Ok! I figured it out (I'm the anonymous poster above) You need at least $100 to play, and you earn cash through single player mode (ひたすらモード = single player mode, which oddly translates to "earnestly" like member Kitaru mentioned) As for the difficulty options: やさしい - Easy ふつう - Normal むずかしい - Hard Yeah, it took a while... if only they had thrown in "$100" somewhere, it wouldn't have been such a mystery, but hey! I figured it out.
There's a fourth "double" mode that sticks two pieces together for you to place each time a line is cleared - it's a pretty wacky option. It's in between hard and easy on the difficulty select in the options screen. In the UFO catcher you only get a chance to grab variations of characters you have beaten in the 1 player game. There's a little gallery mode in there too that lets you view the characters you have collected on a little display cabinet.
Has anyone tried the linkup mode in this game? I lets you play 2vs2 with 2 players on each DC - must be pretty hectic!
I think this game had online versus back in the day too. I would have loved to play that while Sega's network was still up.
It did indeed - you could even use the keyboard in the lobbies. Would have been sweet to have had experienced that even though I'd have been owned.
I don't know how to embed it, but here's some online gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPAeglJ2aV8
Nice - thanks for that. Looked pretty lag free - wonder if that was dial-up or BB. Some nice skills there dealing with the double pieces.
