BlockOut II Remake now for AmigaOS 4!
Date 2008/6/25 16:30:57 | Topic: - Software
| BlockOut II Remake now for AmigaOS 4!
I never understood the excitment that caused Tetris when it came out. Really, I tried to play and enjoyed it several times but never got it. I saw it at the university, at work places, magazine reviews... everywhere, but it wasn't for me. And then came Blockout!
Blockout was designed by Aleksander Ustaszewski and Mirosław Zabłocki in 1989 and released for different platforms including Amiga, DOS, and Atari, developed by California Dreams. There is even a version for Palm OS devices out there.
Blockout is a top down 3-D tetris, were you have to rotate the pieces around all three axes and can be moved and shifted vertically and horizontally in a pit, challenging your 3d spatial capabilities. You must try to fill in the layers in the pit with the pieces, one at a time ideally. When a layer is completed, it is removed and the layers above, if any, drop down. You get extra points for completing the lowest layer without having blocks of other layers on top of it.
The graphics are nice and simple. The pit is a grid and the blocks (polycubes) are not filled, making it easy to see were they can fit in the layer below. You can choose between fullscreen or different window sizes. Controls for rotating the blocks are configurable, as the rotating speed and transparency.T here are three game modes, although you can define your own setup changing the length, width and depth of the pit and the block set (flat, basic or extended).
This remake of BlockOut II has a Hall of Fame as the original one, but also Online Scores. For now, the Amiga port doesn't have it enabled but lets hope soon we'll be kicking some ?blockouters? butts from other platforms :D
For those interested, here is a review of BlockOut in CU Amiga.
Finally, we must thank very, very much Varthall for bringing this classic to AmigaOS 4.
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