Pop'n Twinbee, Chaos, and Co-Operation
To put it simply: shoot clouds to make golden bells pop out, which slowly fall off the bottom of the screen; these can be grabbed and chained for an increasing score bonus that resets if one falls off the screen, or shot to bounce them back up the screen, doing so enough times changing their colour. Four shots change one’s colour from gold to a different colour in a fixed order: blue, green, silver, purple, pink, and flickering; and another four return it to a gold score item which can then be shot four more times to change to a different colour: each colour other than gold corresponds to a different powerup, most of which being vitally important to collect multiple of. Picking up a blue bell increases the ship’s speed by one stage up to a maximum of five, with overcapping returning the ship back to base speed; green bells grant the player an option – bullet-firing drones of which the formation of can be selected before the start of the game – and up to four can be active at once (plus nine more being storeable in a reserve pool!), with an option being lost if the player ship takes damage (but not shield damage); silver and purple change the ship’s shot type to a large shot and a spread shot respectively, the former being more reliable at long-range and the latter having extremely high close-range damage; pink bells give the ship a four-hit shield which can be replenished by collecting another; and flickering bells grant an extra use of the ‘chibi’ shot which acts as a traditional screen-clearing bomb – not to be confused with the game’s literal ‘bomb’ – a fixed-range ground-shot in the vein of Xevious – which is the only way to deal damage to grounded enemies, some of whom drop health pickups to restore the ship’s somewhat generous health bar; while the main shot can only be used to hit flying foes. Though the main shot isn’t the only way to hit flying enemies – the ‘punching’ animation used for throwing the bomb can be charged into a high-damage, bullet-cancelling attack versus flying enemies, at the cost of lost access to the ground shot while charging. And don’t forget to dodge the bullets while you’re at it.
Even once the immediate information overload wears off, Pop’n TwinBee remains rather hectic, and what results is having to balance typical shoot ‘em up shooting and dodging with the focus on amassing huge amounts of resources gained through its fairly simple, yet nuanced and hugely attention-demanding set of systems. This split focus hugely differentiates its play compared to its shoot ‘em up peers, even others in its own series: other TwinBee entries only require picking up one of each bell colour beyond stacking speed upgrades, with the focus then shifting entirely back to more typical scrolling shoot ‘em up play beyond repairing a broken shield and recovering from a death; meanwhile the only upgrades in Pop’n Twinbee that can’t be stacked dizzyingly high are the shot type modifications. To match the heightened focus on bell-juggling, the shot requirement to change the bells' colours is extremely lenient towards mistakes – coloured bells in other entries take just one shot to revert them back to a score item! – diverting the focus on bell-juggling from an infrequent yet very precise act to a somewhat clumsy, chaotic, yet far more consistent affair that remains top priority throughout the whole runtime. The priority is to reach a comfortable ship speed, grab the preferred shot type, maintain a shield at all times, and then focus purely on green and flickering bells to stockpile as many options and bombs as possible. The fixed bell colour cycle makes it both possible to perfectly track exactly how to get the next type of resource you need, and fairly hyperactive to actually play it out in practice! The quickest way to move through the cycle of colours is to simply have lots of bells on-screen and juggle them all at once, though the bell-spawning clouds always appear scattered across the width of the screen, thus demanding an awful lot of back-and-forth movement to do so, a fair amount of ship speed to do so without dropping them, and a healthy dose of restraint on the shots to keep the whole swarm moving without accidentally reverting a colour you want. Slam bullets into as many bells as possible, slam yourself into greens, flickers, and pinks where needed, and do so while trying not to drop or reset the ones you want… and don’t forget to dodge the bullets while you’re at it!
In a game with such readily-available and powerful resources, the levels naturally attempt to push back in a way that directly challenges said resources: Pop’n TwinBee wields its enemies both densely and aggressively, enemies sweeping in from all sides of the screen – including the bottom – as early as the very first stage, and filling the screen with sometimes slightly inaccurate aimed bullets, spawn positions both pushing play away from any edges of the screen and allowing use of aimed shots that effectively cuts off tap-dodging methods that usually trivialise them. Heavy use of grounded enemies keeps the screen full of bullets as the Xevious-style ground-shot has a long enough cooldown and requires tight enough positioning to land to make eliminating those enemies extraordinarily slow, especially while balancing the positioning demands of fighting ranged enemies and juggling bells. These enemy setups work together sometimes too well, to the point where they sometimes feel unavoidable – though with the player ship backed by its plentiful health bar, this encounter design feels less a way to take out the player directly and instead a way to attack their resources: dense and chaotic enemy placements and behaviours not only restrict the high-movement process of gaining resources, but almost force having those resources worn down, in order to keep bell-juggling at the height of importance. Resource pressure later weaves itself in on the macro level, as well: Stage 4 being the first and most notable instance, dragging itself out with a slow-moving aeroplane duel with waves upon waves of enemies and cannons and moving stage hazards to avoid, only offering a refill after a minutes-long slog that feels like hours in the moment. There’s clearly a lack of precision in Pop’n’s levels compared to more typical shoot ‘em ups, but eschewing the demand of perfection baked into genre tradition leads to play that both allows more mistakes than its peers and builds its challenges around expecting taking such a higher amount of hits, which reframes its executional demands to be not on perfect dodging, but on managing the wildly chaotic resource-gathering game while clattering through increasingly hectic screens of enemies, to build up as many resources as possible to buffer inevitable mistakes, while trying to not make those mistakes in the process.
