Blockout

Blockout is a puzzle video game, published in 1989 by California Dreams, developed in Poland by Aleksander Ustaszewski and Mirosław Zabłocki.

The game is the logical extension of Tetris into the third dimension. In regular Tetris, the player manipulates a set of tetrominoes which fall into a two-dimensional pit (seen from the side). The aim is to solve a real-time packing problem by forming complete rows, which then disappear and score points. Poor play leads to incomplete rows, caused by inefficient arrangements of tiles; these rows do not disappear, giving the player progressively less space and less time to play subsequent pieces. Similarly, in Blockout, the player manipulates a set of polycubes which fall into a three-dimensional pit (seen from above; the pieces appear in the foreground and fall away). The pieces can be rotated around all three axes, and moved horizontally and vertically. The aim is to form complete layers.

Game modes
The game allows the player to choose the set of blocks they will play with and the size of the pit. Pits range from 3x3x6 to 7x7x18, giving a total of 195 possible pit sizes (counting e.g. 3x5x6 and 5x3x6 as identical). Three block sets are available &mdash; flat, basic, and extended &mdash; making a total of 585 possible game modes.

Under "Main Menu", three of the possible 585 game configurations are recommended to the player. These are called "Flat Fun", "3D Mania", and "Out of Control", and use the flat, basic and extended block sets respectively. Other features of the game include:

Demo mode: This is not a pre-recorded game of an expert playing, but a well-programmed bot that plays a good game in any given setup. The bot finds smaller pits and more complex block sets more difficult, and achieves correspondingly lower scores.

Practice mode: A game where the pieces do not move down with time. The player can manipulate the pieces for as long as they like before dropping them into place with the space bar. This is very useful for beginners learning to navigate the 6 keys required to rotate in two directions around each of three axes. Practice mode scores are not recorded in the High Scores file.

High scores
The Blockout Halls of Fame list the top ten scores ever in each one of the 585 permutations. Scores can be submitted to the site, and the high score database is updated about once a year. World rankings depend on number of appearances in these tables and scores achieved, suitably corrected by "M-factor", which captures the varying difficulty of different game modes. A world championship is held each year in Germany, usually in Ingolstadt in November.

There is also a new realtime online high score database. Players can upload not only their high score, but also their entire game, and watch replays from others. This allows players to learn by watching the playing and stacking techniques of other gamers, and to identify possible fake high scores.

Polycube block sets
Flat

The flat block set consists of polycubes that all fit into a single layer. These are effectively just two-dimensional polyominoes with thickness added, and include all but one of the members of the n-polyominoes up to n=4. (The tetromino consisting of four squares in a row is excluded.)

Basic

The basic block set consists of the seven polycubes present in a soma cube, all of which are polycubes of order three or four:
 * Soma-ra.svg The "L" tricube
 * Soma-t.svg T tetracube: a row of three blocks with one added below the center
 * Soma-l.svg L tetracube: a row of three blocks with one added below the left side
 * Soma-s.svg S tetracube: bent triomino with block placed on outside of clockwise side
 * Soma-lscrew.svg Left screw tetracube: unit cube placed on top of anticlockwise side. Chiral in 3D.
 * Soma-rscrew.svg Right screw tetracube: unit cube placed on top of clockwise side. Chiral in 3D.
 * Soma-branch.svg Branch tetracube: unit cube placed on bend. Not chiral in 3D.

Extended

The extended block set consists of all n-polycubes up to n=5. This is a block set with 41 members, consisting of the single cube, two cubes together, the 2 tricubes, the 8 tetracubes, and the 29 pentacubes.

Critical reception
The New York Times reviewed the game in an article about educational software for mathematics, writing that Blockout "doesn't pretend to be educational, but the skills required to master it are not unrelated to mathematics, particularly geometry."

A 1993 study found evidence that playing Blockout improved the spatial visualization ability of 10 to 14 year olds.

The Atari Lynx version of the game was reviewed in 1992 in Dragon #181 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 5 out of 5 stars.