Denki Blocks! (GBA, 2001)

Rating: 8.5/10

Denki Blocks! is a game I've had for years now and never thought about playing it until I went through my games a few weeks ago. I had the game without even knowing what it was about or even what genre it fell under...

Denki Blocks! is a puzzle game made by the Scottish developer Denki...Yeah, they really named a game after their company. The game was made for the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and even the Sky Gamestar... What the hell is a Sky Gamestar? The game was later remade for the PSP and mobile devices and from what I've seen, those versions look really unappealing.

The game takes place on Puzzle Island, where everyone is playing some game called Denki Blocks! (Yes, it's exclaimed even in the game. Might as well add a trademark too.) The objective of the game is to maneuver Gumblocks around a board in order to connect them to Gumblocks of the same color. Sounds simple right? Well this is a puzzle game, so it does get challenging after awhile. There are different game modes: Tournament, Workout, and Perfecto!. I only played Tournament mode. At first I was going to 100% complete the game until I got frustrated on a bonus level... I kept retrying until I remembered that the point of my blog is to give my thoughts on a game. I don't need to do a completionist run.

In Tournament mode, you have to defeat the eight Denki Blocks! champions. Each champion has 25 puzzles for you to solve, but you have to solve at least 15 in order to get a trophy and advance. Even if you solve 15, you can come back and solve the remaining 10 puzzles to unlock 5 bonus puzzles. When you complete bonus puzzles, you get a special gift from the champion. And that's pretty much it for the gameplay; this is a pretty linear game.

Pros:

+ The art is really cute.

+ The music is nice.

+ You aren't forced to complete every puzzle.

+ There are multiple ways to solve a puzzle.

Cons:

- You can only undo a move once.

- Although it's good, there aren't many music tracks and it really gets repetitive after awhile.

Final Thoughts:

Denki Blocks! is a neat obscure GBA title that would've stayed under my radar if I didn't finally play it. I like puzzle games (even one of my old usernames was something like "thepuzzlelover"), but my favorite games in the genre are almost all similar to Tetris or Puyo Puyo, so this was a fun experience at trying something new. I'm honestly kind of surprised that there are no sequels to this. I'm not sure how many copies were sold, but it got very favorable reviews and even won an award. Maybe there's a fan somewhere who will eventually make a spiritual successor of some kind. I think I like this game enough to play it on my own time, so that's good. Plus there's lots of replay value since there's different modes and such. Do I recommend Denki Blocks!? If you like puzzle games and a good challenge, then yes. 

I've been thinking for awhile to put my YouTube channel to some use again. A few weeks ago I did a short Twitch stream and recorded it. I planned on uploading the video to YouTube, but decided not to and also I used my old Twitch account. I can't get into my current one right now, so I thought earlier "why not stream to YouTube?". I might try it this weekend if I'm free.