Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is an 'Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog'-themed reskin of Japanese falling block puzzle game Puyo Puyo.

The premise of Puyo Puyo is simple but addictive. The aim of the game is to clear your board by joining together quads of beans and popping them off your board. When you pop a foursome, it makes a rock appear on your opponents board so by clearing your own board you're simultaneously disrupting your opponents'. Crucially, when you chain a combo of bean pops together, it creates an avalanche of rocks on your opponents board.

This is the central risk reward matrix at the heart of Puyo Puyo's gameplay and adds a delectable layer of tension. Do you build up a monstrous combo and leave yourself vulnerable to enemy rocks or do you try to overwhelm your opponent with a continual string of smaller combos?

It's a formula that's easy to grasp but takes time to master. I always found Mean Bean's story mode hit a sweet-spot with it's difficulty curve. Every robotic opponent has a distinct playstyle but they get progressively tougher to beat, pushing you to continually blast through your own perceived skill ceiling in an effort to get further. Overall it's the type of game I find endlessly replayable and satisfying to best.

For what it's worth, I enjoy Mean Bean over the original Puyo Puyo because of it's AOSTH inspiration. It's so much fun to see the goofy enemy portraits change from smug grins to desperate, sweating faces when you turn the tide in your favour. The tense Kraftwerk-inspired music and excellent used of well-placed sound effects (an exuberant YIPEE sounds off whenever you pop a quad of beans) only add to the satisfaction when you've got Dr. Robotnik on the ropes.

In Japan, this is not a Sonic related game at all. When Puyo-Puyo got a release in North America and Europe, Sega decided to overhaul the design to base it on Dr Robotnik, featuring a bunch of robots from the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon.

Puyo-Puyo/Mean Bean Machine is a colour-matching game. Two “beans” will fall down at once and you can rotate them. Match four of the same colour and they’ll vanish. At the same time, an AI opponent is competing against you. If you chain multiple combos, you’ll send a bunch of beans that don’t match and can only be removed by triggering a group of another colour next to it. First one to reach the top of the screen loses.

I could only make it to stage 3, partly due to colourblind issues (although I am bad at this style of game anyway). The beans are slightly different shapes, but it’s difficult to identify the shapes quick enough for the reaction speeds needed to compete against the AI.

Against my introverted self's better judgment, a week or so ago I went to a dinner party hosted by a good friend. I arrived a little late, and by the time I walked in, everyone was crowded around the TV playing Puyo Puyo against each other. "Yo Iyellatcloud!" someone calls out. "Have you played Puyo Puyo before?"

"No," I say. "But I've played Mean Bean Machine..."

"I don't know what that is. But you should try playing Puyo!" A controller is thrust into my hand, and 30 seconds later I've hit a 4-hit combo and won. (and then everybody clapped...) Everyone takes turns trying to challenge me, and the closest I come to losing is when the most experienced Puyo player dumps junk all over half my playing area, but I manage to calmly clear it all and pull off the comeback.

"I don't get it!" she says. "How are you kicking everyone's ass if you've never played Puyo before?"
------------------------------------------------------------
At this point I'd like to take a detour to rank the opponents in Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine in ascending order of punchability.

- Grounder (Stage 8): My favorite badnik from AoStH because of his Inspector Gadget powers, it's kinda hard to dislike his goofy voice. He even cries when he loses, the poor thing.
- Arms (Stage 1): The mandatory easy first opponent, he looks like a chill fella; I'd have a beer with him.
- Humpty (Stage 3): Another slightly adorable little doof.
- Coconuts (Stage 4): His "winning" face is kinda annoying, he might rank higher on this list if not for the fact that you won't see it much because his AI is a joke.
- Sir Ffuzzy-Logik (Stage 10): Not particularly likeable, not particularly punchable; kinda generic.
- Frankly (Stage 2): Very annoying and punchable "winning" face... and it only gets worse from here.
- Davy Sprocket (Stage 5): Frankly v2.0. Never trust anyone who smiles that much.
- Spike (Stage 9): Augh, what a snot nose. He looks like the stereotypical fat bratty kid that bullies the protagonist in every children's book/movie.
- Dr Robotnik (Stage 13): The big man himself. Not quite S-tier levels of annoying, but when he starts winning his moustache takes on a life of its own and it gets really distracting flipping up and down. His "HUAHUAHUAHUA" when you lose against him is worth some extra points on its own.
- Dynamight (Stage 7) - The most shit-eating "winning" face on this list so far.
- Dragon Breath (Stage 11) - Now we're entering the S-tier of punchability. This prick looks more like a pig than a dragon, and his "winning" face looks... perverted. He looks like he's ogling at girl dragonpigs while he's beating you at Puyo and it's utterly infuriating.
- Scratch (Stage 12) - "I'm winning this one by fair means or fowl." How apt that his entire thing is chicken-related puns because this guy is a gigantic cock. Puts on an extremely skeevy smirk when he's in the lead - real "you can't touch me, do you know who my dad is?" vibes here. Also, he has teeth. WHY DOES A CHICKEN HAVE TEETH
- Skweel (Stage 6) - The champion, nay, Grand Master of Punchability. This damn cylindrical purple pig on wheels already has the most aggravating smile, but when he's in the lead he starts swinging back and forth like a giant purple dick. Can you imagine trying to focus on the falling-block puzzle with this self-satisfied pig face is flopping back and forth in your peripheral vision?
----------------------------------------------
Ahem, back to the story.

"I keep winning," I tell my friend, "Because you honed your skills against cutesy anime characters, and I honed mine against a giant swinging purple dildo." Well, I didn't say that because it would have led to more questions than answers, but that just added to my mystique.

Mean Bean Machine is essentially nothing more than a Puyo Puyo reskin, but through its wonderfully expressive and smug smarmy character designs it manages to be a far better teacher than Puyo Puyo, by harnessing the power of hatred. Back when I was in middle school and before I could buy alcohol, there was nothing more addictive than finally wiping the bloody smirk off each opponent's face, and I trained tirelessly to that end. It's been many years since I last touched Mean Bean Machine, but I can still beat most people at Puyo Puyo, and a quick playthrough has shown that I can still beat Easy and Normal modes within 1-3 credits. The principles of planning ahead and setting up good combo strings have been seared into my subconscious by the sweaty pigdragon perv.

Thank you, Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, for giving me an extremely niche life skill and briefly making me a celebrity. All it cost me was some longstanding unresolved anger issues.