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.

Columns

Columns

Publisher: Sega

Developer: Sega

Consoles: Sega Genesis

First off, to say this game is only on the Sega Genesis is absurd, because it's not. The game was seen in arcades, TurboGrafx-16, Sega Master System, Sega CD, Game Gear, Game Boy Color, MSX 2, iPhone, DOS, Mac, Windows, Atari ST, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, Super Famicom, Game Boy Advance, Playstation 2, Wii, XBox 360, and Playstation 3. That's not including the knock-off copycat games, either. This game is on nearly as many consoles as Tetris or Mega Man, it seems. However, the version I'm talking about today, as well as one of the most popular versions and the one that seems to be the most ported, is the Sega Genesis version, so let's just keep it at that.

OH, THAT'S where the jewels rain down from!

I fucking love this game. I'm not one to brag or toot my own horn, but I bought this game on the Virtual Console the day it came out, and had to have been the first person on the VC version of the game to hit level 99 and maxed out the cleared jewels counter. However, because I not only wasn't in the "arcade" mode, nor had a way of recording it set up, it's an achievement that has to stay quiet within me because pretty much no one else around me gave a shit as I hit level 99.

I have no reason to be bitter about it, and I'm not, but this isn't the reason why I like this game. It's a major nostalgia kick for me. I owned this gem (see what I did there?) on the Genesis growing up, and, in a family that doesn't care for gaming, I'd find the whole family taking turns to see how far we could get, or team up in the arcade mode to see who could reach a certain level the fastest.

The normal arcade mode, which allows for two player action

What IS Columns, though? It's a puzzle game back in the days where Tetris ruled the puzzle market. Very similar to the king of puzzle games, you have a rectangular playing area as tall as the screen, and you would receive a column of colored jewels that would drop slowly from the top to the bottom. They had to remain upright, hence the name COLUMNS, but you could move them about and rotate the order the pieces were in. Instead of clearing lines, you had to match three of the same color in a row, be it vertically, horizontally, or diagonally.

It seems simple, but predictably enough, the higher the level you reach, the quicker the blocks begin to fall. There's also a blinking piece that will destroy every gem of the same color it's placed upon. It adds a new level of strategy to decide what you should destroy, or what color you should work on in order to drop the height of the jewels in the playing field.

Flash Columns had you dig through lines of jewels to destroy a specific one

The music in the game, to me, is more enjoyable than the now overplayed Tetris theme (which is actually a Russian folk song, by the way). The Greek themed game has a nice soundtrack to it that I find calms me; if I'm in a bad mood or having a rough day, a quick game (or fifteen) of Columns makes me feel better. What's actually pretty interesting is that the game's pseudo-main theme, "Clotho," actually changes - hit a certain level, and the music calms down to a gentle piano rendition, done during stages that might temporarily slow down the pace in order to help the player catch up on clearing the way.

I feel this is one of the most underrated puzzle games out there today. It seems the only classic puzzle game everyone remembers is Tetris, and newer games like Bejeweled seem to be the only puzzle games played by the casual player today. However, my props go out to the FIRST jewel puzzle game, one of the best puzzle titles of all time: Columns.