From Japan With Love – Guru Logic Champ

Platform: Gameboy Advance, Developer: Compile, Released: 2002

Guru Logic Champ is a deviously crafted puzzler from Puyo Pop inventors, Compile. A little Picross, a little Bust-a-Move, Logic Champ is charming, smart and devilishly addictive.

With Nintendo’s mainstream appeal and massive install base, some of Japan’s most quirky games see Western shores on DS. From finger flexing lawyers to cuisine savants, the DS is rife with quirky “only in Japan” releases.

The Gameboy era was a different story; Pocket Monsters (Pokemon, 1999) and Made in Wario (Wario Ware, 2003) made their mark in the West (a smouldering crater in Pokemon’s case) but titles such as foot-tapping Rhythm Tengoku, chirpy starfish Stafi and brain boggling Guru Logic Champ stayed in Japan.

Champs are the plump birds that populate the game, each coloured differently but all sharing the gigantic, protruding bill. The two you play are off helping their fellow residents who are in dire need of assistance.

This fellow has run a marathon and is parched; imagine his distress when he finds a water fountain without a tap! It’s time for the Guru Logic Champs to help out.

Like Picross, stages are represented by tiny works of pixel art, however in Guru Logic Champ; the images are generally presented before you start the puzzle.

The image (shown in the panel on the left) is incomplete, with pale pieces that must be filled. You can shoot out blocks with your cannon, but they must collide with either part of the stage or other blocks.

Seems simple, right? Shoot out a line of blocks, spin the screen around and finish off the puzzle.

You spin the screen with the shoulder buttons.

And it is that simple. For the first few sets of levels (spanning 50 puzzles), there is no change to the rule set, no added sophistication or confusion.

But it’s a mere 7 or so stages in before you start to understand Guru Logic Champ’s devious make-up. Pale spaces float in a barren sea of nothingness, neither close nor adjacent to a wall. Now, you have to make the barriers, making consciously incorrect moves to manufacture walls, barriers and buffers.

Each stages turns the notch a little further, making it more difficult to retrieve your wrongly placed bricks; you only have enough blocks to fill the pale spaces, mind you, no block left behind. It’s sometimes difficult to reason, but you’ll be creating giant structures of X bricks, just to leverage the ability to place a single O.

Guru Logic Champ, like the most archaic, yet established puzzles can have your head spinning as you eternally drop in and suck out blocks, the same blocks, and it never quite fits together. An elephant’s trunk is in the way or a TV’s antenna obtrudes that single X brick that you’ve somehow lodged in the centre of your puzzle.

The game will begin to introduce new types of blocks, such as these bouncy, unusable yellow ‘uns.

Maybe it’s the way I play, or maybe it’s the way Logic Champ is designed, but I can’t count how many times this happens. The game is almost done, one single pale space to fill and one single block to fill it with. But, your newly filled board is now an impregnable structure; that single block is impossible to slot in without taking out half of your blocks.

Like creating the perfect LEGO castle, and then when you want to sit the regal King in his plastic throne, you have to dismantle the roof. But the roof is connected to the walls, and the walls to the drawbridge. It’s a frustrating exercise in priorities, but you should have known better.

Guru Logic Champ is about learning rules; not so much as Picross (champion DS players could write books full of winning strategies), but about saving the easiest part to last, working from the inside out; logical lessons.

The last stage in each scenario creates a particularly useful object, such as this tap. I know someone who would appreciate this.

Each group of levels ends in the rescue of a Champ, but then again… not every rescue goes to plan.

Where titles like Gyakuten Saiban and Rhythm Tengoku failed on Gameboy Advance, they succeeded in Phoenix Wright and Rhythm Heaven on Nintendo DS.

However, in the same year that Guru Logic Champ was released, 2002, Compile filed for bankruptcy. Companies like Milestone, Aiky and Compile Heart were created with former Compile staff members to continue the legacy, but Guru Logic Champ has so far been forgotten.

Guru’s unique gameplay would be appreciated on any platform, but would make a strangely perfect fit on the iPhone. Coupling Logic Champ’s spinning gameplay with the iPhone’s rotating screen would be a match made in heaven.

Guru Logic Champ’s dive into obscurity has made the title harder and harder to find. Play-Asia is out of stock and eBay returns no results. If you do manage to get your hands on this game, cherish it; it’s great.