It is strange that this game should be so completely forgotten, for its creators are by no means unknown: Mario Knezovic (together with Carsten Neubauer) wrote the code, Michael Detert created the graphics, Thomas Detert the music. Together they firmed as Bones Park and had created a couple of Commodore 64 games including Stone Age. Mario Knezovic was later involved in the third part of the Realms of Arkania trilogy.
Yet the game has vanished with hardly a trace and we would never have known about it had not GameBringer dug the DOS version up somewhere and uploaded it to Abandonia. So what is this mysterious game?
It is basically a Shisen-Sho variant.
The main difference is that there may be only one bend in the line
between the matching tiles. Some levels contain walls,
unremovable blocks that must not be in the line between the tiles.
And the levels are laid out very differently, so the feel is somewhere
halfway between Shisen-Sho and the classic solitaire MahJongg. There
are two interface details that are confusing at first:
- The main menu is, in contrast to the game itself, not mouse-based and no mouse cursor will be visible. The options are selected by typing the first letter.
- It is not enough to select two qualifying matching tiles, you have to left-click one of them once more to confirm your choice.
According to one of the few mentions of the game outside Abandonia, there was a Commodore 64 version, and indeed, the blue background that resembles electronic citcuitry is a typical Commodore 64 style element. As on many 8-bit platforms, the graphics of the C64 were essentially character based. The screen was divided into 40×25 characters that had to have the same background color; then, you could choose between 4×8 characters with three foreground colors and 8×8 characters with one foreground color. At some point it was discovered that it was a good idea to use lo-res tiles (characters) for the foreground and hi-res tiles for the background. Possibly the first game to utilize this was Turrican. It gave the illusion of a higher resolution in general, besides, you do not want a background too loud anyway.
Back to the question at hand, why was Sixx so completely forgotten? Maybe the time was just wrong. The great Shisen-Sho craze of 1989/90 was gone, but it had left enough tile matching games to last for a few more years, so Sixx was either too late or too early.
Download Sixx (357kB)
| Shisen-Sho Clones and Variants | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Take Two |  |
89 |  |
||||||
| Match-It! | |
91 | |
Steffen Fischer | |||||
| Tautology | |
94 |  |
Reservoir Gods | |||||
| UJA's Petite Fleur |  |
|
Ulrike Jahnke | ||||||
| FourRivers |  |
 |
Kusunoki Masaya | ||||||
| Short Circuit |  |
95 |  |
Carl Limsico | |||||
| Pairs |  |
|
96 | |
Tobias Lenz | ||||
| Shisen-Sho | |
00 | |
Martin Fiedler | |||||
| AcChen | |
01 | |
Stefan Preuss | |||||
