You play as one of a Ragtag Band of Misfits on a quest to kick the ass of the others and earn the right to Save the World from the evil overlord from space, Moolamb! By throwing bubbles at giant flowers.
Spin Jam Provides Examples Of:
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Gillybones the purple ankylosaur.
- Animesque: A European game that looks a lot like an Anime. It even had a promotional Manga!
- Announcer Chatter: The most basic sort, but oddly endearing with the Greek Chorus of children yelling it. "GET READY!" "YOU LOSE!" "YOU WIN!" You get a few more varied soundclips for Enemy Chatter.
- Attract Mode: A pretty neat animated opening.
- Bizarre Puzzle Game: A very loose variation of a Match-Three Game. While Spin Jam has a match-three element, that ain't how you win levels. The three matched balls provide a force (of sorts) in a straight line that runs through the center spindle, which will cause affected balls to be shot away from the center and (hopefully) into matching-colored flower petals. Filling those petals is the ultimate goal.
- In a variant, 2 player mode makes all petals infinite and the goal is to ram as many balls into them as possible, because after a few seconds they'll come back on the opponent's side, possibly transformed into negative status effects. You can also unleash a Limit Break when your gauge is full and have you character blast theirs for a temporary stun. The match is won when one side's field is so filled up it spills out of the flower-shaped playing field.
- Bonus Feature Failure: What do you get after toughing your way through the expert story mode? A Powerpoint-style slideshow of concept art set to the title theme music repeated 3 times, as seen here.
- Double failure - those exact same pictures can ALSO be unlocked by beating the infinitely more brain-breakingly hard 100-round arcade mode with each character. Yay, that was worthwhile.
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp" / Non-Indicative Name: Moolamb. Not a cow or a sheep, but a red marshmallow that rides around on a meteor.
- Character Portrait: Animated ones in the character select screen, taunting you compared to the sprites themselves...
- Critical Existence Failure: You can keep playing with a full field for hours as long as you keep blasting off bubbles before that very last grey one touches the center spindle, then BOOM! A character's defeat portrait can vary from merely being bandaged head to toe to having their robotic arms ripped off...
- Possibly justified, as the opening as well as the Versus Character Splash implies that the characters are actually fighting each other rather than popping petals. This can show that they may be tougher than their innocent appearances let on.
- Cyborg: Wigsey. Even his hair is artificial!
- Swiss-Army Appendage / Power Fist / Rocket Punch
- Bubble Gun: More useful version than usual- Wigsey's robot hands can create giant rubber bubbles that he rides around like space hoppers and tosses to crush foes.
- Defeat Means Playable: For Moolamb. And also, oddly enough, Baby, who's the starter character Babybot sans Mecha after you trashed it. And for some reason his face and skin color change slightly when he's a separate character.
- Eternal Engine: Babybot's world.
- Excuse Plot: A red marshmallow is threatening the universe somehow. Throw colored balls at giant flowers to defeat him and beat up everyone that gets in your way!
- Floating in a Bubble: Every character has a pic of them doing this and a random one appears on the title screen each time.
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Follow the Leader: Interesting example in that it obviously jumped on the bandwagon of Bust-A-Move by being a Nintendo Hard puzzle game with a cutesy cast and a 'bubble' theme but its gameplay is refreshingly unique. Nonetheless, this trope probably contributed to bad sales. - Gainax Ending: Moolamb gets into a spaceship smaller than himself/was a hologram all along? Just roll with it, in any case you just unlocked him as a character.
- Going Through the Motions: In the pre-fight mini scenes each character has one animation, combined with one of three Incredibly Lame Pun Bond One-Liner snippets of voice acting. In game they have a couple of idles, a panic animation and a super move- varied enough not to get grating even as you grind through the hundred level arcade mode.
- Hurricane of Puns: Several examples, but Lemondrop stands out:Here's a bitter taste of defeat for you!
- Improbable Age: Babybot, who's a baby in a mecha.
- Improbable Weapon User: Poppy and lollipops. She can also ride one around like a witch's broom!
- Sweet Tooth: Poppy again. The manual says she wears boxing gloves to keep herself from eating her home planet.
- Lemondrop tosses the lemon tutu around her waist as her personal Limit Break.
- Booger's own Limit Break is to throw his carrots at his opponent.
- Lethal Lava Land: Gilly's world.
- Level Ate: Lemondrop's world, which is filled with nothing but citrus fruit.
- Mad Libs Dialogue: As a result of the abovementioned Enemy Chatter snippets- it's two random lines stuck together based on the character matchup and if you're lucky it'll half sound like a conversation.
- Mega Neko: Nips the cat.
- Pinball Scoring
- Piranha Problem: Aqualad's adorable fish friends turn out to be these when he summons them for his Limit Break.
- Plant Person: An unusual variation in Lemondrop, who's part human, part lemon.
- Power-Up: Quite a mixed bag!
- Color Bubble- Turns the bubbles it touches into the same color.
- Grenade - Blows up a few bubbles.
- Rocket - Blows up all bubbles in a straight line down to the spindle.
- Grenade Spray - Your super move in single player mode: a huge storm of grenades all at once.
- Multiplier - One bubble that counts as many.
- Poison Mushroom:
You'll see these more often.- Randomise - Changes color of every bubble on screen.
- Reverse: Reverses directional controls.
- Death Bubble: Turns nearby bubbles grey, thus setting off a virus-esque spread. You lose if they hit the center spindle.
- Bubble Bomb - A timer ticks down and at the end if you haven't go rid of it it pops open into a huge amount of extra bubbles.
- Freeze Bubble - Slows down the interface until dispelled.
- X-Bubble: A bubble that can't be launched into flower petals, only destroyed via Grenade/Rocket/Etc.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: Aqualad's fish when they're not biting, and the small lemon creature on Lemondrop's planet.
- Secret Character: Final Boss Moolamb, Baby without the bot and Innet, a Giant Butterfly Schoolgirl From Nowhere.
- Speaking Simlish: Booger.
- Spell My Name With An S: Lemondrop seems to be all over the place with this. The opening sequence calls her just that, while the manual turns the "drop" into a surname (Lemon Drop). Selecting her within the game itself simply calls her "Lemon".
- Sugar Bowl: Poppy's world is one with lollipops that are as tall as trees, to which she restrains herself from eating up by wearing boxing gloves.
- Take That!: See the hard-to-reach ending video above. Can you spot Nips the cat eating Pikachu?
- Versus Character Splash: Which gives off the impression of a Fighting Game as the characters look like they're about to beat the crap out of each other. This is more evident when the loser of match is shown in a portrait with bruises and bandages.
- Victory Pose: Done not only when a character wins, but also when they successfully pop a petal.
