INTRODUCTION

Playing Blockz is easy. You are given a series of blocks, which you place on a board. Any blocks forming a 3x3 grid are destroyed, increasing your score. There are different kinds of blocks, and various ways to destroy them. Your objective is to destroy as many blocks as possible, by thinking hard, and making good use of the limited time available.

GETTING STARTED

After the opening intro, you will see the title screen with PLAY, CONTROLS and RULES. To begin play, highlight PLAY and press the X button. In the same way, you can highlight CONTROLS or RULES and press the X button to view a summary of the controls, or view the rules for playing Blockz (press the X button to return to the title screen).

PLAYING THE GAME

The panel on the right of the game screen shows your score, and the next block you will be given. Below this panel is a space where the blocks appear; you must move these blocks onto the board using the directional buttons on your controller. Blocks can be rotated left (press the square button) or right (press the circle button). When you have positioned a block, press the X button; you will then be provided with the next block.

If you have formed any 3x3 grids, these will be destroyed, increasing your score and freeing up space on the board. Note that a grid larger than 3x3 will also be destroyed. When destroyed, the blocks fade away, and the different blocks have various behaviours when destroyed:

The bomb is very useful, becuase it destroys all surrounding blocks, including invincible ones. Rockets are also useful. Bombs and rockets can cause chain reactions; for example, a rocket could take off and destroy a bomb, which detonates and sets off another rocket, and so on. See how many bombs you can detonate at once!

The left and top walls can move. Moving a wall outwards will create more space. However moving a wall inwards will not be very useful. To destroy a Move wall block, without moving the wall, simply blow it up with a bomb. This also applies to the Reverse controls block.

You have limited time to position a block. The clock at the top left of the screen shows how much time is remaining. When time is up, the block will be placed on the board for you.

The game ends, when you can not move your block onto the board, and you run out of time to position that block. Your score will be shown on the title screen under LAST. The highest score achieved so far is shown under HIGH.

NET YAROZE

To play blocks, download it using the link below, and run go.bat from the DOS prompt. This which simply runs: SIOCONS auto

Download Blockz now: blockz.zip (~400k)

A larger version of the title image can be found here. For NTSC, use this executable instead.