Tube-It
Released: 1993
Pitch: Connect sections of tube and make them disappear before they fill the screen.
Tube-It is a falling block puzzle game a la Tetris but here you can't swap the blocks around or decide where they fall. You can rotate each one, trying to connect any two of the pipes that line the walls and also grab a piece that isn't blocked in and pull it to the side. Despite that, I found the relative lack of player agency frustrating. You're really at the mercy of where the blocks fall. You have to clear a certain number of blocks to advance to the next level. There is a two player mode which is probably fun since both people would be suffering together lol.
Oh cool. I like the pipe puzzles I've played in games like Bioshock (electrical there) and RocketMania (fuses there). There was another one too, but I can't think of it now.
I wouldn't mind pre-made, handcrafted puzzles like this but not so much when under a time crunch as random blocks continue to fall.
I kind of liked this one, because I really liked the game Pipe Dream back then. But there are definitely way better puzzlers out there. One of the Taito collections has an awesome puzzle game called Cleopatra's Fortune. I really liked the stage music in that one.
The character in Cleopatra's Fortune was also in another Taito action puzzle game called Puchi Carat. That game played like a cross betweek Arkanoid and Puzzle Bobble. Except because of a translation error, Cleopatra in that game is called Patarco for some reason. But her stage has a remix of the Cleopatra's Fortune stage theme.
Dang, that is some good music! Both of those games are on Taito Legends 2, so I'll be getting to them at some point.
Puchi Carat! Love that game.