The Closeout Warrior

As you may have noticed, I’m a sucker for a good puzzle game. I’m not particularly good at them, but I like playing them, especially if they’re a little more off the wall than ’sort the things falling from the sky by color’. No, Denki Blocks is different. You get to slide multi-colored bricks around a playfield to sort the colored blocks.

See? Way different.

To conceptualize Denki Blocks, pretend you have a large, square plate. On this plate you have different colored blocks that only stick to blocks of the same color. If you tilt the plate in one of the four cardinal directions, all of the blocks on the plate move in unison in that direction, and like colors stick together. Your goal, then, is to make all of the blocks of each color stick together, as doing so will clear the stage.

Stages get progressively more difficult as you move along through the game, which really means that the starting points and the shapes of the blocks gets more ridiculous, which in turn means that the solutions get much more circuitous. I managed to make it about halfway through the game before I had to hang my head in shame and walk away from the game forever. I now understand that I quit just before the game got interesting, with such crazy items that change blocks’ colors, blocks that don’t stick to anything, one-way gates, blocks that stick to the ground. And of course, by interesting I mean mind-bendingly difficult.

I like to think that by no longer playing this game that I’ve saved my GBA from being smashed into a few dozen pieces.

Several years ago it became necessary for my circle of friends to choose different brands of consoles. Partially out of personal preference, but mostly because we each could only afford one console each. This worked out well, since we could play the games on the proverbial ‘other side of the fence’ on the cheap. Since I was destined to become a Nintendo person, I took every opportunity to exchange time on the Super NES for time on the Genesis. One of the games that I distinctly remembered from these exchanges was a fantastic game called Gunstar Heroes. Of course, now that I’m older and actually have a Genesis and the means to buy back pieces of my childhood, I set out to locate the game, and quickly discovered that I’m apparently not the only one that thought this game was totally rad, as the asking price is borderline pretendous.

Imagine my surprise when the team responsible for the game (and, curiously, the fantastic Super Castlevania IV) got back together and produced a sequel for the Game Boy Advance. I was fairly excited about that, but then promptly forgot about it until about three weeks ago. I was trolling around my local Toys ‘R’ Us for bargains and happened on a stack of them for $9.98.

While not completely identical to the original game, it’s a suitable surrogate. It is a sequel, after all. The controls are a little wonky, but once you get used to them aren’t too bad. I especially had trouble standing in one place and shooting, for some reason.

The story and graphics are very similar to the original game: You, as either special agent Red or Blue have to save the planet from various villainous characters named after the colors of the rainbow and their hordes of disposable minions. It’s decently fun and challenging. The only thing missing is the two player option. The original was a good one-player experience and even better with two-players. But it’s good for a few hours, at least.