By Andrew Liszewski
Let’s face it, it’s Friday, many of you have just gotten back from CES, and no one really feels like working. But Solitaire is starting to wear a little thin, Minesweeper feels too Windows 3.1, and even Tetris is starting to feel mundane. But what if you were to take those falling blocks into the 3rd dimension? You’d end up with a flash game like Tetrical developed by Jeff Mastropietro.
Even after all these years a game of Tetris with the speed turned up is still a challenge, but adding another dimension will really mess with your brain, even with the pieces dropping at a snail’s pace. Using the keyboard’s arrow keys with Shift and Ctrl to spin and position the pieces is easy enough, and while you can change the angle at which you’re viewing the stack, I can’t help but feel that being able to rotate it in 3D to any angle would help a lot. But since it’s also free, you won’t hear me complaining.
[ Digital Machina Tetrical ] VIA [ Cool Hunting ]
Actually, such a 3D version of Tetris has been around for about 20 years. The original is called “BlockOut” and ran under DOS. There are updated versions around, including “Blockout II”, which runs under all versions of Windows.
I seem to remember something like this on our Apple 2 GS.
I think it was FRAC; BlockOut looked down a tunnel:
http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/frac.htm
http://www.geocities.com/xifrac
Isometric graphics already is a step backwards, actually. Not impressed, to be frank. These Flash coding exercises have no chance getting me hooked like the good old BlockOut Amiga version back in the days…
I used to have essentially the same game back in the early 90s.
(Wait, isometric is with left/right axes. I think I meant that other projection.)