48. No One Can Stop Mr. Domino (Artdink, Playstation, 1998)

When I was a naive young 29-year-old, I thought "surely there is someone who can stop Mr. Domino". Now, as a wizened 30-year-old, I see how foolish I was.

No One Can Stop Mr. Domino is an action / puzzle game from Artdink, who also made game #6: Aquanaut's Holiday. This title is a far cry from relaxing underwater exploration, as each level has you running along a course avoiding obstacles and placing dominos behind your character. The objective is to use the dominos to hit a series of switches that cause various cute events to play out. Once all of the event switches have been hit, a level is cleared. 

All of the events are based on the levels theme, including a casino, grocery store, and Japanese home. The challenge of the game is in the fairly strict time limit, so you have to really use your first lap around the course to carefully place your dominos in a way that you will be able to knock them over on a return trip. It's kind of like a kart racer where you're working with yourself from previous laps, which is a pretty novel experience, I just wish it was a little bit easier or that I could replay levels instead of starting over from the beginning. 

4/5, Lots of charm, but not very deep