''Puzz Loop'' is an arcade tile-matching puzzle game developed by

Mitchell Corporation Mitchell Corporation (株式会社ミッチェル) was a Japanese video game developer based in the Suginami ward of Tokyo. Roy Ozaki served as president, and Koichi Niida served as vice-president. Some employees were former Capcom and TAD Corpor ...

and released in 1998 in Japan and North America and 1999 in Europe. It was later ported to the

Game Boy Color The (GBC or CGB) is an 8-bit handheld game console developed by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on October 21, 1998, and to international markets that November. Compared to the original Game Boy, the Game Boy Color features a color TFT scre ...

PlayStation is a video gaming brand owned and produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), a division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. Its flagship products consists of a series of home video game consoles produced under the brand; it also consists ...

and

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

Nuon DVD players under the name ''Ballistic''. The original ''Puzz Loop'' game was also known by this title. In 2008, publisher Hudson Soft released the game on App Store for the

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

and

iPod Touch The iPod Touch (stylized as iPod touch) is a discontinued line of iOS-based mobile devices designed and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. with a touchscreen-controlled user interface. As with other iPod models, the iPod Touch can be used as a po ...

. There was a Neo Geo Pocket Color version of the game initially planned to be published by SNK, but cancelled due to bankruptcy of the original incarnation of the company. The original ''Puzz Loop'' was followed by a sequel, '' Puzz Loop 2'', in 2001.

Gameplay

In the game, marbles of different colors roll down a spiral path towards a central goal, which the player must stop by shooting new marbles using a cannon into the oncoming ones. The marbles disappear if player matches three or more marbles of the same color. In addition, collecting bonus items, for example, attached to marbles can temporarily slow down the rate the marbles advance or cause all the marbles of the same color to disappear. Once the marbles are pushed over the goal threshold, the game is over.

Reception

In Japan, ''Game Machine'' listed ''Puzz Loop'' on their March 1, 1999 issue as being the eight most-successful arcade game of the month. ''Game Machine'' also listed ''Puzz Loop 2'' on their April 1, 2001 issue as being the thirteenth most-successful arcade game of the month. Jeff Lundrigan reviewed the PlayStation version of the game for '' Next Generation'', rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "OK, so it's an ultimately derivative action puzzler; but give it a shot and we guarantee you won't want to put it down."

Legacy

Sequel

''Puzz Loop 2'' is an arcade puzzle game by

released in 2001 on

Capcom is a Japanese video game company. It has created a number of critically acclaimed and List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises, with its most commercially successful being ''Resident Evil'', ''Monster ...

's CPS-2 hardware. Gameplay is exactly the same as its predecessor, with the player needing to deplete all the colored balls before they hit the center of the screen. The most popular feature of ''Puzz Loop 2'' was the two-player versus mode.

Clones

The success of ''Puzz Loop'' led to a number of clones with identical or nearly-identical gameplay from other companies including '' Zuma'', the ''

Luxor Luxor is a city in Upper Egypt. Luxor had a population of 263,109 in 2020, with an area of approximately and is the capital of the Luxor Governorate. It is among the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest continuously inhabited c ...

'' series, '' Tumblebugs'', '' Potpourrii'', ''Butterfly Escape'', ''Loco'', ''Bonsai Blast'', and ''Bonbon Factory''. Mitchell alleges that ''Zuma'', one of the more popular clones, directly infringes on their intellectual property. In reply, ''Zuma'' developer PopCap Games asserts that their game is "not an exact clone", but an elaboration of Mitchell's original idea. Mitchell itself released a version of the game for the

Nintendo DS The is a foldable handheld game console produced by Nintendo, released globally across 2004 and 2005. The DS, an initialism for "Developers' System" or "Dual Screen", introduced distinctive new features to handheld games: two LCD screens worki ...

called ''

Magnetica ''Magnetica'' (known in Japanese as and in Europe as ''Actionloop'') is a puzzle video game developed by Mitchell Corporation and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DS, released as part of the ''Touch! Generations'' series. It is based on Mi ...

'' in 2006. A Wii version of ''Magnetica'' was released via WiiWare in 2008.

References

External links

*{{KLOV game, id=9165 1998 video games Arcade video games Capcom games Game Boy Color games IOS games Marble video games Multiplayer and single-player video games Nuon games PlayStation (console) games SNK games Tile-matching video games Video games developed in Japan