Magical Tetris Challenge

released on Nov 20, 1998

Join Disney's Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy as they embark on a non-stop adventure full of challenging fun and excitement in Magical Tetris Challenge. Completely addictive, deceptively simple, you'll go wild in a kaleidoscopic shower of falling Tetris pieces in this magical version of the world's most popular video game.


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i wish my adjectives had been a bit more varied, but i was indeed fascinated by the minutiae of Magical Tetris Challenge. forgive me for blazing through the story, as it's uninteresting to me. i do believe that the base difficult dipswitches for arcade mode were much easer than the settings for the n64. there's a story somewhere about why the NAOMI system hosted such gorgeous games with 3d environments, and why the aleck64 seemed to be like mostly okay -- why SEGA poured more money and devs into it. the TAS confirmed for me that 4-widing is the meta, i just wasn't able to properly execute here. we also didn't see the high-clock magical pieces, which are n-minos for larger and larger values of n, as well as disconnected shapes. does the multiplayer format really support someone getting to that clock level? who knows. the shared next piece was apparently cribbed from Tetris Battle Gaiden (1993, BPS), which i'll have to investigate. i truly wish for a demonstration of the wallkicks possible with the strange kickmaps, but i don't know of such a video. i would encourage those interested to check out @Oshisaure, who i believe wrote the kicktable map and has streamed MTC a few time. fuck disney, but this stuff is cool. is this on fightcade?? 8/10

of course it's that rotund fuck pete that has the best song in the entire soundtrack because who else would

Playing this game feels kinda odd. It's a Tetris game that clearly precedes whatever insane "guidelines" the Tetris Company came up with by the 2000s. The game feels like it's balanced around gobbling up quarters with it having some absurd difficulty levels even on "normal mode" (could only imagine the hard mode).
The game loves handing you piece after piece after piece of the same one at points (even in the endless mode where there's no "battles"). It feels like the random number generator isn't as forgiving as "modern" Tetris. But wow this game looks visually incredible. Not bothering with any sort of 3D gameplay allows the power of the 2d graphics to pop. The soundtrack is kinda crazy at points going in a lot of directions. The story felt a little nonsense but apparently the Mickey one is last chronologically and I'm not playing all 4 campaigns.
Apparently this shares a director with Zelda's 2D Capcom games and also Breath of The Wild and Tears of the Kingdom?? I didn't realize this before playing and huh it's his directorial debut. I'm a sucker for puzzle games so I enjoyed this. Shame it didn't get an American release on PS1 so I had to play this at 50 FPS due to Mickey Mouse (haha) "PAL" monitors. Running a game at 50 Hz makes you not a real country.
7/10

play it for the godly music. It's also a surprisingly fun twist on the tetris formula, i recommend it.