Ghostlop

Ghostlop is a falling block puzzle game reminiscent of Drop Off and Puzzle Bobble, where players take control of ghost hunters Bruce (P1) and McCoy (P2) with the main objective of evicting as many ghosts as possible from the playfield with a single ball by using the walls and/or their respective character to ricochet the ball back at the ghosts to eliminate them before the timer runs out and the current round ends. Failing in catching the ball from rebound after touching the floor results in a stack of random colored ghosts rapidly descending from the top and once all the ghosts reach the bottom, the game is over as a result unless players insert more credits into the arcade machine to continue playing. The game offers a single-player campaign mode where one player assume the role of either Bruce or McCoy to hunt and evict mischievous ghosts across multiple locations, as well as a versus mode where players compete for the highest score.

A unique feature of the game is how ghosts are evicted. Similar to Silhouette Mirage and Ikaruga's polarity mechanism, players can switch their ball between red and blue colors in order to evict ghosts of the same respective color by pressing either A or B buttons. There are also three additional types of ghosts: bomb ghosts capable of detaching others caught within their blast radius, skull ghosts that take two hits to evict as well as electric ghosts, which act as dynamite that erases all the ghosts from the playfield. Similar to Puyo Puyo's chain mechanism, players are able to attack the rival playfield by performing a chain reaction with a disappearing ghost that cause a group of ghosts to fall off and spawn in the rival area.

Ghostlop was created by most of the same team that previously worked on several projects at Data East for the Neo Geo platforms such as Spinmaster, Windjammers, Karnov's Revenge, Street Slam and the Magical Drop franchise, after which a group of employees would later go on to work at Kaneko on Cyvern: The Dragon Weapons before the former company declared bankruptcy in 2003. Its development was helmed by Nitro Ball director Koji Jinbo as producer, with Yuzuru Tsukahara serving as the project's sole designer. Programmers Kenichi Minegishi, Osapan, Sandy Hirokun and Sho Chang wrote the game's software. Endo Chang and several artists were in charge of creating the pixel art, while Tony Taka acted as character designer.

The sound was handled by Gamadelic members Hiroaki Yoshida, Masaaki Iwasaki and Shinichi Yamazaki, while character voice work was done by Lynn Harris and Ward Sexton, the latter of which is credited erroneously as Word E. Sexton.