In Japan, this is not a Sonic related game at all. When Puyo-Puyo got a release in North America and Europe, Sega decided to overhaul the design to base it on Dr Robotnik, featuring a bunch of robots from the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon.

Puyo-Puyo/Mean Bean Machine is a colour-matching game. Two “beans” will fall down at once and you can rotate them. Match four of the same colour and they’ll vanish. At the same time, an AI opponent is competing against you. If you chain multiple combos, you’ll send a bunch of beans that don’t match and can only be removed by triggering a group of another colour next to it. First one to reach the top of the screen loses.

I could only make it to stage 3, partly due to colourblind issues (although I am bad at this style of game anyway). The beans are slightly different shapes, but it’s difficult to identify the shapes quick enough for the reaction speeds needed to compete against the AI.

Against my introverted self's better judgment, a week or so ago I went to a dinner party hosted by a good friend. I arrived a little late, and by the time I walked in, everyone was crowded around the TV playing Puyo Puyo against each other. "Yo Iyellatcloud!" someone calls out. "Have you played Puyo Puyo before?"

"No," I say. "But I've played Mean Bean Machine..."

"I don't know what that is. But you should try playing Puyo!" A controller is thrust into my hand, and 30 seconds later I've hit a 4-hit combo and won. (and then everybody clapped...) Everyone takes turns trying to challenge me, and the closest I come to losing is when the most experienced Puyo player dumps junk all over half my playing area, but I manage to calmly clear it all and pull off the comeback.

"I don't get it!" she says. "How are you kicking everyone's ass if you've never played Puyo before?"
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At this point I'd like to take a detour to rank the opponents in Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine in ascending order of punchability.

- Grounder (Stage 8): My favorite badnik from AoStH because of his Inspector Gadget powers, it's kinda hard to dislike his goofy voice. He even cries when he loses, the poor thing.
- Arms (Stage 1): The mandatory easy first opponent, he looks like a chill fella; I'd have a beer with him.
- Humpty (Stage 3): Another slightly adorable little doof.
- Coconuts (Stage 4): His "winning" face is kinda annoying, he might rank higher on this list if not for the fact that you won't see it much because his AI is a joke.
- Sir Ffuzzy-Logik (Stage 10): Not particularly likeable, not particularly punchable; kinda generic.
- Frankly (Stage 2): Very annoying and punchable "winning" face... and it only gets worse from here.
- Davy Sprocket (Stage 5): Frankly v2.0. Never trust anyone who smiles that much.
- Spike (Stage 9): Augh, what a snot nose. He looks like the stereotypical fat bratty kid that bullies the protagonist in every children's book/movie.
- Dr Robotnik (Stage 13): The big man himself. Not quite S-tier levels of annoying, but when he starts winning his moustache takes on a life of its own and it gets really distracting flipping up and down. His "HUAHUAHUAHUA" when you lose against him is worth some extra points on its own.
- Dynamight (Stage 7) - The most shit-eating "winning" face on this list so far.
- Dragon Breath (Stage 11) - Now we're entering the S-tier of punchability. This prick looks more like a pig than a dragon, and his "winning" face looks... perverted. He looks like he's ogling at girl dragonpigs while he's beating you at Puyo and it's utterly infuriating.
- Scratch (Stage 12) - "I'm winning this one by fair means or fowl." How apt that his entire thing is chicken-related puns because this guy is a gigantic cock. Puts on an extremely skeevy smirk when he's in the lead - real "you can't touch me, do you know who my dad is?" vibes here. Also, he has teeth. WHY DOES A CHICKEN HAVE TEETH
- Skweel (Stage 6) - The champion, nay, Grand Master of Punchability. This damn cylindrical purple pig on wheels already has the most aggravating smile, but when he's in the lead he starts swinging back and forth like a giant purple dick. Can you imagine trying to focus on the falling-block puzzle with this self-satisfied pig face is flopping back and forth in your peripheral vision?
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Ahem, back to the story.

"I keep winning," I tell my friend, "Because you honed your skills against cutesy anime characters, and I honed mine against a giant swinging purple dildo." Well, I didn't say that because it would have led to more questions than answers, but that just added to my mystique.

