Ryan has been playing “Klax”
Arcade, NES, GameBoy, Sega Genesis, Atari 2600, Atari Lynx, Master System, Commodore 64, Turbografx-16 and probably everything else
I’ve been revisiting some old retro favorites over the past month. In particular, Klax, one of my favorite puzzle games of all time.
Klax is a unique take on the match-three game, in which you have to match tiles in various combinations as they tumble down a conveyer belt. In some of the longer waves, the game can get pretty fast paced and hectic but maintains its charm and never seems like a chore.The game is fairly unique in that the tiles come at the player from an event horizon point, as opposed to vertically or even horizontally.
Klax first appeared in arcades in 1990 and was part of a series of games that brought Atari back to the forefront of the industry it pioneers (other games they produced at this time include Gauntlet and Paperboy)
You can find a version of Klax on practically every console and computer from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The one I’ve been playing lately is the TurboGrafx-16 version, but there are excellent versions for the Game Boy Color and the Genesis, that are worth tracking down for fans of those systems. The sparse and simplistic, but surprisingly decent, version for the Atari 2600 was the final game Atari ever officially released for that venerable system.
Whichever version you manage to track down, Klax is a wonderful little puzzler that is definitely worth your while and deserves more recognition than it has received. – Ryan Gibbs
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