Quarth (NES, Konami, 1990)

Tetris is probably the most repetitive game ever. You can deny it to try and protect it's honour, but then again, why would you, it's a 20 something year old game made by Russians.

On that well informed note, allow me to say this: I do not like games you cannot complete. I always preffer to be able to take the game on and beat it, by hook or crook. This is especialy annoying with games with a plot, moreso if the plot involves "saving" someone or rescuing something or vice versa. It just makes the whole act of playing the game seem utterly pointless because, you are not going to save that princess, or ever defeat the evil wizard and save the planet. You're just going to lose and the game's going to laugh at you.

This is level 0.

So when I ran across this tetris-clone that you could complete, I thought I'd at least give it a go. The first level started off promising enough, and I was given the option to play as a bell shaped ship with two angels attached to it for some reason, so I assumed there was at least some creativity involved.

I was wrong.

The main gimmick of Quarth is simple. You auto-scroll through a level and shoot blocks out of your front, trying to complete non-rectangular shapes into the one true proper shape, and you go through 10 brief sections, 0-9, after which you have completed the level and can move on.

This is level 9

And for the first couple of levels, it was fairly entertaining. But then, as the levels wore on, the only thing that seemed to change was the speed the level goes at. There were still the five basic shapes, and slowly but surely it dawned on me that this game wasn't getting any different any time soon. And in true cheaply made game fashion, it never did.

The only thing this game offers in the later stages is frustration at the near impossible task of filling in the spaces in the relatively short time you have, not aided at all by the slow movement of your ship from one end of the screen to the next. You can't even practice to know what's going to happen, because the blocks more or less generate randomly. And the moment you're faced with a screen primarily made up of horizontal blocks on something like level 9 you can kiss your rump goodbye, because unless you have perfect turbo button/d-pad coordination, as well as use the quickest and most direct "strategy", you'll simply lose a life and die.

And this is.....level five......yawn.

Sadly, the "special" blocks that actualy would be usefull in this situation, ergo those that stop the scrolling for a limited amount of time, appear very rarely, so I'm not quite sure what strategy I'd advise.

Finaly, the game is just not interesting. All the levels look the same (level 0 and 9 even have the exact same level border), each level has the same exact blocks as every other level, there are no added features or hazards beyond the rarely appearing colour blocks, of which only one is of any use in the later stages of the game, and most strikingly of all, there's no background. Ever. The graphics look pretty sub par, and this from a game released in the same year as Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu and the Chip and Dale NES game just to name a few.

Overall, I found Quarth to be repetitive, difficult to beat in later stages, and just plain archaic looking even by contemporary standarts.