Blockout

The Good
Block Out has the distinction of being "The" 3D Tetris game, but I wonder why it was never as popular as it's 2D counterpart? I think some of it has to do with the spacial recognition required to manipulate the pieces, and the need for variants in the play fields (boxes) to keep the game interesting. Tetris just keeps getting faster and faster, which I think gave it an advantage as being a tournament ready application. Block Out was a bit more diverse, and required that added level of thinking making it more of a brain teaser than a sport. Either way, Block Out was one of my favorite games on the Atari Lynx. It utilized a button+D Pad configuration for moving the pieces on different axes and this worked well on the system since it had limited buttons. The sound effects were just like the PC versions I've played and the Lynx's bold colorful graphics made the game easy to look at for long periods of time.

The Bad
This criticism more or less goes out to every home version of the game that I've played, but it would have been nice if there was an arcade mode that duplicated the board variants and challenging gameplay of the coin op. It had very cool music and would move you to the next challenge after clearing so many levels. It saddens me they didn't do a complete port of this on any system because it was truly addictive.

The Bottom Line
A colorful twist on Tetris in 3D.