Blockout
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Blockout | |
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| Developer(s) | California Dreams |
| Release date(s) | 1989 |
| Genre(s) | Puzzle |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Platform(s) | Mega Drive/Genesis, Commodore 64, Arcade, PC, Atari Lynx |
Blockout is a puzzle videogame, created in 1989 by California Dreams, designed by Alexander Ustaszewski and Mirek Zablocki. The game is the logical extension of Tetris into the third dimension. Tetris requires the player to manipulate a set of tetrominoes which fall from the top of the screen into a two-dimensional pit. The aim is to complete rows at the bottom of the screen, which then disappear and score points. Poor play leads to incomplete rows, caused by inefficient arrangements of tiles. These rows do not disappear, giving the player progressively less space and less time to play subsequent pieces.
Blockout is the three-dimensional analogue of this. Polycubes appear in the foreground and fall "away", using perspective to make them seem to fall into a three dimesional pit. The pieces can be rotated in the three axes, and moved horizontally and vertically. The game presents the player with a real-time packing problem. Efficient arrangements lead to completed layers, points, and room to move. Incomplete layers build up and make gameplay progressively more difficult.
The game is playable on many types of machine due to multiple graphics modes and efficient code. The graphics include perspective, backface culling, and smooth rotation. The guestbook on the Blockout Homepage contains many stories of players discovering the game in the early 1990s, transferring it from machine to machine, and continuing to play successfully on modern cross platform systems such as Windows XP.
Blockout still has its 1989 look and feel. Playing it is a step into computer history. On a Windows PC, it runs in a DOS Shell that temporarily disables all of the Windows functions. There is no mouse selection of menu options, resolution is low and the font could be described as generic 1970s techno; nostalgic for those who remember Green screens and the high score tables of Space Invaders and Galaga.
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[edit] Game modes
The game allows the player to choose the set of blocks they will play with and the size of the pit. Pits range from 3x3x6 to 7x7x18, giving a total of 195 possible pit sizes. (Not counting 3x5 as different from 5x3). Three block sets are available: flat, basic and extended, making a total of 585 possible game modes.
Under "Main Menu", three of the possible 585 game configurations are recommended to the player. These are called "Flat Fun", "3D Mania", and "Out of Control", and use the flat, basic and extended block sets respectively. Other features of the game include:
Demo mode: This is not a pre-recorded game of an expert playing, but a well programmed bot that plays a very good game in any given setup. The bot finds smaller pits and more complex block sets more difficult, and achieves correspondingly lower scores.
Practice mode: A game where the pieces do not move down with time. The player can manipulate the pieces for as long as they like before dropping them into place with the space bar. This is very useful for beginners learning to navigate the 6 keys required to rotate in two directions in three axes. Practice mode scores are not recorded in the High Scores file.
[edit] High scores
The Blockout Halls of Fame list the top ten scores ever in each one of the 585 permutations. Scores can be submitted to www.blockout.de; and the high-score database is updated about once a year. World rankings depend on number of appearances in these tables and scores achieved, suitably corrected by "M-factor", which captures the varying difficulty of different game modes. A world championship is held each year in Germany, usually in November, and usually in Ingolstadt.
[edit] Polycube block sets
Flat
The flat block set consists of polycubes that all fit into a single layer. Effectively, these are 2D polyominoes, and include all but one of the members of the n-polyominoes up to n=4. (Excluding, for some reason, the tetromino that consists of four squares in a row.)
Basic
The basic block set consists of the seven polycubes present in a soma cube.
The seven Soma pieces are all polycubes of order three or four:
The "L" tricube
T tetracube: a row of three blocks with one added below the center
L tetracube: a row of three blocks with one added below the left side
S tetracube: bent triomino with block placed on outside of clockwise side
Left screw tetracube: unit cube placed on top of anticlockwise side. Chiral in 3D.
Right screw tetracube: unit cube placed on top of clockwise side. Chiral in 3D.
An n=5 Polycube or Pentacube
Branch tetracube: unit cube placed on bend. Not chiral in 3D.
Extended
The extended block set consists of all n-polycubes up to n=5. This is a block set with 41 members. It consists of the single cube, two cubes together, the two tricubes, the eight tetracubes and the twenty-nine pentacubes.
[edit] Quotes
Taken from http://www.sonic.net/~fryman/blockout/ :
Top 7.5 reasons Blockout is either cool or evil:
- 7. It runs on a 8088
- 6. It runs on a Pentium
- 5. It runs under DOS 2.0
- 4. It runs under Windoze
- 3. You can never win.
- 2. You keep getting better...
- 1. ...But you'll never win.
Taken from http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/blockout.htm
- I always try to give a country of origin for games. With Blockout, this is more difficult than with most. Let's see. The name Blockout is a trademark of Kadon Enterprises, a Maryland-based game company. California Dreams, the label under which it was published, is a subsidiary of LDW (Last Day of Work) Software, a California company. The arcade machine was made by Technos Japan. The PC, C64, and Amiga versions, which form the original release, were created entirely by Polish programmers.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- http://www.blockout.de Website with a blockout game download, high scores, world championships and a guestbook
- http://www.3dtris.de Flash clone of Blockout with online Highscores running in most Web-Browsers!
- http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/blockout.htm Information about different Blockout Releases
- http://www.3dtris.de/blockout_essay an Blockout Essay from Igor Vukomanovic about Blockout tactics
Deliberate Defacement: There is a J2ME (cellphone/mobile phone) version of this game called BlockAway which is linked to from getjar.com. Please replace this line with appropriate wikipedia wording.
