I suppose what you like about the effect most, is that it fills the gaps that are intrinsic to ASCII art. But our brains are already wired to do that: http://bit.ly/1xeEci5. The shadow blur eats away at the details that are in fact a quality of ASCII art (like which characters were chosen to emulate a shape). The demonstrated CSS drop-shadow effect is really easily toggled by squinting your eyes instead: http://bit.ly/1DNrkXK.

Guess you're right in stating that it looks "cooler" though. Try making the shadows dark grey instead of black: http://cl.ly/image/073a412z0f34.