Blockout

The Good
After the moderately disappointing release of Welltris by Spectrum Holobyte, Blockout showed us how true 3D Tetris was done. A very fast and capable simulation, it solved the problem of hidden surfaces by displaying each block as a wireframe before dropping it down.

Blockout is also very configurable. You can rotate blocks forward and backward along the x, y, and z axis (although all you really need is the x and y axis), and you can specify how many levels deep or high/wide when you play. A seperate high score is kept for each configuration for fairness.

Support for multiple graphics modes is also well done, making Blockout playable on almost any machine.

The Bad
My only complaint with Blockout is that there's no way to see empty spaces underneath the top layer. This is a hard provlem to solve visually, so I'm not really blaming the designers (who did a great job). I guess I'm just lamenting my own memory's inability to keep track of 4 or 5 stacks of blocks. :-)

The Bottom Line
The first 3D Tetris variant and still the best.