Diet Go Go (Arcade)

Diet Go Go was released by Data East in 1992. It's a spiritual successor to Tumblepop. The plot apparently involves an evil scientist giving everyone free meat and cake. That bastard. Instead of vacuuming up enemies then shooting them like in Tumblepop, you inflate them with balls, then kick them around at other enemies. This works a lot better than Tumblepop's vacuuming which could sometimes feel a bit awkward and inaccurate.
Instead of always dying with a single hit, if you get hit by an enemies attack (which is usually in the form of food being thrown at you), you become fat and slow, and die if you get hit again. If you get hit by the enemies themselves you die straight away.
Like in Tumblepop, you get extra lives from bonus stages, this time accessed by getting 777 on the fruit machine at the top of the screen, which spins whenever you collect one of the big gold coins that enemies drop. Matching triples of other symbols gets you one of each power-up or causes a whole bunch of points items to appear onscreen. This random element meants this happens a lot more often than collecting the whole word "tumblepop", so you end up getting extra lives pretty frequently.
Like you can see in the video, it's a lot faster than Tumblepop, and i think it's a lot better too. It's actually one of my most played roms in MAME, and one of the few i can come close to completing.

(Originally posted on selectbutton.net on 13/03/2009)