Bloxeed

Bloxeed was one of the first of many arcade sequels to the game of Tetris. I am not going to duplicate the contents of the Tetris node, but I will describe the manner in which this game differs from normal Tetris.

Some blocks will have a letter or number inside, and if you complete a line containing one then something will happen. The "B" summons a bomb and the "F" summons Flicky (a little known Sega mascot). Meanwhile getting a "4" will take out four rows of bricks and getting a "16" will summon a giant weight to crush many bricks.

As far as Tetris games go this one is mediocre at best. I consider it to be a bit better than the original Atari version of Tetris, but it pales in comparison to almost all later versions (including the Game Boy one). The timing seems strange, and the controls don't seem nearly as responsive as they could be.

The arcade conversion kit for Bloxeed shipped without any joysticks, which was unfortunate, because that meant most Bloxeed machines would be equipped with joysticks that had already seen many years of play, and that might possibly be horrible for the game. Some types of joysticks are better for some types of games than others. I briefly owned a Bloxeed machine and it had absolutely terrible joysticks on it.