Alongside puzzle greats like Breakout/Arkanoid and that one game with the falling blocks, Pipe Dream helped establish the fact that it was actually a lot of fun to play video games and use your brain at the same time. It’s got that sort of zen-like addictive quality where one can pick up and play it almost immediately, and before you know it, half an hour’s gone by. Chances are that even if you’ve never played “Pipe Dream,” you’ve played in SOME capacity. The game’s been ported, knocked off, and shoehorned into other unrelated games countless times since its creation, appearing as a minigame in BioShock, Saints Row, and Neopets to name a few. Who knew BioShock and Neopets would share a common link? What a strange world we live in.
The NES conversion in particular is great fun, and definitely one of the better versions that came out at the time. The home computer editions were lacking graphically and often had no music to speak of, besides the PC-88/98 releases, which were like the Rolls Royce of early 90’s Pipe Dream ports. Not to say that a game so simple needs good graphics or bops to be fun, but it never hurts to have something nice to passively ingest while your brain autopilots its way through laying down pipe after pipe. The puzzler pros over at Bulletproof Software went a step above the rest and presented the game with a simple yet solid aesthetic, consisting of subtle checked patterns and pleasing palettes for the goop that runs through the pipes. I’m sure there have been a thousand iterations of Pipe Dream released for smart phones and the like, but do they have the absolute banger that is NES’s Song 2? Yeah, didn’t think so.
All there is to say is that Pipe Dream is an excellent time. If you like puzzle games, play Pipe Dream. If you’ve played Pipe Dream before, play it again. What’re you waiting for?! Go now!
NESJunk 