"Cuteness, pseudo-carnage, and strategy tied with a fabled interspecies rivalry."

I always felt that the original fairy tale about the wolf and the three little pigs was a bit smarmy, the sort of insipid stuff adults would sluff off on me while going to tell their own dirtier stories behind closed doors, leaving me to hear only the scraps of loud laughter that resulted. And I never could like the the third pig--the one with the house that wouldn't blow in. He seemed a bit snarky. The other two were just dumb, of course, like the poor wolf, who was outnumbered anyway. Pooyan changes all this. Wolves steal two of a mother pig's children. So she comes after them with arrows, shooting from a movable gondola on the right side. And although she can't hurt the wolves directly, she can pop the balloons they use move up or down. And watching the wolves flail around in midair before going splat on their heads never gets old. It all takes place in a forest, but the tree houses, like the carnage, are much cooler than the old children's tale.

But despite the general kiddy look Pooyan winds up being sophisticated. I suppose many early video games pulled you in with the same trick: a few cute characters followed by a game that gets impossible quickly after a relatively easy first level hooks the player. Later levels may feel like they swarm you over. They're never too long, with a maximum of forty-eight wolves to shoot before advancing, but the ways to shoot all the bad guys' balloons with proper timing and agility become more obscure. And you'll quickly notice a realistic feature that goes against standard saccharination such as the wolves' heads being as big as their bodies. The rocks the wolves chuck at you go in parabolas. They're rather shallow but still you have to anticipate while you avoid. Because the right direction isn't always obvious. With all the games where you fired straight on with a spaceship, this realism in such a cartoonish game forces maneuvers more sober save-the-galaxy games don't require of your more state-of-the-art spacecraft.

Especially when you have a curving weapon of your own. Most of the time the mother pig will fire arrows that go straight, but apparently a piece of meat will appear at the top. It can take out wolves or their balloons, and it starts left before veering down. The levels have certain predetermined formations, and you can often take out five wolves at once this way, which of course gets big points too. Eventually the wolves appear in less obvious curves, or you'll face a phalanx of four where you need to shoot one first. And you'll need to use intuition or patience to find the best time to use the meat.

But aside from the rocks they throw at you, the wolves have devious plans for sneaking up on you. These plans alternate with the levels and backgrounds. In the odd ones, wolves come down from a tree, and if one reaches the bottom it goes to a ladder in the tree house behind you. Occasionally it will reach out and howl before it tries to bite you. It's almost a bit frightening, especially on levels which have a lot of challenge. Being close to perfection is important here as if too many wolves make it to the ground, they can cover about half of your gondola's range. Even without biting too often, they're a distraction, pinning you in from both sides. On later levels, balloons take more than one hit, and a purple wolf drops fruit down, which can block your shots.

The even levels seem a bit more demanding but after the initial confusion they offer more strategy and allow more room for error. In these, the wolves take balloons to rise to the top. As more get to the top, they start pushing that benign looking rock at the top left over to the right. If seven wolves make it to the top, they push the rock off the edge and form a conga line for a little victory dance. There are also three nubs that blow up balloons to block your shots at wolves.

Worse yet, you may need a few hits to take them out--if you shoot a balloon too high up, it merely gets smaller, and the wolf rises more slowly. You can do this twice until it has a puny red balloon and looks very scared as the wolf holding on looks very scared as he rises at a crawl--but fortunately(temporarily anyway) for him gravitational acceleration applies only to missiles. These levels provide several tricks such as shooting a few wolves's balloons to alter their speed, picking up meat, and coming back down when you've aligned a set of five in an arc. Wolves can also fall onto each other in special cases, including an annoying purple one that you must kill--it's got a flashing balloon that takes four shots to nail conventionally. But you can also shoot wolves and have the arrows bounce to great effect. Meat often bounces off the stray balloons here, and so there's a possibility here you can master the reflections to take out monsters far apart from each other. But you can also afford to blunder or even let a wolf in a tough formation get through.

There are also a few bonus levels, but they're not up to much. One is target practice with parabolically launched fruits, and the other has wolves rising to the top, and you just have meat to shoot them with. It almost seems too drippy until the next level comes by and some of the formations seem outright impossible. But they aren't, really; there's always a sensible way to do things and although on the later odd levels the execution must be perfect, some of the curve balls you need to throw are unexpected. Often you'll need an exact shot to get all of a formation, but there should be enough time to scramble and pick off the last bad guy. And if you keep track of the monsters left you can even fire at the right time to get an extra piece of meat.

The wolves themselves often give clues. You'll probably need them. For instance, wolves will turn their heads before firing at you, and they have to blow up their balloons before going in the air. The sound effects for this are hardly realistic, but they're pointed and clear and cartoony. The wolf howls when you let one escape are also effective, but they aren't as legitimately pressing as the 'bong' a rock makes when you bounce off your gondola. On later levels I found I needed to have close shaves, but being reminded of one didn't hurt my adrenaline flow.

And even when you goof in Pooyan, it's all very sprightly, from the balloons bouncing meat back at you(feels like a blocked shot in basketball) to the wolves mucking around on the ladders or cliff tops, ready to take you out, to your pigs who look like ice cream cones with their heads taking most of their body areas. Even popping the balloons is a jolly experience--it's like bubble wrap, or just plain busting some mostly-forgotten grade-school bully's balloon(not that he'd have or cry over one,) and with the standard Fisher Price music box fare in the background, you can feel like a kid even if you're trying for a serious high score. The wolves themselves might be alligators if they slouched and seem just to have missed the cut as villains in a Hello Kitty game, perhaps. All this rounded out with the cute marching tunes after you solve a level makes for what feels like a complete experience full of fun observations and strategy without being bogged down by too much thought.

For a cute little game that allows you to put hearts in your high score list entry, Pooyan offers good fun and surprising swerving. It may be the only game I know where you fire from the right, and the originality doesn't stop there. Mappy is the only ancient arcade game that could be cuter, and even though I didn't notice the more strategically interesting points or care about them when I was very young, it was still a very cute game to play, lasting longer than many others. Back when arcades and simple game ideas were burgeoning, it seemed games like Pooyan would always get produced. Sadly that isn't the case--game creators probably ran out of animals and genres. But it is nice to have learned in the meantime that some old favorites actually had legitimately clever puzzles, too.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/30/01, Updated 10/22/03