Woody Pop is a bat-and-ball-style Breakout/Arkanoid clone, developed and published by Sega, and released for the Sega Master System in 1987, and the Sega Game Gear in 1991.

You control a log (a tree spirit called Woody) that must bounce balls up the screen to clear away the destructible blocks. If you hit a toy box with the ball, out will come a trio of toy soldiers (or robots) and these can deflect the ball and cause mayhem, if not dealt with quickly. That said, you’re not strictly “dealing with them”, just trying to keep the ball in play and hoping that they disappear as quickly as possible.

The small screen sometimes means having to race to get to a ball heading out, but the game is fairly forgiving in terms of collision detection. Plus: the developers at least had the foresight to make the bat move fast enough to be able to reach a ball on the other side of the screen.

When you clear a level of blocks you then get a choice of which direction to go next (in a similar way to Smash TV), which at least gives the player some variety in the stages they play, rather than it being a fixed route.

Overall, Woody Pop is playable and fun for a while. It doesn’t have a great deal of lastability, but it’s good to pick up and play on occasion.

More: Woody Pop on Wikipedia