Rating: 5/5
Block Out is a 3D Tetris variation in which the blocks are easy to perceive and the play is smooth, as compared with many other cheap Tetris rip-offs and Welltris. The blocks appear close to to and drop away from you in a perspective-drawn well. Each scene has different dimensions, such as 5 X 4. Each well is 8 blocks deep. By completing layers you keep the puzzle low and keep it from reaching the top, which ends the game. Just before every 5th numbered round is a bonus round in which you cannot die. It is 2 X 2 X 8 and gives you a chance to practice fast movements for bonus points. You use 3 buttons to rotate the blocks in 3 different directions. The blocks become more complicated as you progress thru the rounds. Some of the more complcated ones are made of 3 blocks in a triangle and then one sticking out in a perpindicular direction. To make the game easier to play and the blocks easier to perceive, the block always points down initially. If you see a place to drop it with its protrusion then you can drop it that way. Otherwise, it can be turned over so that the protrusion sticks up (in that case you need a space for 3 blocks in an L-shape or triangle). Each round requires a certain number of levels completed to advance to the next round. When the game is over, you have 10 seconds to start from where you left off. The score starts from zero, again, but the scoring is higher on later rounds. Bonus rounds give a bonus of 1000 points for each level completed (advanced players can get 10-15 levels on each bonus round). Blockout is getting all the blocks in a round to disappear, and that gives a bonus of 500 points. Other scoring is in pretty small numbers, so the bonuses make a huge difference to the score. Block Out is really unweildly towards the top of the well. It does not let you turn blocks if they would hit any other block. So, you really have to keep it down to about level 4 or below in order to make any progress. Certain rounds are particularly difficult to get thru. This is a good one to play with multiple "quarters". I usually play with 40 "quarters" (one solid roll), and get to round 60 or so. I do not know how high the rounds can go. MAME 0.142 still has a bug for this game, in which game state cannot be maintained or MAME may crash upon restarting. This can be avoided by turning off the save state function for this one game. However, that makes it really difficult to get thru to the higher rounds without marathon efforts.
You also need an emulator to run this game. To grab one quickly, please check out our MAME emulators section.