Klax

Klax

Publisher: Atari Games/Tengen

Developer: Atari Games/Tengen

Consoles: Arcade, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, TurboGrafx-16, Sega Genesis, and various others

"It is the nineties, and there is time for Klax."

It's odd that not many people know of Klax. It won the Best Mind Game award at the 1991 European Computer Leisure Awards, gained the seal of approval of the Parents' Choice Foundation in 1990, and was named the Best Cartridge Game of 1990. It was considered a major arcade hit, had ports not only to the systems above but also to Playstation, Playstation 2, PSP, XBox, Gamecube, Amstrad GX4000, ZX Spectrum, MSX, Commodore 64 and Amiga, DOS, Windows, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and more. It seemed like this game was everywhere. Yet, I can't find hardly a single person that's played this game before.

Klax was an arcade follow-up to Tetris, because Atari was in legal troubles over the latter at that time. It's hard to truly explain Klax, so let me try my best to explain the gameplay:

The game is made up of a conveyer belt, or a staircase, or something along those lines, and has tiles tumbling down towards the playing field. You control a little white machine or ship just above the playing field, where you catch the tiles. You drop them down into the playing field, a 5x5 area, and attempt to match up three or more like-colored tiles, either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. This is called a "Klax," and getting four or more (either in a row or as two connecting Klaxs) counts as more than one Klax.

What most of the game will look like. Only exciting.
So the idea is to make as many of these, right? Well, not necessarily. See, what made Klax interesting was that each level had a specific goal. One level may have you performing a specific number of Klaxs. Another may have you do the same thing, but only vertically, horizontally, or diagonally completed Klaxs count. Other modes include simply catching a certain number of tiles, hitting a certain score, and so on.

Your ship (or device or whatever the hell it is) can only hold five tiles at a time. You dump out the top most, or recently caught, tile onto the field, allowing you to hold onto tiles for a later time. There is no way of shifting through these tiles, however, so if the tile you need is at the bottom, you need to dump out the four tiles on top first to get to it.

So let's say you try to catch a tile with five tiles already piled up. The tile falls off the stairway to hell and takes one hit off of your Drop Meter. You have three, four, or five chances in your drop meter (depending on if you warp; more on that later), and any tile that plummets off the end of the highway counts against you. Deplete the meter, and it's game over.

Warp screen example, at the start of the game.
At the start of the game, and every five levels afterward, you're given the option to skip five or ten levels ahead. These warps give you either four or five drops, depending on how far you warped, as well as bonus points. The catch is, obviously, the game is harder the further you go. The game has 100 levels, the last of which is to get a large high score of 250,000 points before you're able to win.

Some levels may have special criteria, as well; for example, one level may ask you to complete an X-shaped Klax that spans the entire field of play. The reward? A warp that takes you 45 levels ahead. And it's not easy, neither - I tried for nearly two hours recently before giving up, frustrated.

Pausing the game gives the player the option to change the current song being played, as well. This is nice, because there's a lot of different styles to the songs, from a dirty grungy metal sound to a more pop, maybe even new wave sound. It's nice to have an option, too, with a soundtrack of five songs that can be changed during play is nicer than going 15 levels of hearing the same song. I even like the titles of the songs - "Led Fut," "Giganticus Breathalizer," "Dance of the Fairies," "Rottweiler," and my personal favorite, "Caverns of Cthulu." It's really catchy, and I suggest anyone to YouTube them.


Most of the screens all look the same, so here's a bonus song for you guys.

The game's been released recently with the Midway Arcade Treasures for PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox. I suggest anyone that likes puzzle games to at least rent this compilation to try this game out. It may not be the nineties anymore, but there is always time for Klax.