As a small child with a wide-eyed interest in the natural world, I embarked on one or two trips to a place called the Tropiqaria in West Somerset. It was and still is a small tropical house and zoo built in and around an old BBC radio transmitter.
Over the following thirty years I would think about this game every now and then, surrounded by snakes, lizards and tropical flora as it was, but could never remember the name. It was bright and colourful and whimsical, and something about it burrowed into the back of my mind and found a permanent home there. Tumblepop is an arcade platformer for up to two players starring a pair of ghost hunters who travel the world, sucking up spooks and blasting them into their allies.
The machine was published by Namco in Japan, a company called Leprechaun Inc. Despite sounding very English, the Mitchell Corporation was apparently a Japanese developer and publisher, and somehow delivered a Tumblepop cabinet to a random exhibition of tropical animals in the depths of the English West Country.
Thanks to the modern gift of emulation, I spent some time today playing Tumblepop on my desktop PC using a USB Nintendo Switch controller, and I have to say I had a pretty good experience with it, despite there being very few lizards nearby. The game definitely has an air of Bomb Jack about it, with its single-screen layouts and backgrounds featuring world landmarks, but the rainbow-hued suction beams of the magic vacuum guns add a whole extra dimension to the gameplay.
As you progress through the stages, projectile-spewing baddies will begin to appear, as well as baddie-producing generator-type enemies that take a couple of hits to remove. Each location has a boss waiting at the end of it, and the bosses tend to dominate the screen and represent an interesting change of pace. Despite each boss encounter having its own simple gimmick they all have the same solution; suck up their minions and empty the tank right in their enormous, ugly faces.
