A Night On The Tiles

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Every so often the steady stream of zapping, kicking and jumping games is interrupted by a glimmer of originality, it happened with Tetris and now the experience is repeated with Klax.

If someone told you that you were about to spend much of your leisure time for the foreseeable future catching little coloured tiles and placing then in neat stacks, you'd probably think that they'd spent a touch too long in the sun.

You would, however, be completely wrong in your assumption, because tile stacking is the order of the day in this arcade blockbuster from Domark.

Running down the screen is a five lane conveyor belt along which tiles of differing colours are transported. At the end of each lane is a bin into which you must selectively flip tiles in an attempt to create vertical, horizontal, or diagonal lines of similar coloured tiles. A line of tiles is three units in length and is known as a Klax.

As each wave starts you are told of the number, and sometimes even the direction, of the Klaxes you need to create in order to proceed to the next wave.

Klax building is performed with the aid of a mobile paddle attached to the end of the conveyor. Using it, you catch the on-coming tiles and then quickly move to the most appropriate bin and flip the tile. A bin can hold up to five tiles before it refuses to accept any more.

The duration of each game is determined by the number of tiles that fall off the edge of the convey or, which happens if you are not quick enough with the paddle or if the bin that you have flipped a tile towards is already full.

A "Drop meter" tots up tiles dropped in the current game. Three dropped tiles and you're finished on the initial waves, building to an oh-so-generous five drops on higher levels.

Paddle operation is not quite as straightforward as it appears. Up to five tiles can be balanced on your paddle and tiles are flipped in last in-first out fashion into the bin of your choice.

As soon as a Klax has been created the appropriate tiles disappear, allowing the ones that they were supporting it to fall into new positions.

If these tiles create a new Klax you are immediately awarded points for this too. Clever planning, and an awesomely quick brain, will enable you to create high scoring Klax combinations.

Torrents of superlatives are frequently used to describe the latest offerings from the moguls of the computer world, but all too often the games don't live up to the hype.

Klax is different. Klax is described as "The fastest selling coin-op ever" and I would be tempted to believe them.

Jon Revis