Holiday Qb, by Andrew Davie
4/5
Ho! Ho! Ho! It's Christmas Time at Atari Age and you've been tapped to take on the role of good ol' St. Nick! For some reason, instead of preparing for Christmas Eve, you're solving puzzles by sliding blocks while collecting goodies and avoiding baddies.
Holiday QB is the holiday cart for 2004. This was the second year of what's become an annual tradition here at Atari Age. Sadly I missed out on the first year, but I won't let that happen again! For this year's holiday cart Andrew Davie took his original game, Qb, and spruced it up with some holiday themed graphics. Even the digits in the score have been jazzed up.
When you power on Holiday Qb you're presented with the main game screen with a nice demo of the game going on. The larger area on the left is the playfield, with a smaller target grid located in the upper right. Santa starts out in the lower right of the playfield and can slide the block he's standing on in any direction until it hits the edge of the screen or another block. If you slide up against another block you can jump on it to take control of it. The goal is to arrange the blocks in the playfield to match the arrangement shown in the target grid. The target grid will helpfully flash blocks that still need to be positioned.
Sounds easy, but snowballs will pop up on some of the blocks. When the snowball melts a goodie or a baddie will appear. The goodies are items like gingerbread men and candy canes. The baddies are characters like snowmen and Santa hats that have taken on a life of their own. Collect the goodies for points, or even extra lives if you can figure out the secret collection sequence. While you may want to avoid the baddies, don't. They have a habit of moving around the blocks, thus hampering your quest to match the patterns. Banish a baddie by jumping onto their block while holding down the fire button - but be careful, holding down the button will decrease your score. If it gets down to zero the banishment will stop working.
While the playfield is pretty sparse, the characters are done using a flicker technique to create some slick multi-colored sprites. It's a neat way of working around the Atari's single color sprites, at the expense of characters that look a bit ghostly due to the flicker. Sound effects are functional, but nothing to write home about.
One thing I found really odd was the lives indicator that appears at the start of each round in Qb was left out of Holiday Qb.
All in all it's a fun puzzle game.
Next up, AtariVox Speech Synthesizer
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