The yellow one isn’t SpongeBob, so I’m told.
I love meeting excited indie developers at parties. Michel Mailhot of Casual Friday Games was one such lad. He couldn’t wait to show us his first game, and I’m glad he did! This one is going to be tough to describe in text form, so I won’t waste too much of your time. Rest-assured, we’ll have a video in the upcoming weeks, as this game still has some time before release. I suppose it could be classified as an “arcade match-four puzzle game”, but I feel bad associating the dreaded “match-x” prefix to a game that looks this good.
Essentially, you start out in the middle of a bunch of spread out blocks of different colors and faces (seen in the title image). Your job is to connect with other blocks of the same color to form a 4-block cube. You do this by tilting the device to slide your block around the playing field. Once you form a cube, it explodes, and you move on to the next color/block. It is an extremely simple concept that somehow became one of the most intense games I played at GDC.
The action heats up very quickly as enemies start appearing. Some of them are stationary, and others seek you out. In the mode we played, there were no extra lives or second chances. You essentially connect as many blocks as you can before you die. There were a few power ups that help out with this, such as an item that turns you into a glowing saw-blade of death, smashing through blocks and enemies alike. All of this action takes place using great particle effects and layered 3D backgrounds. We also saw a countdown mode that has you racing against the clock to for as many cubes as possible. I’ll be honest, neither Pat or I got very far in either of these, but it’s obvious that Superblox was designed for quick play sessions on the go.
All-in-all, Superblox was an impressive showing, especially for a first game from a one-man dev team. This write-up probably doesn’t do the game justice, so we’ll be sure to post more media as it’s made available. Suffice to say, I’ll be keeping my eye on this one.
Say hello to Ramblok, Blokenstein, Iceblok, Legallyblok, Cheezblok, and Shinoblok.
