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Looking for the name of a very old game (MS-DOS/C64 era)

If you didn’t play on MS-DOS (or should we say DoS? 😉 ) or on Commodore 64, you probably can’t answer my question. If you did, please follow reading as I’m looking for as much help as I can.

I don’t remember the name, and thus I can’t get any screenshot, I have to base myself entirely on my memory. The game was available for sure on both MS-DOS and Commodore 64. For the Italian readers, it was in either the first or third issue of “PC Facile” (I think this was the title) by Jackson Libri.

It was a totally 2d (no pseudo-3d), tile-based game, game area was delimited by “wall” tiles, it had a gravity toward the bottom of the screen, although there were “elevator” solid tiles moving through the area, going around obstacles, mostly.

The focus point of the game were other tiles though, with shapes and icons on them. The objective of the game was to put two or more of those together to destroy them. The tricky part was that often the tiles were odd in the game area, so you had to put three together. And most of the time in a given sequence otherwise you couldn’t get other tiles together.

To move tiles together you could “lock on” them (they took a red border) and then you could move them either left or right.

I’d very much like to find it to see if it’s possible at all to implement a version of it on modern systems, although I’m sure there would be copyright problems on trying to reverse engineer it… at least I could make sure how the gameplay was.

Sometimes I find myself wondering what I could possibly let my nephew play when he’s a bit older… I’m not going to let him play hack’n’slash games like Devil May Cry 4 (even though it’s an exceptional game). Puzzles are what I was playing between 4 and 10 (then I switched to RTS with Dune 2), but most of the puzzle I liked to play don’t seem to be available for anything I can let him play with (like my mother’s iBook).

Comments 7
  1. This sounds quite a bit like Brix by Epic MegaGames, which I first saw on some old CD collection of games (I dug it out just now, and it’s called “1001 Games & More”, from 1997).

  2. This reminds me of a (more recent) game called Vexed, although it doesn’t have elevators. I played it on my previous S60 phone, it’s probably not working on S60v3, but seems to exist for palm and windows too (not much huh). I’ve had both C64 and a 386 with DOS but don’t remember such game 🙁

  3. I knew there would have been enough people playing at the time to find it here 🙂 Thanks guys! It’s indeed Brix and Puzznic (which seem to be basically the same game). And the nicest thing to see is that there’s a PSX port, now it’s just a matter of finding it 🙂

  4. Oh, by the way… If you like puzzles (as I do), I can recommend these to you:(already in portage:)games-puzzle/fish-fillets (excellent and funny)games-kids/pytraffic (simple and good)games-puzzle/groundhog (simple and nice)games-puzzle/einstein (maybe too difficult for a kid)games-puzzle/enigma (requires too much mouse skills)(not in portage, but I’ve submitted an ebuild to gentoo bugzilla)Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collectionhttp://www.chiark.greenend….

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