As much as I talk about Bubble Bobble creating this entirely new subgenre(The action-puzzler) it was in fact a game that came out a year before that started things off. The Fairyland Story is the story of a cute little witch and her dealings with nasty beasts, priests, and other wacky things. While Bubble Bobble popularized turning bad guys into sweet goodies TFS goes in a different direction by supplying the witch with a magic spell that turns everyone into delicious chocolate cake.
Scoring in TFS is very easy to figure out. Using this magic spell(which has a fairly short reach but good range as it's about the height of her entire body hat excluded) the trick is turn one bad guy into a cake and then use that cake to crush unsuspecting badguys below by pushing it over a ledge. If that isn't an option the player can simply cast enough spells on the cake until it along with the bad guy disappear. Killing a number of bad guys with a single well-timed cake causes coins to appear which are worth tons of points. Another way to get good points is to lure enemies into getting caught by a worm(careful the same doesn't happen to you).
One really neat aspect of this game is how bad guys react to each other. This isn't like most other games in the genre where bad guys pass through each other. Here they'll bump and shove each other around. This is important as if you're to pushing a cake off a ledge a bad guy could show up trying to stop you. Since the baddies can also escape from their cake if left alone for a short period of time it's beneficial to simply shove the cake over(taking care to throw the occassional spell on it to keep the bad guy trapped) and before long you'll send the cake and the bad guy pushing it the other way over the edge, making for more points. Also if you zap a foe in mid-air if they're at a great enough height they'll smash as soon as they hit the ground, making for some interesting scoring opportunities. However if you're really careless you could find yourself smashed by your own cake.
Another neat aspect about this game is that if you're stuck in a pit or in another situation where you can't get to the bad guy after awhile they'll simply disappear and you'll move onto the next stage. Though a better idea might have been to not include such situations or give the witch a way out of them I still think it was a great way to handle the problem without leading to needless frustration.
Overall this is a worthwhile game and I recommend giving it a look.
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