Game

Game

Game

I kinda wasted my big #50 on something small but eh, I wanted to play Pepper II.

Pepper II is one of my favorite arcade games, a simple but fast paced, frantic, and addicting maze game. The concept is that you are zipping up these pathways, and once you fully zip up a square, it’s filled in. Fill in all the squares to win, and go into the next area, which has a different maze layout. Fill in all four mazes in the game, and boom, onto the next loop, where things are a little faster and your weapons a little shorter.

As you move, enemies will spawn, little eyes that move erratically and are VERY dangerous and fast. You can beat them by filling in the pitchfork squares, which turn you into your Devil Form, where you can eat enemies and freeze The Unzipperer. That’s right, THE UNZIPPERER! There’s this green guy who spawns sometimes and wanders around, unzipping all the things you already zipped up, if they aren’t part of a finished block yet. What a fucking pervert.

There’s also items you can collect, which give you like, 100xN points, where N is the number of items you’ve gotten. And… that’s it! Get a good score! The Colecovision version is basically exactly the same as the arcade, but with a good difficulty selection. It’s easiest mode is REALLY easy and I could play it basically forever. Level 3 is arcade-difficulty though, and it’s pretty accurate.

One of the fun stories about this game is behind its name. There is no Pepper I. That’s not a thing that existed. The story is, this game was ORIGINALLY going to be called Zipper, but they got the call to change it, because Zipper is a trademarked name by a company. It’s a kleenex or thermos situation, basically. So the designer of this game is in his kitchen like “what the fuck am I going to name this thing”, and sees his pepper shaker. Boom. It’ll be called Pepper. Why not. And to make it more interesting, let’s called it Pepper II, that’ll catch some eyes to it, like “ooh this is the SEQUEL, that must mean its improved!” Extremely clever.

This took me like 20-40 minutes to master, the set is rather simple, though the final achievement to get to loop 2 on arcade difficulty gave me some trouble.`