| BLOCKOUT |
  BlockOut was a game released in 1988 and is basically a unlicenced 3D version of Tetris. It was published by California Dreams, the same people who made Street Rod I & II and several other DOS titles. It also apparently had an unreleased port for the NES, and several other computer platform releases, mostly likey being the Commodore Amiga, Apple Macintosh series, and of course, the IBM Compatible PC.
It was developed by two Polish developers: Aleksander Ustaszewski and Mirosław Zabłocki. The game itself plays like you were playing Tetris by dropping pieces into a pit, and then aligning them on an X, Z, and Y Axis with each other to get them to fit. Once an entire row is filled up space-wize (9 blocks wide by 1 block tall) that row will dissappear. There's not really a whole lot more to say than that. People who are good at Geometry (such as myself) tend to enjoy or at least find this game quite easy. As with a lot of these DOS games I have on this page (which there will be VERY many), are extremely hard to find information on because of how many various games have been made over the course of the 80's-90's that have gone under the radar. About the only thing I could add about Blockout, besides that it's a fun little "time waster" DOS game - is that it makes use of FM using hte PC speaker, something California Dreams did quite a bit in this game, and in parts of their Street Rod Series (which will also be posted here at some point).Staring into the Void - My Experiences So I found this game on an abandonware site sometime a long time ago and installed it on my GEM 286 as a way to pass the time in an interesting new way. It's actually quite a neat release because it has the "digitized" audio that plays through the internal speaker for the music (seems California Dreams loved to use this FM syntheses through the PC speaker a lot as some is in the Street Rod series as well). The tricky thing about writing a game like this for a computer is the keyboard layout. Logic denotates using the Arrow Keys, which is really all you need in a regular 2D tetris game, but we need at least 2-4 more keys for when we are playing this game with an X, Y, and Z Axis. On this it makes use of a square of keys around the letter "J" to control the X/Y/Z axis stuff. Honestly, I'd be curious about playing this with a "Space Ball" - one of those 3D CAD controllers used at places like Boeing for designing things in a CAD program. It's not really a game I play all the time, but it's one I like to pull up when I have nothing else going on and just want to kill some time on one of my Vintage laptops or DOSbox. |