Perhaps fittingly for a multiplayer-focused series, these dynamics feed themselves perfectly into co-op play, twisting it into something both slightly more controlled and much more chaotic. The bell colour cycle dictates that the same colour bell will never exist twice at once under normal circumstances, so managing optimal pickups for two players likely focusing on opposite sides of the screen involves frantic call-outs to grab the other’s attention, and breaking a controlled position to make a mad dive across a threat-laden screen for them to grab the bell – ideally before the one controlling the bell accidentally resets it, or gets impatient and just grabs it for themselves. And while the game's chaotic encounters are somewhat easier to control with the presence of another player, co-op play grants much less individual control over that all-important resource game, and resources have to be split between both players rather than hoarded by one, forcing direct communication or implicit understanding of both players’ states in order to keep either from sinking behind. It’s also not the only mechanic that forces displacing oneself during situations that wouldn’t exist solo – two inputs are reserved specifically for multiplayer-exclusive actions! Encouraging both players to stack on top of each other is a TwinBee staple, though whereas most entries reward this by granting a powerful formation shot, Pop’n TwinBee replaces this with a healing input: if both ships are within kissing distance, either player can equalise both ships’ health by spending the healthier player’s health bar to heal the other – but it requires remaining intimately close during a fairly slow transfusion, usually resulting in both staying still while the more desperate of the two is likely dangerously low. The other co-op input is, of course, grabbing the other player, spinning them around, and launching them as an invulnerable, ricocheting projectile weapon, bouncing haphazardly and disintegrating everything they touch. It’s as destructive as it is entertaining – maybe less so for an unfortunate soul being lobbed around for the fun of it – but, though being much more straightforwardly empowering than the other multiplayer dynamics with clear risks, still carries the delicate penalty that the ‘throwee’ bounces randomly and only has a scant few moments of invulnerability afterwards – try to have an escape plan in case your friend decides to chuck you right into a really big boss!
It can be hard to build a game whose mechanics and situations lean into direct, natural, and consistent co-operation during multiplayer; many a session spent with friends chatting the night away over games that felt like playing alongside each other, rather than with. And it’s much more so for a shoot ‘em up, a genre whose traditional foundations feel as though they lack inherent co-operative dynamics, rather being much more built for solitary self-improvement; whittling away at an insurmountable obstacle until it splinters and crumbles under hours of practice and precision. TwinBee is a series built deliberately towards a multiplayer experience from its outset, both from implementing explicit co-operative mechanics as well as simply being early examples of symmetrical multiplayer shoot ‘em ups in an era where most were asymmetrical, turn-taking multiplayer experiences built towards out-scoring the person on the other side of the cabinet. It almost feels like a happy little accident that the TwinBee game with the highest amount of explicit multiplayer verbs also happens to be the one whose mechanics most naturally fit the form of a co-operative experience: one that encourages communication and problem-solving with the other person, and where each player’s performance meaningfully trickles down into the overall results of the group as a whole – but also one that gently transforms decision-making and play on the individual end purely due to the presence of a second player. I’ll never stop dragging my friends through weird and wonderful shoot ‘em ups, but Pop’n TwinBee feels the most as though I’m playing and interacting directly with them, not just experiencing a game in parallel.
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Thank you for reading, as always. Since I first played it, Pop’n TwinBee has always been the first game I fire up when I want to drag someone new through Fightcade co-op sessions. It’s been a hit with everyone, regardless of how interested they are in the arcade space, if that’s a good enough sales pitch :p. I haven’t kept anyone long enough to pull this off in co-op, but I did land a solo 1cc somewhat recently. It’s far from the hardest game out there thanks to how generous its health bar is, but it can get quite mean during the ending stretch without enough resources banked. I didn’t record it, but I got a little bit of….. silent footage of my run ending on the second loop, lol. It’s like three minutes and the revenge bullets are very funny, so give it a watch if you’d like.
Don’t have much more of an outro this time, except to say that I should be able to keep up this ‘one article per month’ cadence until the end of the year. (If you’re into weird shoot ‘em ups half as much as I am, there might be some more good coming your way soon...) I might try to make the shorter 'discussion' pieces a little bit more common as well, perhaps. If you like what I do on this site, please consider making a donation on my ko-fi It's maybe a little cliché to say, but any amount of support does help me keep doing what I do over here. Shooting game never die. See you next time. ~♡