Blokus Portable: Steambot Championship
Score: 80% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Majesco Games Developer: Irem Software Engineering Media: UMD/1 Players: 1 - 16 (Ad Hoc) Genre: Board Games
Graphics & Sound: Blokus Portable: Steambot Championship puts the board game Blokus in your hands with a customizable slant that makes it feel a bit more than simply a video board game like the game's previous interactive venture, Blokus World Tour. Visually, there is a good mix of a semi-realistic looking hub world, The Lobster Inn, and cartoony looking characters at the game board. Each of the game pieces are easily identifiable and play out nicely on the system's screen, while characters in the Inn are small, but still discernibly different. What is of note is the inclusion of five characters from Irem's more notable series, Steambot Chronicles, and the fact that they look a lot like their console counterparts. One area where Blokus doesn't stand out is with sound. While not bad by any means, everything in the audio department is forgettable and rarely goes beyond the bare necessities. Music is okay, but doesn't get you excited about the game, and sound effects are very basic.
Gameplay: Blokus Portable: Steambot Championship makes the board game a little more personal by letting you create your own character and design your own business cards. Since the game offers wireless play with other gamers, the ability to trade business cards with your friends and see how they designed their in-gamer personas is an added benefit. The game's story take place in The Lobster Inn, where Blokus games are occurring all over the place (for those unfamiliar with the game, I'll describe its rules in a bit). Besides the game rooms, there is also your room where you can change your character's outfit and hairstyle (both purchased at the Inn's shop), view your awards in the trophy case, look at your collected Illustrations or browse the various business cards you've traded with your friends. This is the base of operation for the game, but most of your time will be spent at the tables. The game itself is fairly simple to explain, but requires a good bit of forethought and strategy to get good at. Up to four players sit at a grid, each player places a piece in their respective corner. Each turn, you place another one of your tiles down (everyone has the same tiles, just colored differently). But the catch is, not only does your newly placed piece have to touch an existing block of the same color, but you can only touch at the corner, so you won't be putting any pieces side-by-side. The game is over when no one can put anything down, and the points are decided by the number of squares of your color you weren't able to place on the board (a piece with three squares is three points), and the person with the lowest number of squares left wins. Like I said, the game appears to be fairly simple. You want to get as many pieces on the board as possible, while keeping your opponents from being able to attach to their chains. But you will also want to get rid of your bigger pieces sooner, not only because they are worth more points and you wouldn't want them in your available pieces bin, but also because later in the game, there are fewer and fewer holes in the board, so the smaller tiles will be more valuable then.
Difficulty: Blokus Portable: Steambot Championship is fairly well balanced. As a strategy board game, there is a lot of thinking several steps ahead involved here, and the opponent A.I.'s were a good mix of intelligent players and easier opponents. I found that most games were filled with a good mix of these types of players. While the easier opponents didn't require as much effort, the harder ones always had me replaying matches several times until I came out on top. In the end, I never really felt like I was playing too far below my level, but I never felt like there was no way I could win either.
Game Mechanics: Blokus Portable: Steambot Championship, and specifically the board game of Blokus, has an interesting twist in the fact that you can only place your tiles on the corners of your other pieces. While a game that allows you to place pieces side-by-side will allow you to be a bit more defensive and attempt to cut off sections of the board, forcing moves to be on the corners only means that trying to do that will almost always allow your opponents through your wall. This means that your actions will have to be a bit more aggressive and preemptive than another similar game. Instead of trying to block off sections of the board, you really have to consider ways to halt an existing chain that your opponent is working off of. This can typically be done by taking up the positions around your opponent's corners so that they can't place there. But even this strategy isn't flawless since you could easily find yourself in a predicament where you don't have any corners to build off of, especially if you don't put a lot of thought into the bar-shaped tiles which have only four corners. I have to say, the design idea to force placement at corners is really novel and makes this game much more of a strategists' dream. If you have played and liked the normal Blokus games, then this portable version is right up your alley.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
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