"I guessed it was a lame RPG with cumbersome controls and an overdone story. Wrong on all counts."

Better processing power and higher resolution have made so many games more detailed. That does not mean realistic. If a platformer is too workaday then it has little to recommend playing it, and what's an RPG or fighting game these days with ten or more caricatures finding all manner of ways to get hacked apart? I suppose racing simulations and sports games have managed to incorporate realism, but the most surprising realistic twist in a game is in one with falling blocks. It's amazing what programmers these days can do. While I've found a free Paint by Numbers a bit more mindlessly addicting over the past few months, a shareware effort called Triptych serves as an impressive way of providing a new action challenge to a simple idea(Tetris/Columns falling blocks,) and although you never have the fun of educated guessing, there's a definite aspect of planning and gambling, you never feel as though you're doing the busy work arithmetic that larger Paint by Numbers puzzles require.

Although you have a three-square block falling as in the dreadful Columns(a great way for programmers to show they understand a language, but dumpy for an end user who actually wants to have fun,) it can be an L or straight, but the great twist is that movements are not quantized. You can speed your piece up as it falls or move it to the sides, you have angular momentum in addition to the standard momentum. So instead of hitting a rotation button four times to get back where you were, you have a timing issue on your hands. If your block leaves some space in its final resting place, that is too bad for you. Learning to keep fallen blocks neat is a key part of the game, although on the bright side if something hits the ground there you can sometimes make it squirm to where you want it to hit, because the squares have elasticity. Even dropping a straight block where you want it to is not trivial; although you have a grid to help you place blocks(the play area is 6x12,) the block may bounce a bit from where you intended to put it and even fall on its side if dropped straight up. But this elasticity can offset some of the problems of momentum, and frequently you can negate it if you need to by slamming a block into the desired spot. You can also alter the path of a block no longer under your control but still bouncing around that way.

The way you get rid of squares is to get three squares of the same color in a row; they don't have to touch fully, and this can often cause a structure with unused space to collapse. The square also become electrified for a bit and can cause a chain reaction with any other square of their color before disappearing. For each block in the chain reaction, the amount added to your score gets higher, and you also replenish the gauge at the side indicating how much time elapses before your bonus resets. A big part of getting a great score is learning to get a quick combination. The next block is fortunately still there to help with combinations as well, of course.

Even the game over criterion is hardly pedestrian. Each block that falls has a certain time limit for you to control it, although it may bounce around afterwards if the laws of physics dictate so. Everything in the structure that your blocks build must be below a red line when the time limit runs out; if not, you lose. As levels increase, this time becomes shorter. Instead of a silly pile-up after you make a slight slip of the finger, there's often a bit of tension as your latest block hovers around the area. You actually have a chance to recover from a bad mistake with the bricks piled up. While many versions of Tetris relied on going faster than your at the end or eventually throwing out a series of bad shapes, later levels of Triptych simply cut down the time you have to control a piece.

But even before the game ends, Triptych shows a commendable natural balance. It has several options for the games you can play. Easy, Normal, Hard and Expert block modes allow for five to seven(and eight, I assume, for Expert, available only if you buy the game,) and you have Normal and Ultra game modes; Ultra is also pay-restricted but I suspect it is a challenge to pile up points in a time limit, which you more or less get anyway with the three-level limit for Normal mode. Still it's interesting to see how, with best play, you can expect to wind up with more points on the hard level than on the easy. With more colors you are more likely to build up a structure of blocks, which may eventually allow for more combinations; if the board is nearly empty, as it is for good players on the easy level, it will not be easy to find any consistent combination. Harder levels force you to settle for two block connected, and if you get enough of those then eventually you can wind up with a few combos in a row. With easy levels there's less doubt you'll get through but less opportunity for a rally--unless you decide to gamble and create a huge block structure to work away at. Tetris's chances are more along the lines of 'I need one of those four-long things' or 'I hope three squares in a row don't come down.' In the end I'm not surprised that a program with such mathematical rigor allows for such probabilistic dilemmas.

The game won't exactly dazzle you in the graphics department; although the squares that bounce off each other grow slightly curvy edges during the contact time, as if they were really being smooshed together, the rest of the graphics only serve as controls or help, such as the 'next' piece. Even the early LCD calculator number fonts suggest the primitive. To the right of the screen you'll have one thermometer that drops to zero as your time to control a piece expires. Another drops to zero as your bonus time dwindles, recharged when you pick up a new bonus. The red line you must put all pieces beneath flashes when you are still in danger, and there's a bar at the bottom as well that tells how far you are along in a level. The grid is the most useful part, showing where you want to position squares ideally, and it's become standard practice in this sort of game to clear the screen during pause. The player can't even cheat here by clicking outside the window; the field still disappears. Sound has bumps and thuds as your pieces spin around and land, with a 'HU-YAW!' grunt after each level.

Sadly I'm not sure if I want to pay the $15 for the whole deal or for the principle of supporting small-company shareware. This probably extends more from personal pride than anything. I remember long hours playing Tetris on my Apple II(I paid $30, and buying the shareware now would admit to a waste of money using standard miser logic, while at a higher price it would be more than I ever like to pay for a game) and marveling at the backgrounds and finally figuring out how to maximize my points--start at level 8 for an easier 8000 points before taking on the reflex testing of the final level 9.) Then there was the physics teacher who said computers weren't really close to being accurate enough for complex physical or chemical interactions, also noting these complex calculations were only really good for research, and the computer science teacher who tried to steer students towards heap sort(someone eventually wrote a graphic Tetris on his own, but after the brief sense of liberation it gave me I was still left as feeling like a bottom of the barrel programmer who wanted to program silly stuff like text adventures and graphics instead of stuff I was assured was important, yet I still mucked it up.) Triptych jumps all over these annoying memories and I would not be mad to find if it used a heap sort to sort the high scores that are only accessible if you buy it anyway.

Once Tetris gets stale the whole 'You Can't Go Home Again' blather kicks in and there's nothing you can really do to bring the fun back, although the occasional free JavaScript game is a wonderful way to see how easy it's become to program this. Triptych helped expose a new direction of thinking entertainment for a while, and its rallies where you eliminate blocks last longer than Tetris as well, even if a combination of twenty-five is rated 'good' the same as six.

In its shareware form, where you can only play the first three levels, Triptych is a nice challenge and stops you from playing longer than you can afford. I occasionally try to beat my own high score when I pull this game down once or twice a week, as I quixotically wish to procrastinate an unappetizing piece of busy work with something in all likelihood more abstract and challenging. Meanwhile, the specter of 3-d Triptych(the next logical extension--and I mean 3-d pieces and drop zone, not useless graphic embellishments) looms in the background. It may take a while to come out if the creators of Triptych choose to pursue it, and I'm confident they will make the game playable, but until then I will enjoy the original thing. It is the sort of game that, once you play it for five minutes, you suspect should almost have been done before, and its innovations over similar falling-block games are always logical, and not just as ways to create new challenges. They work well with the general laws of physics themselves.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/11/02, Updated 08/11/02