Post by wafflerevolution on Sept 11, 2013 18:17:06 GMT
I had to find some way to use that phrase.
by gakon5
Klax is an old Atari arcade game, although the rights to it are currently owned by Midway. As a block puzzle game, it's goal is pretty obvious: stack three or more colored blocks of the same type vertically, horozontally, or vertically. Although the game has a simple premise, like many puzzle games, the difficulty quickly ramps up from easy to insane.
The History
Klax was written by programmer Dave Akers, who also worked on games such as Burgertime. The game took him only several weeks to develop; Akers wrote the game in Amiga Basic, but later hand-ported it to C for its arcade release.
Although not on the level of a Pac-Man or a Street Fighter, Klax was a success in arcades. The game's somewhat-stupid-but-awesome catchphrase, "It is the ninties and there is time for Klax" even managed to catch on in some places.
The Gameplay
In Klax you drop blocks into a five-by-five grid of spaces. Tiles roll down a conveyorbelt, and must be caught by your paddle, to then be dropped into the game area. Your paddle can hold up to five stacked tiles at once, which can be dropped one-by-one, starting with the tile at the top of the stack.
To clear tiles off the board, you must form Klaxes, aka combos. A Klax can be formed by stacking at least three similarly colored tiles vertically, horozonally, or diagonally (in order of point value). You can also form lines of four or five tiles, which is a bit harder but gets you more points.
This guy ain't doing so well. Screenshot courtesy of Wikipedia.
As tiles roll down the five slots of the conveyorbelt, you have to be careful to catch all of them, or your drop meter begins to fill. On default settings, if you let 3 tiles drop past your paddle the game ends. Also, you can shoot a tile your paddle is holding back up the conveyorbelt, after which it just begins rolling back down.
This can be a useful technique if you want to get all strategic and stuff, but it's also a risky one, as you might shoot a tile right next to another one, making it impossible to catch both when they hit the edge of the conveyor belt.
At the start of the game, you are given the option to start at Level 1, or skip ahead to Level 6 or even Level 11. Starting at a later level gives you extra "lives" on your drop meter, along with some bonus points for the next level. Every 5 levels your drop meter is resotred to 0, and you are given the option to skip ahead 5 or 10 levels.
There are 100 levels total, which is fully bananas. I've managed to hit level 10 without skipping or continuing, so I guess I have a long way to go.
The 2600 of Klax. You'd think they could have used more of screen. Courtesy of AtariAge.
The Ports
Like many arcade games, Klax was ported to a billion different consoles, listed here:
Atari 2600
Atari 7800 (was never released)
NES
Master System
Genesis
TurboGrafx-16
Commodore 64
Lynx
Game Boy+Color
Game Gear
The game was also released in several compilations, most notably Midway Arcade Treasures 1, along with Klax/Marble Madness for the GBA, and Arcade Party Pak for the PS1.
Etc.
Find out more about Klax here:
Wikipedia article
Klax World
(a Klax fansite, which keeps giving me error messages today. They were working yesterday..)