Dolucky no Puzzle Tour '94
Years ago, my love of playing Twinkle Star Sprites with friends prompted me to start searching for similar head to head experiences. I tried stuff like WarTech: Senko no Ronde, Calcolo, and more chasing after new intriguing competitive shooting experiences. One of the games I ended up grabbing to try was Dolucky no Puzzle Tour '94 for the Super Famicom, which from what I could find at the time, looked promising. How did it turn out?
Dolucky is a beefy little cat who served as a mascot for ImagineerZoom in Japan, and had at least three Super Famicom games in which he starred. Two were silly sports games, but Puzzle Tour '94 is actually a fairly unique little head to head, uh, puzzle game... but it has some shooting elements and power-ups that lend a little bit of that Twinkle Star Sprites magic to the proceedings. You go head to head against the CPU or another player, trying to cause them to be knocked out first... but this is no falling block game.
Where things may look similar to your Bust A Moves or Puyo Puyos, things immediately turn in that your screen scrolls vertically like a shooter instead of staying static. There are three colors of blocks that you will approach, and matching 5 or more will cause them to disappear. You get to throw your blocks forward to make these chains, but you can scroll through which color you throw with A and Y, and throw with B. You're never waiting for the game to feed you the color you need. You can also force faster scrolling by holding the D-pad, allowing you to make chains and clear the area. The first player to have a block touch their boundary loses.
Sounds like a puzzle game, but this starts to feel more like a shooter with the way you attack your opponent. You don't clear chains and cause garbage to appear on the other side. No, instead you want to find question mark blocks, and open them by a chain touching the block. This will release a power-up, such as stopping scrolling for you (aside from manually doing so), causing your opponent to throw garbage instead of blocks for a short time, feezing your opponent in ice temporarily, or causing a bird to swoop down and try to carry them off- screen for a few seconds. Couple these attacks with stone blocks that must be broken by chains touching them, and you get a game centered around picking your spot, aggressively clearing your screen, and watching for a good moment to try to trigger an attack. In a final shooter moment, you also start each round with a bomb (and can find more in said power-up boxes) to clear your screen in a pinch.
All of this comes together as something in between shooter and puzzler, but leaning more heavily toward puzzler. The pace is fast and the gameplay feels good and fun, but it's not perfect. The power-ups I named are literally all of them. More variety would have definitely made the game less predictable, which would've been a plus. Secondly, power-up blocks are not quite frequent enough to keep things truly frantic, and if both players are conservative in their play style, rounds can last a little too long to be truly intense. Sure, you can play for high score, but in a game like this, who cares about score? You want to win by knocking your opponent out. The graphics are colorful, the sound is decent, and control is spot-on... there's a lot of fun to be had here. It just never quite hits those same highs as Twinkle Star Sprites, and isn't as frantic as Calcolo. I'd still recommend it as a great change of pace that might even feel better to players with more of a puzzle leaning than shooter, and it's given my friends and me a few great evenings.
Reply With Quote