Blockout

The Good
After the moderately disappointing release of Welltris by Spectrum Holobyte, Blockout showed us how true 3D Tetris was done. A very fast and capable simulation, it solved the problem of hidden surfaces by displaying each block as a wireframe before dropping it down.

Blockout is also very configurable. You can rotate blocks forward and backward along the x, y, and z axis (although all you really need is the x and y axis), and you can specify how many levels deep or high/wide when you play. A seperate high score is kept for each configuration for fairness.

Support for multiple graphics modes is also well done, making Blockout playable on almost any machine.

The Bad
My only complaint with Blockout is that there's no way to see empty spaces underneath the top layer. This is a hard provlem to solve visually, so I'm not really blaming the designers (who did a great job). I guess I'm just lamenting my own memory's inability to keep track of 4 or 5 stacks of blocks. :-)

The Bottom Line
The first 3D Tetris variant and still the best.

The Good
Block Out has the distinction of being "The" 3D Tetris game, but I wonder why it was never as popular as it's 2D counterpart? I think some of it has to do with the spacial recognition required to manipulate the pieces, and the need for variants in the play fields (boxes) to keep the game interesting. Tetris just keeps getting faster and faster, which I think gave it an advantage as being a tournament ready application. Block Out was a bit more diverse, and required that added level of thinking making it more of a brain teaser than a sport. Either way, Block Out was one of my favorite games on the Atari Lynx. It utilized a button+D Pad configuration for moving the pieces on different axes and this worked well on the system since it had limited buttons. The sound effects were just like the PC versions I've played and the Lynx's bold colorful graphics made the game easy to look at for long periods of time.

The Bad
This criticism more or less goes out to every home version of the game that I've played, but it would have been nice if there was an arcade mode that duplicated the board variants and challenging gameplay of the coin op. It had very cool music and would move you to the next challenge after clearing so many levels. It saddens me they didn't do a complete port of this on any system because it was truly addictive.

The Bottom Line
A colorful twist on Tetris in 3D.