There was a time in the early noughties when few publishers were willing to take a chance on something new and innovative, sticking to following trends and only shipping software that appealed to the widest audience possible. One genre remained untouched from this stubbornness, however – the humble puzzle game. It was perhaps believed that a developer could still potentially stumble on the next Tetris or Lemmings, and so most publishers would happily pick up a puzzler to diversify their catalogue.
This line of thought led to Kemco signing 2002’s multiformat Eggo Mania – known as Egg Mania: Eggstreme Madness in the US – from UK developer HotGen. Released on PS2, Xbox, GameCube and GBA, you control an egg-shaped persona with names such as Yolko and Coolio, and must build a tower using falling Tetris-style blocks to avoid a rising water level. It pits you against AI controlled rivals, using a split-screen view at all times.
As Kemco were a moderately large publisher at the time, responsible for the popular Top Gear and Crazy Castle franchises along with the colossal failure Batman: Dark Tomorrow, Eggo Mania was treated to the usual rollout of news, previews and multi-page reviews in the gaming magazines of the era. Reviews were generally in the 6/10 ballpark, with a few outliers such as The Official Xbox Magazine’s generous 7.8/10. The GBA version was the most positively received, presumably because a 2D puzzler was more at home on that system. By 2002, puzzlers were by and large expected to have some kind of 3D element.
Eggo Mania came and went without much fanfare. It definitely wasn’t the next Tetris or Lemmings. This wasn’t the last we saw of it though. Enter Blast Entertainment, a UK publisher out to make a fortune from the late PS2 budget market. We’ve touched on Blast before when we looked back at their belated Beverly Hills Cop game. To recap, Blast purchased all manner of movie and TV licenses cheaply and mostly hired studios with bespoke ready-to-go engines for racing, platform, shooting games, etc. Made on a quick turnaround, these products were shoved out the door for a mere £9.99. Most weren’t very good, although it should be noted that the standard was generally higher than what Phoenix Games put their name to. These weren’t lame interactive colouring books, at least.
Early 2008, Eggo Mania ended up being reskinned and re-released as Jetix Puzzle Buzzle on PS2 and Nintendo DS – with the GBA pretty much dead by this point. This license is a real barrel scraper – Jetix was, simply, a Children’s television network owned by Disney. It started airing in 2004, intended to compete with Cartoon Network, and was replaced by Disney XD in 2009. Here, the cast of colourful eggs were replaced with the Jetix logos; including a one-eyed white sphere. As no other cartoon characters are present, this is akin to somebody making a Tetris game where every block features the Sky Sports logo. Some of the backdrops remained cartoon-like, including a beach with sun loungers, but that was about it for style and personality. You have to wonder if Blast tried to bag a Disney license but this is all they were able to walk away with. Either that, or Disney was perhaps seeking ways to promote Jetix, and this was seen as a quick win for both companies.
Reviews of Jetix Puzzle Buzzle are almost non-existent, both on Nintendo DS and PS2. We have vague memories of seeing a review in a late issue of the Official PlayStation 2 Magazine, but no scans are available online to confirm.
While it is a little cheeky to re-release an older game with a new name and a slight rejig, chances of someone accidentally buying it twice seem slim. Six years had passed between the two, with the PS2 demographic skewing a lot younger in 2008.
It seems that the peculiar license aroused some interest among younger fans, and that the Jetix version is the more common of the two, although neither will set you back much more than a fiver nowadays. I think we can all agree that the version without blatant TV network branding is the more appealing.