If you have a game that’s as successful as Q*bert, what do you do to keep the cash flowing in? Barring some kind of catastrophic market crash you make a sequel, of course.
So you take the blocks from the original game, separate them and make them rotatable, add a new character or two, and you have a new game.
The goal in this game is still to hop on cubes, though now there is a slight twist. When Q*bert hops off a cube, it rotates in the direction he hopped. Getting the cube to match the orientation on the top-left of the screen makes the cube turn black. Get a tic-tac-toe (four in a row in any direction) and you win! Then you go to the next stage where things move faster, the enemies are more plentiful, and the blocks get more difficult to orient correctly.
I was never able to actually play this game until recently, due to never being able to find it in my area. But it turns out to be so similar to the original game, that vets should feel right at home. Over 20 years after it came out and I was finally able to play it, I did reasonably well, but I don’t feel any great desire to play it again.