A tribute to an underrated video game or: Dalek's having trouble at the moment.

Wow. Long time, no post, and for a reason too. Your old pal Dalek is currently having trouble finding movies to talk about since THE BIG MOVE (tm) so instead I'm going to talk about an arcade game I've rarely seen anything written about. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... QUARTH!


Quarth is a 1989 space shooter from Konami, one of my all-time favorite publishers. It is also what could be considered the original "puzz-em-up", a weird blend of puzzle game and shmup that a lot of hard core retro gamers usually associate with ADK's Twinkle Star Sprites for the Neo-Geo. But Quarth appears to be the pioneer in this case, and I'm always surprised it doesn't get the respect it deserves.

There is something of a plot to this game. Sometime in the then futuristic 1990s, a rare gravity phenomenon creates what scientists call a "block-hole" (as opposed to black hole =P). This becomes a launching point for thousands of bright green tetrad lookalikes that are smashing into everything possible on a direct course to Earth. As the anonymous pilot of an experimental space ship, you are the last line of defense and the goal of the game is to push the blocks back to the block hole Again... its not much of a plot.

Now the first thing you notice about Quarth is the look of it. Somebody at Konami must have been a real fan of Trip to the Moon filmmaker George Melies since Quarth is a gigantic love letter to him. Your craft is what I can only describe as a flying shell, and if you've seen "A Trip to the Moon" (and if you haven't, its on YouTube probably) you might recognize it as the spacecraft the scientists got to the moon in. Since the game is set in space, you pass various planets in the background and they all have human faces, again as homage to the filmmaker. Its one of the most unique looks I have seen in a game and also one of my favorites.


Play mechanics are the essence of simplicity. The blocks are presented incomplete and to destroy them you must fill the gaps to create various shapes of squares and rectangles. Like Tetris, you can control the rate the blocks travel towards your ship at the bottom and this is important to get bigger combinations of blocks for bonuses. Also it is important that your ship can only fire once per button press and for good reason too, as Quarth is the ultimate anti-button masher. If you make one too many mistakes on a block and make it too big for your own good, you're going to get killed, and fast. As in the case with Space Invaders, if any block makes it to the bottom of the screen you blow up and lose a life, so judicious use of block control and fire power are necessary to beat this game.

One last thing... Most of my snaps are from the Japanese version. When Konami decided to localize this for American arcades they renamed the game Block-Hole, added some new more urgent sounding music, and also changed the main ship to a more conventional space fighter. Oddly they didn't do anything else to the game so the new fighter and music stick out like a sore thumb against all the whimsical Melies-esque backgrounds. For this reason and this reason only I prefer the Japanese version and apparently Konami did too as they decided to allow you to play as both ships when they ported Quarth to the Game Boy in the early 90's.

So that's Quarth, a sadly underated gem from Konami that kinda got lost in the shuffle back when it came out originally. I hope however through this review that I've given it the fair shake it deserves.