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sarahssowertty
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This week's Arcade Archives release is... Tecmo Stackers / Dero~n Dero Dero (Tecmo, 1995)

PSN
EU
US

Switch
EU
US

Only the Japanese ROM, Dero~n Dero Dero, is included. As pointed out by David Haywood, a ROM with the Tecmo Stackers name does exist as an arcade game, but still has a lot of Japanese text that's just subtitled, and it's not as exhaustive a localisation as the game would get for the US Playstation port (caution: contains US box art)

After, according to Masamitsu “Moo” Niitani himself, Puyo Puyo Tsu "established a “post-Tetris” standard for falling-block puzzle games", and you can definitely see that here. Look, these kind of games were big, of course Tecmo wanted to put one out! As is the tradition with games like Puyo Puyo and Konami's Taisen Puzzle-dama series, a cast of very and wacky characters compete in a puzzle game, complete with catchy music and personality-filled blobs. Match 'em up and get 'em outta here!

So, this one does play very much like Puyo Puyo- drop blobs into your pit, match colours of four to remove them from play and send junk over to your opponent to bury them- but there's a few twists and additions. The primary mechanic here is that when you destroy blobs, adjacent blobs or ones that get moved by the reaction will stretch out sideways, and if they match with a clump of the same colour and there's four or more, they explode too, setting off other blobs to stretch and so on. It's a neat little thing that can help you clear out your pit and pull of wild new strategies, but I imagine it can also mess up any chains you may have been planning, so you can't just do what you do in Puyo Puyo necessarily, you'll have to adapt!

A few other changes include no 'offset' rule where you can counter any incoming junk with your own changes- instead, one column is always designated as save from junk, and when you start a combo the safe column will start changing (select it with a button press)- and a third button used for a single-use bomb that destroys all junk blobs and makes all normal blobs stretch out which can save you in a pinch. I must admit, I haven't spent that much time with this one- there's a lot of arcade puzzle games out there and not all of them are Money Idol Exchanger- and this one is perhaps a bit too close to Puyo Puyo for comfort (it also has this annoying thing where when you move a blob from one colum to the other, it doesn't 'snap' to the next column instantly, it inches along for a brief moment and that's a little off-putting) but it does at least have a few elements not seen in other Puyo variants, so that's something.



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