PlayStation Basement #35 - Spin Jam

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on April 27th, 2019.

It’s Saturday, and that means it’s time for PlayStation Basement! PlayStation Basement is a weekly review of an odd or obscure game for the original PlayStation. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral. Now, let’s go!

Today, I’m thinking about brightly colored Easter eggs and also flowers. My partner and I are planning to do some gardening today, so here is a game about flowers and bright colors. It’s Spin Jam, a puzzle game developed by Empire Interactive and published by Take-Two Interactive. It was released in Europe and North America in the year 2000. Spin Jam is about matching brightly colored balls to launch other balls into matching petals. That might sound pretty weird, and that’s why it’s a perfect match for the PlayStation Basement.

The cover art is basically the same in both regions. Spin Jam shows Lemondrop and some bubbles flying about in a swirl of blue. The title logo has that millennium bubble design. It’s all very Y2K aesthetic as a whole. “Puzzled? You will be”, the game tells us.

And graphically, it’s all still very Y2K millennium stuff in the game as well. The characters are kind of cute but also a mishmash of British rave culture and Kids WB/Newgrounds pseudo-anime designs in a Puyo Puyo style. These characters look sort of off, wobbly and unbalanced. The menu is very barebones and lacks words, which I find confusing. The images for each choice are almost clipart designs. The actual gameplay screen is fine, though I find the placement that shows the next pieces hard to see. I like how the pieces you match look and the various designs to the powerups. There’s always so much going on with bubbles flying across the screen and petals spinning around.

In terms of sound, Spin Jam is just average. The voices are very wacky, British, cheesy, and poorly recorded; everyone sounds similar and like they are in a fishbowl. The sound effects are the kind of bright sounds that I expect in this kind of puzzle game. The music tends towards jazzy dance tracks. It’s decent, some of it even good, but I find it sort of repetitive and tinny too.

Spin Jam as a whole is a repetitive game. The bubble launching mechanics are obviously inspired by Bust-a-Move/Puzzle Bobble but lack the excitement of that game or Tetris. Basically, you have a gear/spindle that you spin around in the center of the screen. You shoot bubbles onto the gear, and, once you have matched three of the same color, the bubbles start to vibrate. After a few seconds, bubbles on the other side of the gear will blast away into the surrounding petals. If they touch a petal of their own color or a rainbow petal, the balls stick inside. Once you have two balls inside a petal, the petal bursts. In the arcade mode, this is a step towards victory (you need to pop all the petals to proceed), while in versus mode and story mode this will fill your meter to attack your opponent with your characters attack. There are also some little powerups that show up, reminding me of prizes in a gumball machine with the already gumball looking game pieces. This goes on until one player is poisoned by a grey piece that forms when balls pile up outside the central circle. These grey pieces than infect others until they get to the center.

I had trouble noticing these grey pieces. Overall, I’m really bad at this game and have not been able to defeat even one opponent in story mode. In arcade mode, I got through the first ten levels out of 100. I’m sure I could do better with practice, but I don’t play Spin Jam often.

I’ve owned this game since around 2010, finding it at a flea market when I wasn’t really that interested in games. It was around that time that I started to notice PS1 and PS2 games becoming very cheap and showing up at thrift stores or in bargain bins at Walmart. In a way, Spin Jam got me interested in the strange PS1 games that I missed in the later era of that console, hence why it needs to be here in PlayStation Basement.

Anyway, Spin Jam is just okay. The overall production feels cheap. The gameplay is fine but nothing outstanding. It’s not enthralling like faster puzzle games; these matches take way too long and can go on and on. Personally, I also don’t really get Spin Jam, but that’s on me. The game does seem overly difficult, considering I was playing so poorly on the easy mode. I can’t really recommend this game full of 2000s-isms like pseudo-70s flowers and American anime-styled awkwardness, but it’s certainly an interesting time capsule into that era.

Spin Jam receives a Neutral.

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