Team Hoi was a group of Dutch Amiga enthusiast, who after creating demos in the late 80s went on to writing commercial games in the early 90s, still in their teens, but usually ended up being screwed over by their publishers.
Clockwiser was their last Amiga game, and it was their first game available in a DOS version. They had not planned on doing one, and when Rainbow Arts insisted on it as a prerequisite for publishing the game, they rather looked for another publisher instead. But although they found one in Rasputin, they soon noticed that a PC version had simply become necessary to achieve interesting sales figures. The Amiga was in decline, the PC was on the rise, even in Europe. None of them had any experience with the PC, so the port was done by a friend of theirs, Peter Schaap.
Interesting enough, the PC version ended up having the best graphics of them all. While the AGA and CD32 versions had improved interface graphics, they used the same blocks as the ECS/OCS version. For the PC, the blocks were redrawn. Especially impressive is the animated title screen. Fashioned after a rotating radar, only either the CLOCK or the WISER becomes visible. What you see above is a cut-and-paste job, the first time I ever had to do this!
Clockwiser is a puzzle game. The premise is simple: arrange the blocks on the left side so that they match the arrangement on the right side. The way to achieve this is to select a rectangle with the mouse and then rotate this rectangle either clockwise or counter-clockwise, hence the name. Colored blocks are subject to gravity; bricks aren't; steel is immovable and indestructable; bombs explode when dropped, destroying what is directly above, beneath, or beside them; diamonds multiply when dropped. Additionally, there are antigravs and teleporter pods. I'm still stuck on level 17; I can't figure out how to move blocks through a one-space opening without dropping them.
