Blog:Spanky no Orifuru Puzzle! (Super Famicom)
Spanky no Orifuru Puzzle! (Super Famicom)
by CRV (talk) | Originally posted June 12, 2021
Poachers beware! Spanky is coming to get you!
In this unreleased Super Famicom puzzle game from Natsume, a young aristocratic lady orders her servant Sebastian to bring her all the animals from around the world. Unfortunately for them, feisty feline Spanky (or is that Spunky?) is following right behind. At each locale is a new rival for Spanky and another opportunity to free the animals from their caged existence.
Spanky no Orifuru Puzzle! looks like your standard falling block puzzler. Match a colored key with animals of the same color to clear them from the screen. The better you play, the more junk blocks drop on your opponent's side of the screen. If your opponent's side fills up first, you win.
This is another one of those unreleased games that got little to no press at the time. If it weren't for a video that appeared on Youtube in 2010 (see below), I might not have gotten around to writing this post many years later.
According to the video description, Spanky "has no ROM cartridge;" does that mean a ROM file is in the hands of a select few? Not much else has turned up since the video was uploaded.
Given the game's low profile, you might be surprised to find out that Natsume USA showed it off at Winter CES in January 1995 (four months before the first E3, incidentally). It was featured in the 1995 Video Game Preview Guide, a supplement included with US magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly (see right).
Natsume was set to publish Spanky, but another name appears on the title screen — Workman. I assume this is the name of the developer, and I assume it is the same Workman profiled on this site. Workman was a company founded in 1993 by former Now Production staff. Despite the Natsume connection, this probably has nothing to do with Spanky's Quest, which starred a monkey.
{{#ev:youtube|jIq4Y2BMiKU}}
