The Game: Pengo the penguin is trapped in an ice maze with seals, walking snowmen and other predators. Pengo can defeat his enemies by pushing ice blocks toward them, crushing them in the process. Pengo can also create new ice blocks via some biological process that’s perhaps best left unexplored (and if he doesn’t leave the spot where he generates ice blocks immediately after starting that process, he’ll be temporarily frozen to that spot); those blocks can also become ammo in a pinch. Treats such as dollar signs and popsicles – both valuable commidities to penguins – appear from time to time. Defeating all enemies on a given level advances Pengo to the next screen. (Sega, 1995, for Japanese market only)
Memories: Released only for the Sega Mega Drive (the Japanese equivalent of the Genesis console), Pepenga Pengo is a nice update of the original, not only enhancing the graphics but including new game play elements that don’t “break the universe” of the original.
The “story mode” is simply a series of increasingly difficult screens of the revised game, which takes the 1982 arcade Pengo‘s “smash everything with blocks, unless the blocks can’t move” game play and stretches it out to fit playfields with complicated shapes.
A second mode, Battle Mode, lets multiple players – or a couple of players plus the computer – take each other on in a battle to the death in several exotic locales (as penguins often do). This part of the game might be more fun if it relied on a “life bar” system instead of a more old-school arcade-inspired “one touch and you’re dead” system of elimination; it always seems to end too quickly.
Finally, there’s an Arcade Mode, which is simply the original Pengo emulated to a reasonably faithful degree (the music has been changed and updated to something much more 16-bit). Veteran players may be thrown off a bit by the vertical scrolling used to reformat the game into a horizontal TV screen without 
compromising the original arcade graphics.
Pepenga Pengo has something for everyone, though the best thing going for it may be its Arcade Mode, which brings the original game back into focus as the basis for everything enjoyable about the new editions.