It was summer 1980 when Nintendo released one of the very first pocket games to hit the shelves: it was a Game & Watch (Silver Series) and they called it Fire!. It featured a mono-chromatic LCD screen, two levels of difficulty, two buttons to operate the characters: your aim is to move two firemen left and right, in order to save people falling from a building on fire. They bounce left to right and finally get safely to an ambulance placed on the right side of the screen.

At first sight, Plump Pop looks exactly as a coin-op porting of Fire!: two characters in the shape of lovely pets, make a friend of them bounce up and down and try to avoid him from falling on the floor. So the game concept is identical.

At first we select the race of pets we prefer: dogs, cats and pigs - whichever one we select, gameplay is not affected by our choice. By the way, Taito programmers probably inserted both dogs and cats in order to make dog lovers play with their favourite pet, and viceversa.

Then those genius programmers probably thought: "What if someone doesn't like neither dogs nor cats? So let's also include pigs, so everybody will be happier and the videogame will be a true success!" And so they did (I won't mention the genius because he already got a wide pay for his wonderful ideas, and he doesn't need more fame through this review!).

The dogs family is composed of Rocky, Coocy and Kunkun. Cats are called Tom, Chibi and Nyanderful. Tonta, Piggy and Korobuu are the names of the pigs. How will we recognize them? They all look the same... but who cares?

After selecting our favourite race, we can finally start the game. It all happens in a wonderful place far away from here. Two funny little devils named Bibiru decided to break the boredom and ossessive perfection of that fairy place: so they kidnapped all the angels. We now have to save them all and beat those hell creatures ... but how shall we do?!? Exorcism? Prayers? Nah, nothing like that! All we need is three pets, a bouncing carpet and an old-style airplane! ...well now the funny part starts!

We have to clear ten rounds, each composed of four stages, before reaching out for the final boss. In the former two we'll have to clear the skies of enemies in the shapes of flying saucers, space invaders, bubbles, bones, balloons and many more (try guessing ten random objects and they are probably included in this videogame!). Stage three is a sort of bonus round, and finally the fourth stage is the fight against the area boss.

How will our funny heroes beat those enemies, just by the use of a bouncing carpet and an airplane? Well, enemies are actually quite innocuous: flying saucers for example don't hurt anybody, they simply move around the sky, sometimes there are also crows flying here and there - they make your pet bounce lower. After hitting a flying saucer, the pet will bounce elsewhere, eventually hitting more flying objects in a similar way to a pinball ball - there are even small clouds which hold the "pet-ball" for a while. So the game is quite similar to Arkanoid though having moveable bricks and an animated ball! All we have to do is trying to understand where out flying friend is gonna move, in order to go and get him before he falls on the floor, making him bounce back up.

Controling the game is really simple: you operate the bouncer left and right by pulling joystick, and make it jump by the fire button. This is necessary in order to avoid a nasty little dragon which sometimes tries to slower our moves. If you press fire while the acrobat pet is hitting the bouncer, you'll make him fly even higher. Also, if you hit the button while he's walking on a cloud, you'll make him jump against some objects near there.

During the first two phases of each level, we'll eventually get fruits from destroyed enemies: they're worth bonus points and all we have to do is getting them on the bouncer before they get squashed on the floor.

There are also nice stars, having a random effect out of three: making some objects blow away; making objects on the left and right explode; making items around explode.

Other items have magical effects, such as making the bouncer larger; doubling the number of flying acrobats (double chance to make them fall down ehm); transforming your acrobat to a sort of Pac-Man - capable of blasting everything in his way; gaining helmets which will make our pets stronger and capable of moving without bouncing back after hitting enemies - they get to the screen border easily.

If you're lucky enough, you'll also find a box labeled "1UP" - get it to gain a bonus life, or you'll have to reach 50.000 and 70.000 points to have it.

Each level's third phase is a bonus stage: we have to get as many fruits as possible. Each fruit is worth 1000 points, and we'll also get a "perfect bonus" in case we catch all of them. Bonus is worth 10.000 points at first, but then the value increases in further levels. Bonus stages aren't all the same: fruits fall from the sky in level 1-3, then they'll be thrown by flying balloons in level 2-3 and so on... In the last genre of bonus stage we'll have to fulfil a glass with fruits which bounce around the game screen. Each fruit is worth 500 points. There's also a nasty weight bar which we have to avoid, or it will stop our characters for a few seconds.

In phase four we'll finally fight the area boss: heavy and dangerous creature moving in air, defended by many smaller flying itms (the same ones we can also find in previous game phases).

The first boss is called Big French (don't ask me the reason of th name - I have no idea!) and has yellow small balloons as hair: they will leave from the head as you hit it, becoming part of the barrier. His life gauge (placed in the top-left part of the screen) indicates his power. When energy goes zero, boss explodes and our flying acrobat lands with a parachute, then he'll take off on an airplane and fly towards next area (the firemen) follow him by walk...

And the story goes on to the tenth boss who is made of a couple of angels soon revealing themselves as being devils. Their barrier is made of heart-shaped balloons, and they also throw excrements against our characters, also making the floor slippery. The fight is really hard, but as we beat them, we'll make them become angels again, and they'll pray in silence making our land peaceful and shiny again. Game ends with a staff roll and the high-score table.