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2008-08-11

Tetris! Tetris!

Today's update is all about the Russian all-time classic. Most of the new games are for Windows 9x, two of them have source code included:

• Bedtris is just the first version of Andrew Bednarz's Bedter, for which I have had a page for more than three years. He renamed it after legal threats by the Tetris Company. But before that, it had been included in a shareware CD-ROM, a year or two ago someone uploaded that CD, and that's how I found it. Since it doesn't just have a different name, but a different icon and slightly different graphics too, I've given it a seperate page.
• Blazetris is a relatively new 3D Tetris with an Egyptian theme. I tend to be sceptical towards hi-tech Tetris clones, but this one has an undeniable charm.
• TeTrist is definitely the graphically bizarrest Tetris clone that I've ever played. You could see it as the absolute opposite of Blazetris, if you want. It was originally a DOS program, but this version seems to be lost, only a later Windows port remains. However, it is open source and uses Allegro, so it would be no problem to recompile it with DJGPP.
• Tetanus on Drugs is, well, this game is a bit of a myth. It is even more psychedelic than Tetripz, a lot more psychedelic, I'm not sure if it's really possible to play it very long. But it's an experience you shouldn't miss. Like Tetrist, it is open source and uses Allegro, and the original DOS version has become rare. But I'm happy to say I managed to dig it up. Since WinTOD won't run in a window, I found playing it in DOSBox preferrable, and it was the only way I could take decent screenshots.

There's also a small update for Wetrix, I added the icon and cropped the screenshot, removing the window borders. I had always thought that Wetrix doesn't have an icon (a lot of Windows 9x games don't), but it just doesn't show in the title bar as usual.

Amiga

Yeah, originally I started out working on that big Amiga update I talked about yesterday, but then I got lost in my Windows Tetris folder. So you'll just get a small hors d'œuvre today, and I'll spare you the rant for now.

It's really mostly about Tetris too. Two years ago I came across a Columns clone that was described as like Colorix on the Amiga. As it turned out, the name of the game was really Coloris, obviously the most popular game of that sort on that platform. Today I added a paragraph about some gameplay specialities, but that's not the point.

It turned out that there are actually two games named Colorix on the Amiga. Colorix by Andreas Turowsky is not much later than Coloris, but it is not a Columns clone or even some Tetris clone at all, it's a puzzle game where you have to rotate and fit pieces. Colorix by Ventzislav Tzvetkov is quite new, and it is a Columns clone, just like Coloris, but a lot simpler. It looks a bit like games with ASCII graphics on the PC look. And it's the first Bulgarian game in my collection.

What else is new

I read that Wolfgang Strobl won a first prize in 1992 for porting his Klotz to Windows NT. It had never really occurred to me that 32-bit Windows programming had started years before Windows 95, even for games. The prize was a then top-of-the-line monitor and video card. I've added the specs to the PC hardware in 1992.

Previous entry: 2008-08-10