AGH Atari 2600 Review: BEANY BOPPER by Fox Video Games As the title suggests, this game will be of interest predominantly to beginning players and youngsters. There really isn't very much to the thing in the way of challenge, but there is some fun and quite a few entertaining moments. Beany Bopper is actually harder to explain than it is to play. The joystick controls the movements of a large circular figure (the big Bopper with an apparent eye in the center. Your job is to help Bopper rid the screen of meany beanies and all manner of falling objects. You get four Boppers to start off with. Bagging four beanies in a row without loss of a Bopper results in the addition of another Bopper to the reserves, although you cannot keep more than three Boppers in reserve at any one time. The Bopper moves all over the screen area, shooting either long range single shots or rapid firing, short range shots. Once another object has been hit by one of the shots, the object is stunned momentarily and cannot get away. This is the time Bopper goes into action and eliminates the other object by passing over it -- ala Mario Bros. Any objects falling to the bottom of the screen reappear as Meany Beanies. There are two different modes of play available: in one game the beanies all bounce off obstacles that appear randomly in the screen; in the other option the beanies all fly freely through obstacles. Bopper can only go around the obstacles. There are seven different levels of challenge, in which the objects fly faster and drop more rapidly to the bottom edge of the screen. There's a small dose of strategy involved in successful play, but none of it is overly complicated and all of it is easily learned. Beany Bopper is one of the lower stress games compared to others in the same genre, and it'll allow you to sharpen all those skills so that players can move on and tackle the Robotrons of the world... well, maybe not Robotron, but you catch my drift. Graphically, Beany Bopper barely measures up against even the very early, first generation 2600 games put out by Atari. Meaning the character and objects are blocky and barely recognizable and the playfield is sparsely populated. Sounds consist of a few blips and beeps and nothing more. Given that there's not much going for it gameplay wise to begin with, there's not much here to recommend. Title Beany Bopper Publisher Fox Video Games System Atari 2600 (VCS) Graphics 3 Sound 3 Gameplay 3 Overall 3 Reviewer Keita Iida