around a snow bank in demo mode after the pre-emptive thanks for playing. Then for just one quarter you get to play as a little red penguin who moves about in a randomly generated grid maze of ice blocks--or at least it seems that way. Then a bunch of blobs called Sno-Bees start floating around. To get to the next level, you shove a block into all of them. It all seems relatively nonviolent and bright, and it outdoes Pac-Man with a skit every other level.

But sadly the game is more suited to mistaken nostalgia than consistent fun, so those who think a game should partially be about learning to get through it will be flummoxed in short order. Although your little penguin has many ways to disable and fake out the Sno-Bees and even a special objective that can distract you from getting through levels to the extent of killing all your lives, a frequently unfair and arbitrary game lurks behind the cuteness of Pengo falling down exiting the board after finishing a level.

It's impressive to watch at the start. The maze generation is clever; the bottom left square is cleared out, and then the game creates paths by continually breaking two squares in any one direction but never winding up in the same square twice. It then determines where three diamond blocks are placed, and you see Pengo and a bunch of temporarily flashing blocks. Some will quickly shatter to reveal Sno-Bees. Others, you can crush. They flash again with each enemy killed, and the game always tries to keep three or four Sno-Bees on the board.

Now the Sno-Bees can destroy ice blocks in their way, but the catch is that they slow down in the process, making them easy marks or letting you run, and they can't crush diamond blocks. So often you need to build an ice fortress or sit behind two ice blocks and be patient. If the ice blocks are too close together, and you time it wrong, you simply wind up shattering the block, which lets the Sno-Bee in after you that much quicker. However there's more of a window of time than when a Sno-Bee forms initially and you can hit it with an ice block. If it's too small, your block goes through it.

In addition to creating ice block fortresses, you can also head to the wall and shake it by pushing against it and hitting the button for firing an ice block. Affected Sno-Bees do their impressions of fried eggs for a few seconds, and you can pick them up or circle around and nail them with ice blocks. But the risk here is that, if you are on the side, they can pin you down to form one of the less fun parts of the game: you run back and forth on the side while a Sno-Bee runs back and forth next to you, with little chance for you to escape.

It's okay that the Sno-Bees start out just slower than you and wind up moving and turning faster and even can sense when you fire a block later, but perhaps if they'd made things so Sno-Bees couldn't turn around unless you were right behind or they reached a dead end, or you could see which way they planned to go, the game would be a bit fairer. Half of the time though they're facing so you can't see them. Very late on, they even approach you more smartly, being not so eager to line up horizontally or vertically. So to maximize your score you'll either need to sucker two Sno-Bees behind a block or put the diamond blocks in a row.

And without the challenge of placing these three blocks in a row, Pengo would lose much of its appeal. The strategy to put them together is not immediately obvious, and in fact on the later levels it's rarely feasible, so you'll have to sacrifice some games to lining the blocks up. You're more likely to line them up by a favorable start(one of the twenty random board patterns places the blocks in an L two squares away from each other) than to do so through skill. If all three are on the side of the board, you get five grand, about the average for clearing an entire level, but if one is not, that doubles. Monsters are also stunned--or they usually are. I think there's some random criteria for all this. But being able to take over a minute for a level, run circles around the Sno-Bees, and still pop the diamond blocks together is a great temptation--if you misjudge your talent or try too hard, you can lose several lives trying to put them together, but for me it's about more than points.

All this is worth the bonus countdown that gets tedious, even if it's the only real break you get in the game, and other annoyances such as how dying can often leave you more vulnerable when the game restarts and how you can only get one extra life. As every block fired or destroyed generally compromises your position that much more it would be sporting to give you a break. But perhaps most maddening is how, if there is one Sno-Bee left, it occasionally decides to make a Sno-Beeline(sorry) for you. The other times it goes in a corner and disappears to end the level, but the worst part is, if you're caught, the Sno-Bee immediately folds and disappears. No chance for revenge. They obviously have a few drops of chicken blood in them.

That's not the worst part of it. The Sno-Bees move somewhat randomly, and there's no clue telling you which way they'll go next. Often you'll be so shocked when one turns away from you for once that you'll run straight into another. Your simple controls are surprisingly ugly as well. Pengo moves between grid squares, and if he starts in one direction and you want to pull back--forget it. This can turn even connecting the three diamonds tragic. Also when you bump a wall a Sno-Bee may run one square over before it is stunned, i.e. right on top of you, and you can't sling two blocks at once.

The most egregious slip is thankfully the funniest, though. After Pengo walks off the screen, tripping half the time in the process, you get a time-based bonus ranging from 5000(under twenty seconds) down to ten(50 to 59.) Given the lowest point total for an in-game action in thirty(destroy an ice block,) I find it easy to laugh after getting the diamond block bonus and wondering if I'm going to get that little extra tacked on.

Yet Pengo still has the appeal of an attractive woman who is too demanding. The between-level skits are worth seeing as a line of penguins even gets a bit risque later even if the accompanying electronic 'Ode to Joy,' less catchy than the general in-game tune, exacerbates a too-long break. Pengo out-cutes Peter Pepper of Burgertime's on-his-back death flail, and the Sno-Bees change color.

So Pengo is probably best played a few times to optimize the positive memories of it. Once you start asking for fairness in addition to cuteness, the game doesn't deliver. But with lining up the diamond blocks Pengo retains marginal addictiveness, and there are ways to combat the pro-Sno-bee bias. And the game has inspired many less demanding JAVA applets from apprentice programmers.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/27/00, Updated 01/20/03