Magical Drop III

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Manufacturer: Nihon Bussan/AV Japan
Year: 1997
Class: Wide Release
Genre: Puzzle
Type: Videogame

Monitor:

Orientation: Horizontal
Type: Raster: Standard Resolution
CRT: Color

Conversion Class: Neo Geo MVS
Number of Simultaneous Players: 2
Maximum number of Players: 2
Gameplay: Competitive
Control Panel Layout: Multiple Player
Controls:

Joystick: 2-way (left, right)
Buttons: 3

Sound: Amplified Mono (one channel)

CABINET PICTURE NEEDED FOR Magical Drop III - Click for details on how to contribute.

Description

A fast-paced puzzle game where the object is to match three or more pieces of the same color and design.

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Cheats, Tricks and Bugs

In the story mode, if you do not collect any fire bubbles, you will not advance any spaces. You can use this to your advantage on spaces that provide very simple puzzles (the first space always works, there are others) to rack up the score.

Scores higher than 999999 (which are very achievable using this trick!) will not display correctly on the high score menu, but they will be listed in the proper order.

Game Introduction

Try to match three or more objects of the same color while playing against the computer or alone in two different types of games: survival mode or magical journey.

Game Play

Gameplay is very similar to Magical Drop 2 - line up three similary-coloured bubbles and they disappear. Two new additions to Magical Drop III were the countdown block (indestructible, but counts down by one for each group you destroy) and a multicoloured block that eliminates all blocks on the screen, including countown blocks, ice blocks and bubbles.

There were also a few changes in the rules from Magical Drop 2:

If you clear the whole screen, but are holding any blocks in your hand, you will no longer get credit for clearing the screen.
Juggling bubbles (throwing and catching groups of bubbles in rapid succession to fool the game into thinking they were all still in the air at once) is now a lot harder to do.
Juggling the last few sets of bubbles while clearing the rest of the screen no longer gives you credit for clearing the whole screen.
Juggling bubbles into positions where they would normally break, and catching them before they do, is now next to impossible.
Super bubbles that eliminate all bubbles of their own colour now count as bubbles of that colour when you are picking them up (phew!). For example, if you had a green super bubble underneath or on top of a normal green bubble and you grabbed them, Magical Drop 2 would give you the bubble on the bottom, while Magical Drop III would give you both of them.

The single-player game is also more difficult: Magical Drop 2 happily allowed players to progress as far as level 60 without becoming unusually tough, where Magical Drop III becomes very challenging around level 30.

Scarcity in collections (VAPS.org)

Common - There are 34 known instances of this game owned by one of our 900 members. Of these, 0 of them are original dedicated machines, 1 of them are conversions in which game circuit boards have been placed in another game cabinet, and 33 of them are only circuit boards which a collector could put into a generic case if desired.

Of the 42,694 video games (3,154 unique) tracked by the Video Game Preservation Society, this game ranks a 17 on a scale out of 100 (100 = most commonly seen, 1=least common) in popularity based on ownership records.

Wanted - There is one VAPS member currently looking for this game.

Rarity is NOT necessarily an indication of value. Some common games show up as very rare here because collectors don't want them (they are common because arcade operatos might be sitting on tons of them in warehouses), while some fairly scarce games are grabbed by collectors every time they show up. Additionally, some games made in the last 5 years are still making money for operators and are thus not yet affordable to the typical collector. For a clue to value, compare how many people have this game vs. how many people want this game and then click on the eBay links to help determine an accurate price range.

eBay Listings

Click here to automatically search eBay's Arcade, Jukebox, and Pinball categories for the Magical Drop III Videogame machine and items related to it.

Click here to automatically search eBay's Arcade, Jukebox, and Pinball categories for machines and parts made by Nihon Bussan/AV Japan.

Alternatively, check out the IAM/KLOV custom report of the hottest coin-op machines on eBay, powered by Ace.com (updated throughoutthe day).

Legacy

Magical Drop II
Magical Drop III

Magical Drop III - Title screen image

Photo contributed by: asterix

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