Magical Drop III, 1997 Data East

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crazyclimber80

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Published on January 30, 2014 12:11:05 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2tAeFzwBMc

Game:

Magical Drop III (1996)

Duration: 31:17

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12

My most recent arcade game to review was played on the NEO GEO cabinet (and its home version), and is a cute, addictive puzzle game where you control a jester at the bottom of the screen, pulling balloons from descending rows and throwing them back up in certain places where they can link with other balloons of similar colors. In typical fashion in puzzle games, you can make chain reactions to make more balloons disappear as the remaining balloons fall upwards and can link to other similarly-colored balloons. Some special balloons can allow you to make a combination around them and then destroy all the balloons onscreen of the same color, leading to possibly more chain reactions. This game features three modes: Survival, Challenge and some sort of Board Game mode. Survival makes you try to reach 15 levels (the more balloons you break the closer you get to going up levels), then your game ends.. BTW you can choose Easy, Normal or Hard for your difficulty on each mode. Challenge is the basic 1p vs 2p or CPU simultaneous play mode, where your chain reactions and regular combos make more balloons descend on the other player. Only by playing Normal or Hard, I believe, will you be able to play all your opponents and beat the game. Easy is INCREDIBLY simple, and only seems to let you beat like 6 opponents before your game ends. Then the Game Board mode puts you on a board game, where you advance spaces if you capture "fire balloons". Link a combo around the fire balloons and you advance one space for each fire balloon captured. If you don't get the fire balloons soon enough they turn into lame ice blocks (which can't be destroyed unless you surround them with a combo). Get to the end of the board to win. If you don't get a fire block on a round (they're timed for less than 40 seconds) you don't advance a space and replay the round! One thing to remember for the basics of this game and all modes: DON'T DAWDLE! Move as quick as you can to pull down balloons and find a good place to release them. And on the modes where you can (I don't think you can on challenge mode), use the "warp" where you can move from one edge of the screen to the other to your full advantage. 2 tricks for this game: enter Challenge mode and hover the cursor over a player of your choosing (they're all based on Tarot cards) and press C 3 times quickly, within a second. You'll be able to now choose characters Moon, Hanged Man, Hermit, Temperance, Tower and Fortune. Also, you can hover your cursor over the character Strength and hold C while pressing A or B to play as Father Strength! Cool puzzle game you should track down.
This game was suggested by NadrianATRS!