Spin Jam

Puzzled? You will be.

Spin Jam is an Animesque Bizarre Puzzle Game for the PlayStation, released in 2000 by Empire Interactive in both the US and Europe. For various reasons, it flopped at the time and Needs More Love.

You play as one of a Ragtag Band of Misfits on a quest to kick the ass of the others and earn the right to Save the World from the evil overlord from space, Moolamb! By throwing bubbles at giant flowers.

Proof that you don't need to be Japanese to make a good Widget Series.

---

Tropes used in Spin Jam include:

• Announcer Chatter: The most basic sort, but oddly endearing with the greek chorus of children yelling it. "READY!" "YOU LOSE!" "YOU WIN!" You get a few more varied soundclips for Enemy Chatter.
• Attract Mode: A pretty neat animated opening.
• Bizarre Puzzle Game: A very loose variation of a Match Three Game. While Spin Jam has a match-three element, that ain't how you win levels. The three matched balls provide a force (of sorts) in a straight line that runs through the center spindle, which will cause affected balls to be shot away from the center and (hopefully) into matching-colored flower petals. Filling those petals is the ultimate goal.
  • In a variant, 2 player mode makes all petals infinate and the goal is to ram as many balls into them as possible, because after a few seconds they'll come back on the opponant's side, possibly transformed into negative status effects. You can also unleash a Limit Break when your gauge is full and have you character blast theirs for a temporary stun. The match is won when one side's field is so filled up it spills out of the flower-shaped playing field.
• Bonus Feature Failure: What do you get after toughing your way through the expert story mode? A Powerpoint-style slideshow of concept art set to the title theme music repeated 3 times. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY Fme YN 1 Fw Y
  • Double failure- those exact same pictures can ALSO be unlocked by beating the infinately more brain-breakingly hard 100-round arcade mode with each character. Yay, that was worthwhile.
• Call a Rabbit a Smeerp / Non-Indicative Name: Moolamb. Not a cow or a sheep, but a red marshmallow that rides around on a meteor.
• Character Portrait: Animated ones in the character select screen, taunting you compared to the sprites themselves...
• Contemptible Cover: The american one. Not bad out of context but suffers from a weird sort of American Kirby Is Sexy as that hot anthropomorphic citrus fruit with the side boob is actually a little girl antropomorphism in-game. Sex Sells is not the best sort of strategy for an ages 3 and up puzzle game...
• Critical Existence Failure: You can keep playing with a full field for hours as long as you keep blasting off bubbles before that very last grey one touches the centre spindle, then BOOM! Characters's defeat portraits vary from merely being bandaged head to toe to having their robotic arms ripped off...
• Crowning Music of Awesome: There are three backing tracks in this game and they make them count. Bust-A-Move would be proud.
• Cyborg: Wigsey. Even his hair is artificial!
  • Swiss Army Appendage / Power Fist / Rocket Punch
  • Bubble Gun: More useful version than usual- Wigsey's robot hands can create giant rubber bubbles that he rides around like space hoppers and tosses to crush foes.
  • You Gotta Have Purple Hair: Justified as it's fake! (Noone else in this game has an excuse though.)
• Defeat Means Playable: For Moolamb. And also -oddly enough- Baby, who's the starter character Babybot sans Mecha after you trashed it. And for some reason his face and skin colour change slightly when he's a separate character.
• Difficulty Spike: Hoo boy.
• Everythings Better With Bunnies: Booger the neon green Ugly Cute carrot-munching blob with helicopter ears.
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: Gillybones the purple ankylosaur.
• Excuse Plot: A red marshmallow is threatening the universe somehow. Throw coloured balls at giant flowers to defeat him and beat up everyone that gets in your way!
• Floating in A Bubble: Every character has a pic of them doing this and a random one appears on the title screen each time.
• Follow the Leader: Interesting example in that it obviously jumped on the bandwagon of Bust-A-Move by being a Nintendo Hard puzzle game with a cutesy cast and a 'bubble' theme but its gameplay is refreshingly unique. Nonetheless this trope probably contributed to bad sales.
• Gainax Ending: Moolamb gets into a spaceship smaller than himself/was a hologram all along? Just roll with it, in any case you just unlocked him as a character.
• Going Through the Motions: In the pre-fight mini scenes each character has one animation, combined with one of three Incredibly Lame Pun Bond One-Liner snippets of voice acting. In game they have a couple of idles, a panic animation and a super move- varied enough not to get grating even as you grind through the hundred level arcade mode.
• Improbable Age: Babybot, who's a baby in a mecha.
  • The Engineer
  • Gadgeteer Genius
• Improbable Weapon User: Poppy and lollipops. She can also ride one around like a witch's broom!
  • Sweet Tooth: Poppy again. The manual says she wears boxing gloves to keep herself from eating her home planet.
• Mad Libs Dialogue: As a result of the abovementioned Enemy Chatter snippets- it's two random lines stuck together based on the character matchup and if you're lucky it'll half sound like a conversation.
• Mega Neko: Nips the cat.
  • Furry Fandom: Who really looks like a guy in a mascot suit.
• Pinball Scoring
• Plant Person: An unusual variation in Lemondrop, who's part human part lemon.
• Power-Up: Quite a mixed bag!
  • Color Bubble- Turns the bubbles it touches into the same color.
  • Grenade - Blows up a few bubbles.
  • Rocket - Blows up all bubbles in a straight line down to the spindle.
  • Grenade Spray - Your super move in single player mode- a huge storm of grenades all at once.
  • Multiplier - One bubble that counts as many.
• Poison Mushroom: You'll see these more often.
  • Randomise - Changes colour of every bubble on screen.
  • Reverse: Reverses directional controls.
  • Death Bubble: Turns nearby bubbles grey, thus setting off a virus-esque spread. You die if they hit the centre spindle.
  • Bubble Bomb - A timer ticks down and at the end if you haven't go rid of it it pops open into a huge amount of extra bubbles.
  • Freeze Bubble - Slows down the interface until dispelled.
  • X-Bubble: A bubble that can't be launched into flower petals, only destroyed via Grenade/Rocket/Etc.
• Speaking Simlish: Booger.
• Take That: See the hard-to-reach ending video above. Can you spot Nips the cat eating Pikachu?
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character / Dummied Out (?): Just who is that mysterious skeleton sheriff in the ending slideshow?
• Secret Character: Final Boss Moolamb, Baby without the bot and Innet, a Giant Butterfly Schoolgirl From Nowhere.
• What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?
• Victory Pose
• Victory Quote
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Poppy. Purple for Wigsey, green for Aqualad. Green FUR for Booger the rabbit.