Drop off
a game by | Data East |
Platform: | PC Engine (1990) |
User Rating: | 9.0/10 - 2 votes |
Rate this game: | |
See also: | Puzzle Games |
Poor Takashi. His Girlfriend, Izumi, Has Been in a Deep Sleep For Some Time, and Not Even His Friendliness Can Wake Her. It Wasn't Until the Goddess Appeared in One of His Dreams That He Knew Exactly What Had Happened and What Must Be Done to Save Her. It Seems That An Evil Spirit Has Taken Over Her Soul, and Now Takashi Must Enter Izuml's Dream and Defeat the Spirit If She's Ever Going to Waken. Using a Pad and Ball You Must Knock Out the Monsters in Her Dreams in a Game That Resembles Breakout.
Download Drop off
System requirements:
- PC compatible
- Operating systems: Windows 10/Windows 8/Windows 7/2000/Vista/WinXP
Game Reviews
Picture, if you will, a multibranched vine full of not only fruits such as apples, watermelons and strawberries, but also such items as amoebas, lips and brains. Got it? Okay, now picture a game where these vines slowly lower toward the bottom of the screen to where a small blue globe awaits. Your task? to destroy the objects with a small ball that you can bounce upward at two different angles. The description above will make much more sense than the storyline, which tells of how you, as Takashi, must save your girlfriend, Izumi, from an evil spirit that has inhabited her dream and won't let her awaken.
While the Breakout!Arkanoid theme is not new, a few new twists make Drop off different. in most other games with a similar theme, each of the blocks or objects must be hit in order to destroy them. in Drop off, however, if you can thin out an area higher up on the vine and knock out the object by which the rest are suspended, the entire bunch will fall, awarding extra points. But there's a catch! to get points for any of the items you knock out, you must have hit the ball immediately before it struck the object. This is because, unlike other games, you can miss the ball without losing it. There is either a bar all the way across the bottom or a series of bricks that must be hit several times before they'll allow the ball to escape.
When the ball is hit by your globe, it will turn blue and will remain blue as long as you continue to hit it. Any items that fall to the bottom will not harm you as long as your ball was blue when the items were struck. If you miss the ball and it falls to the bottom, it will change to red, and any falling items will kill your globe if it is hit. Your globe will also die if you run into any of the objects while they are still connected to the vines or if the ball does escape through the bottom of the screen.
An advantage over similar Breakout-type games is that your globe is able to move anywhere on the screen, instead of being limited to the bottom. At the beginning of the round, you are given three "arrows" that allow you to raise the objects back up toward the top of the screen if things start getting out of control. Additional arrows may be acquired by hitting special objects mixed in among the others. Other special items include invulnerability, a halt item that temporarily stops the objects' march down the screen, an iron-wall item that prevents the ball from escaping through the bottom of the screen and 1-Ups. There are 15 different screens of objects to be dealt with as described above, plus a final round where you must defeat the evil spirit boss to end the game.
If an award was given for the weakest link between the storyline and the game, Drop off would take it easily. the boss spirit is easily identified as such, but referring to vines of apples, lips and rosaries as "horrible demons" just isn't going to cut it. the grammar within the game intro is ridiculous! Get this: "It's a sweet fruit, from which her dream, just such a dream as a girl would have, begun." the game is fairly challenging, with only three continues possible, but it isn't interesting, nor does it entice one to make an effort to finish it. If you are absolutely ravenous for some kind of fruit-bashing game on the TurboGrafx-16, give this a look, otherwise Drop off comes off the vine as a rotten apple.