Mean Bean Machine is essentially nothing more than a Puyo Puyo reskin, but through its wonderfully expressive and smug smarmy character designs it manages to be a far better teacher than Puyo Puyo, by harnessing the power of hatred. Back when I was in middle school and before I could buy alcohol, there was nothing more addictive than finally wiping the bloody smirk off each opponent's face, and I trained tirelessly to that end. It's been many years since I last touched Mean Bean Machine, but I can still beat most people at Puyo Puyo, and a quick playthrough has shown that I can still beat Easy and Normal modes within 1-3 credits. The principles of planning ahead and setting up good combo strings have been seared into my subconscious by the sweaty pigdragon perv.

Thank you, Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, for giving me an extremely niche life skill and briefly making me a celebrity. All it cost me was some longstanding unresolved anger issues.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Bean Machine.

On one hand, Puyo Puyo is just a pretty fun game and the Sonic skin is a nice touch with a simple but admittedly fun piece of music.

On the other hand, this is the hardest game I have ever beaten and one of my proudest moments playing a game ever. Finishing this game was my Mt Everest and I thought I was slowly going insane for hours on end.

“Let’s try hardest level.”

No, game, I don’t believe I will.

I’m not really sure what draws me to try every Puyo Puyo variant available on the NSO even though my reflexes are NOT good enough for these games and I end up really frustrated, but… like, it is fun. The animations are fun. Winning feels good. It’s pretty great, even though it feels like totally random at times.

I rated it the same because I felt roughly the same about it, but I think I like Kirby’s Avalanche more because I like Kirby more than, uh, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, and Weird Sassy Kirby was more fun than, uh, a complete lack of player stand-in. Are we supposed to be Has-Bean AKA We Didn’t Bother Changing the Little Puyo Puyo Guy Who Dances Between The Players? God couldn’t they at least put in Flicky. Come on.

I did appreciate Scratch, Grounder, and Robotnik though. Something something snooping as usual I see. Man though like. I think Coconuts was in the show but were any of the other robots aside from those three in AoStH or were they original? I preferred SatAM because I was at the age to prefer that over Looney Tunes and so I don’t know AoStH as well. I will say this game is better to me than the SatAM-inspired game, at least…

Oh, right, I guess I wasn't done with the Game Gear games. Sometimes I forget Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine had a handheld version, as I suspect most people do. Frankly, I'm not sure why anyone would play this version of the game today unless they really want to wring all $40 of value out of their copy of Sonic Origins, or if they've made the commitment to play every Sonic game they possibly can, like a certain bean-loving fool.....

Anyway, I think it's fucked up I can beat this on normal difficulty, whereas anything higher than easy on the Genesis version kicks my ass. I wasn't even paying that much attention when I beat Dr. Robotnik, I accidentally got a 5-chain combo and he sorta just died.

That's one of the key differences between the Game Gear's Mean Bean Machine and its Genesis counterpart. The CPU is much more prone to making mistakes and it's pretty easy to bury them under a pile of junk pieces early, though abrupt changes to the drop speed of puyos beans late in the game and the poor responsiveness of the controls can make this more challenging as your well starts to fill up with fumbled beans. The CPU is far less inclined to cheat, but everything else is considerably more unwieldy.

I prefer the Genesis version for its higher fidelity and smoother controls, but I wouldn't say Mean Bean Machine on the Game Gear is bad. It's just that you have better options, and this should be pretty far from your first choice if you're in the mood for a little Puyo Pop.

Why'd you spill your beans, Robotnik.... Why'd you spill your beans...?

Made entirely obsolete by basically any subsequent Puyo Puyo game. Without offset or other key mechanics that came to the series later (such as double tapping rotate to flip your puyos even if they don't have room to rotate), victory in the arcade mode becomes very dependent on luck.
I have too strong feelings about American Sega's apparent need during the 90s to project their own (entirely ill-defined) fan-fictionesque personality, worldbuilding, and character designs onto Sonic, and while this game serves as a key example of that, that feels like a rant ill-suited for a review of the game itself.

frustratingly both really fun and too difficult and luck dependent for me to really get into. the game does a REALLY good job at making you want to beat it, though, by making the enemy robots look like the stupidest fucking assholes. make no mistake: they fucked your girlfriend AND your mother and have FULL intentions of continuing to do so. you just NEED to destroy them so bad and every time you lose they snicker right at your face and would probably start teabagging you if this was a different kind of game.
yellow bean looks like the nerd emoji