Original Release: Toaplan, 1991, Arcade
Other Releases: Switch (as Spy Bros, 2023)
A demanding but fun derivative of Elevator Action that scattered in some gratuitous naked pics (naked pics sold separately for the Switch version)
Pipi & Bibis (Arcade, Toaplan, 1991)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: Arcade Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
Toaplan eventually became famous for their Engrish in Zero Wing, but the company spent the early-mid 90s making a collection of genuinely decent arcade games that went mostly underlooked due to being Japan-only or just getting a limited localization in Europe. In this case, Pipi and Bibis probably has gone unknown due to dabbling in the peepshow market (the goofball name probably didn’t help either).
It’s an obvious take-off of Elevator Action, but each new set of levels brings new “elevators” to switch up the gameplay a little, like the second set take place in a circus and has you bouncing on trampolines between floors instead. But the goal is always to BOM the place by planting explosives on four terminals, usually scattered about in a convoluted way. Two people can also work at this task simultaneously.
The level design is actually more complex than Elevator Action, with a real need to know how each enemy type moves (some stay on their floor just milling about, others aggressively hunt you, etc) and watch the entire screen to see if you’ll be converging with them in a few seconds. The game throws in the weapon from Dig Dug as your only defense, except pumping the enemies with electricity which causes them to collapse and eventually fall to the floor below if you hold it for about three seconds. It has limited utility, however, as the carcass of one enemy will block you from using it on another. And if you just stun them quickly with it, they’re only down for a second, barely enough time to skip by them if they don’t have any support following them.
The game is pretty hard, and a lot of it is down to how the enemies arbitrarily decide to move and mob up. You can breeze right through a level on one play then get stuck on it forever in another just based on the enemies all wandering to cluster in a key elevator or something. The worst bit of this is when you’ve planted all the bombs and have to make it to the escape door on a short timer; if they all decide to cluster along your escape path you’re basically screwed, and have to start the whole level over.
Then you got your adult content, which is the usual arcade peepery of the time. There’s a girlie to ogle at the end of each set of four levels, but there’s added challenge in that you have to pick up “H” coins that appear in random spots of each level to get her fully nakkid. The idea was to get four coins to get all her clothes off, but this came out in the “no genitalia” period of Japan’s history, so the fourth coin just earns you a giant mosaic over the nether regions (even in the Europe release), thus you really just need three coins to see all that you can see.
So Pipi feels like a casino game sometimes in terms of being cheap, but it’s also fun and definitely more playable than most arcade peepshow titles. In fact, it recently got a Switch port (under the name “Spy Bros”), though of course they removed all the girls from it.
Links
- If you’re playing this in MAME, you’ll need the base rom (“whoopee” or something like that), but also two special “sound ROMs” to get the audio. Once you have all three, you start it with one of the sound ROMs rather than the base ROM. You can play the base ROM by itself with no sound, but the audio really isn’t bad and adds some tension to the game, and when you add the sound ROMs to the MAME directory this stops being an option.
Videos