Trip'd

Trip'd is a falling block puzzle game where triads of colored, tile-shaped eggs gradually descend the screen to stack up on the bottom. Should the stack of eggs reach the line at the top of the play field, the game ends. To avoid this, triads can be moved, rotated, and reoriented by the player as they fall. When four or more eggs of the same color are connected in a line, they are eliminated from the screen, causing any eggs stacked on top to shift down.

However, aligning four similar eggs in a two-by-two square will spawn a creature called a Deow'Nz within that space instead. The player can also align a quartet of Deow'Nz of any color in a four-by-four square pattern to make one giant creature appear.

The game's original incarnation Uchū Seibutsu Flopon-kun was developed by Japanese studio Warp and directed by its president Kenji Eno. It was Warp's second release after the action game Totsugeki Karakuri Megadasu!!. Both works were created out of Eno's philosophy to balance the company with the production of simpler, casual games and the larger, more serious projects like the horror title D. Alongside Eno, the development staff consisted of graphic designer Tomohiro Miyazaki and programmers Hideki Miura and Hirofumi Hayashida.

The game was launched in Japan on the 3DO on August 6, 1994 by San-ei Shobo Publishing. An enhanced edition called Uchū Seibutsu Flopon-kun P! was released by Asmik on PlayStation in Japan on March 31, 1995. The localized version, Trip'd, was published on the North America 3DO by Panasonic in August of that year as Warp's first release outside Japan.

The North American 3DO release of Trip'd has received a generally mediocre reaction from critics. Its gameplay was seen as derivative of previous puzzle titles while its more unique mechanics caused divided opinions. The staff of VideoGames praised the overall gameplay as fun and addictive, particularly in multiplayer. The magazine's Gabe Soria summarized, "If people like us, who see enough video games to make us blind, can be so impressed, it stands to reason something cool must be going on."

While Stuart Wynne of 3DO Magazine was bored with the game's single-player experience, he lauded its multiplayer option as "arguably one of the best in a Tetris variant" and similarly admitted "there's never been a game which has got us so addicted as two-player Trip'd." AC labeled Trip'd as a competent blend of Tetris and Columns and felt it offered solid computer opponents. Contraily, Next Generation felt that Trip'd's additions to the mechanics of Puyo Puyo "really only serve to complicate a wonderfully simple game, and make it more frustrating than innovative." GamePro criticized the game's slow pace and felt that only being able to adjust one tile in a triad per button press was frustrating.