A Review of the ``Klax'' Video Game

For this month, I review Atari's answer to the puzzle game genre which came from Tetris' popularity.
In particular, I've only played the Atari Lynx port, but this will more than suffice for the review.

Klax is a simple game, involving a conveyer belt of blocks falling towards the player's paddle; each
block has a colour, and the goal is to align three in a five-by-five playfield.  The paddle can hold
up to five blocks in a stack, and of course only the topmost block can be dropped on that playfield.
Whenever alignment is reached, of course the blocks are removed and gravity affects those remaining.

There are other details, such as the player's ability to throw blocks back onto the conveyer belt to
gain time, but this is a rather total description of the game; what struck me when I'd given thought
to implementing the game on a less capable platform was its shallow nature.  When the fancy graphics
are stripped away, the game is simply blocks approaching a line, a paddle area of five or so blocks,
and a five-by-five playfield; the graphics are an attempt to place style over substance for a puzzle
game, and the result would be playable and fun too, but it pales in comparison to Tetris and Gunpey.

With this in mind, it's not surprising how the game is largely ignored, nowadays.  It's both trivial
to implement and trivial to play, and colour makes it unsuited to any simple hardware with the game,
as are most common with Tetris.  I can recommend playing the game only if one be particularly bored.

Reviewing Gunpey and Klax, and comparing them with Tetris, has me wondering about their brethren.  I
figure there must be similar puzzle games that are largely forgotten, rather than ending up as games
on a cellular phone or some other pit, and plenty of good puzzle games which have yet to be created.

Klax well exemplifies how graphics beyond the most bare monochrome lines should be set in place last
for any puzzle game; a fun game is fun without fancy graphics, but fancy graphics always slowly rot.
.