Game:

Magical Drop (1995)

Duration: 12:16

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26

A G-MODE recreation / reissue of old mobile phone games, this introduces "G-MODE Archives 19: Magical Drop DX". They've released quite a few reissues for the Nintendo Switch and it's good to see them getting ported to Steam as well. Of course, most of them have not aged well and this is more for novelty than anything else, but it's a commendable project and I hope many more old mobile phone games can be salvaged such as the BREW service titles, J2ME releases and older Android / iOS titles. There are a few games I really WANT to play such as Climax's 2006 iteration of "Lady Stalker" ("Waltz of the Labyrinth", which has practically been forgotten), Jaleco's "Momoko 1200%" and "City Connection Rocket", to name a few, but this is a good starting point. There have been projects for years now slowly integrating old mobile titles for use in emulators.

That said, while this is a great recreation of 2004's "Magical Drop DX", it was not a particularly good iteration of the game. The game takes the basic gameplay of Magical Drop II and splices it with some of the aesthetics of the original Magical Drop / Chain Reaction while incorporating a stripped down Story Mode from the home conversions of MD2. For the uninitiated, Magical Drop is (for the most part) a fantastic series of action / puzzle games that were originally created by Data East and can go toe-to-toe with some of the best titles in the genre due to its frantic pace and high (but forgiving) learning curve and skill ceiling. So great was its influence that there were other titles that would utilize its general concept such as "Money Puzzle / Idol Exchanger", "AstroPop" and even Doujin works such as "To Heart: Date Exchanger". Players grab objects and toss them back to match them and different characters have different type advantages. Sadly, the series more or less died with MDF as the titles to follow were not well-received (and that's putting it mildly) with MD6 being the last current release.

G-Mode has done what they need to on their part with a few basic configuration elements, the ability to scale up to 1080p and the ability to turn graphics filters on or off (though the in-game filter here is pretty good without making things blurry or too pixilated). The same jerky, low framerate is also here (for better or worse) and the game has gamepad support which doesn't seem to suffer any issues in terms of lag or latency. Even with the game's low framerate, it's easy to control for the most part, but you can't control things with maximum efficiency like its 30/60FPS siblings. The game doesn't have any character intros and endings are super brief, all the background animations have been gutted (though the game does switch through the different states, which is a plus), most of the music and sound effects are absent and there are only six characters, but if you had a phone at the time and absolutely had to have an iteration of MD, it was available. It is also commendable for having both opponents visible during play, whereas other portable versions were limited to only the player outside of a link setup for versus.

The game also features the endless mode where players can wrap around the screen and can play on easy, normal or hard difficulty and adjust the threshold for elimination victory. Magical Drop is one of the easier action / puzzlers out there, especially for people who really click with it, but even so, MDDX is laughably easy. This is mainly due to the framerate since, even when lines and the stack are going against you, just grabbing and dropping stops things briefly, so a skilled player can almost eliminate it from moving entirely. Even without this caveat, smaller chains of three and four inflict significant disarray on the A.I. who seldom has a means of coming back from it and the Story Mode can be cleared in under five minutes. G-MODE's default pricing of $5 for most games will seem rather steep, but as these aren't the easiest titles to restore, I'm okay with it... I would understand if others aren't though.

This is a video of the game in action. You can get it at:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1695510/GMODE19_DX/?curator_clanid=38318087

Enjoy.

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