Retro Arcade: Klax (1990)

Klax is a very simple game where bricks come tumbling down a conveyor belt toward your catcher.  Catch them, move them, drop them to try and make matches.  The sound f/x of the tiles flap-flapping down the screen are hilarious at first, but a bit annoying as the game inevitably speeds up.  The overall feel is a kind of mutated Tetris, but it's not a blind race to fill rows like Tetris.  The levels have different goals: 3 diagonal matches, 3 horizontal matches, survive 50 blocks, etc.

It can be played in a browser here. (no explanation of the keys to use)
or here , and there is a good history here.

There is a screen for Options and one for "Stuff".  The Options were: Drop Meter On/Off, Difficulty, Ramping On/Off, Sound FX and Music On/Off.  The Stuff screen had options for Drum Test, Sound Test and a bizarre little hidden sub-game called Blob Ball.  But it's more properly a fragment of a game, just a one-paddle Pong where the ball has a lot of randomness.  No score, no point.  I found it so odd that a developer would leave this in a final, shipped product.  I almost wrote a "Game Within a Game" post about it, but there's not enough game to focus on.

Blob Game ... or non-game


Klax itself was a cute diversion for about 10 minutes.  I can't see investing a lot of time into trying to be the best player ever, but it was a good discovery on the game box.  Watching some other players trying it, I never would have guessed that you can kick the blocks back up the conveyor belt or stack up more than one block on your catcher.  These games all seem to have hidden key combos for things like that.




Here is TASVideos getting the maximum possible score on the Atari version ... it only took two hours.
It's a tool-assisted speed run of 100 waves.  The goal for Wave 100 is ... score 250,000 points.   Wow.  76 million.

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