FRGR #16: Coloris (Avesoft, 1990)

Developed by Signum Victoriae
Designed by Pertti Lehtinen and Keijo Heljanko
Intro programmed by Keijo Heljanko
Game programmed by Pertti Lehtinen
Graphics by Harri Granholm, Mika Meriläinen and Jyrki Kummola
Music and sound effects by Tor Bernhard Gausen and Jean-Pierre Jandrain
Published for Commodore Amiga by Avesoft in 1990.

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INTRODUCTION & GAME STATUS

It's that time of year again, where we celebrate the Finnish Independence by reviewing a classic Finnish game from the olden days. This year's chosen title is Coloris from Avesoft, easily one of the best known Finnish games ever released for Commodore Amiga. It was one of the first Amiga games that I ever played, only to find out afterwards, that it was a Finnish game, which somehow didn't occur to me while seeing Signum Victoriae's obviously Finnish logo. I suppose I must have not been too bright at that age. Anyway, Coloris was the first notable Amiga game from Finland, only to have its international release cancelled by the publisher Avesoft due to fear of copyright infringement. Whether it was the right choice or not, I shall leave it for you to decide, because I'm not 100% certain.

Around the time of release, Coloris received positive reviews, with the Finnish MikroBitti magazine's Jukka Tapanimäki (you might recognize the name) giving it full five stars, while two non-Finnish magazines, Datormagazin and Amiga Joker, gave it a more reasonable 8/10, or 80%. At the time of starting to write this entry, Coloris has a score of 6.92 from 24 votes at LemonAmiga, which I suppose is realistically good.

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THE REVIEW IN ALL ITS COMPACT GLORY

Booting up Coloris on an Amiga in 1990 must have been an awesome experience, with the title sequence resembling more of demoscene productions than the usual game intros of the time. As old fellow Amigists will know, many Amiga demos in the early 1990's did wow us more in different ways than most games did, and Signum Victoriae's logo was one such an awesome sight back then, with the waving mirrored image of the above on the water surface below bringing a magical effect to the whole intro. After the SV logo, the game logo appears for an undetermined duration, with the game credits popping up over the water surface level in some old style font. All this is accompanied by a six-minute long, gloomy ambient track that fits the screen's atmosphere nicely.

Screenshots from the intro sequence.

The only way to proceed is to tap the fire button on your joystick, upon which the game proceeds to load the main menu screen from the disk. Here, you can choose to start a marathon game or a time game. The marathon mode is, quite obviously, an infinite mode, and in the timed game, your mission is to survive for 100 seconds. In the eventuality, that you grow tired of one game mode, you can press ESC key to get back to the main menu.

Just a quick side-note here, you don't really need to examine the menu screen and the following loading screen too closely to notice, that the game's cover art has been largely compiled from elements in these two screens, and some yellow text thrown in with a strange typo. But of course, how many of us actually ever even saw the original cover back in the day?

Menu and loading screen.

On the surface, Coloris plays and feels much like Sega's arcade classic, Columns, from just one year prior to the release of Coloris, which is why Avesoft were reluctant on releasing the game internationally. However, there are a couple of things that make Coloris differ considerably from Columns. First off, stylistically it looks more like a straight Tetris clone. Granted, the way the three-square column blocks only appear vertically aligned, and of which the three squares are switched around between themselves with the fire button does feel exactly like you were playing Columns. Apart from your joystick, the only other controls are the aforementioned ESC key to return to main menu, and you can also toggle pause with either Shift key.

The yellow line on the sides of the block container means that you cannot place blocks any higher than that. So, you get no more than fourteen (14) lines of space to play within, at first, which brings us to the second deviation: every 7th breaking, the game raises the placed column blocks by one full row. If you're playing the time mode, this happens every 7th second, which is a bit panic inducing. Now, this might seem familiar enough from later games like Puyo Puyo and Tetris Attack (Panel de Pon), but the "penalty" lines are invisible, therefore impossible to destroy in the usual method. And of course, the longer you play, the further up the game will raise your blocks, seemingly without any good reason.

Marathon mode.

Thirdly, the way to fight this annoying "penalty" feature, is to control the speed of your falling blocks. In their default speed, they will cause no unexpected effects to your other blocks, but if you speed them up by pulling the joystick down, you can punch the previous blocks one row downwards, provided that you can actually destroy any connected blocks. If you need more time to align the falling blocks, you can also slow the blocks by pulling the joystick up; naturally, this does equally much to the blocks directly below the falling ones as the default speed.

The way to gain back lost rows is to destroy at least five blocks simultaneously, but destroying more blocks simultaneously will give you additional rows back, as well as something called "joker" blocks. I'm not exactly certain of what these "joker" blocks are, since I have yet to see anything particularly special, even though I have been able to break anything up to eight blocks simultaneously, but I suspect they could be some more helpful columns recalculated by the computer to appear at that moment. If there's someone out there, who knows better, feel free to throw a comment.

Time mode.

In terms of gameplay, Coloris definitely has its own thing going, even though it certainly builds on the format of Columns. Visually, it's not quite as interesting as Columns, nor as pretty as its loading screens and intro sequence give reason to expect, but it's still adequate, if a bit confusing, if you don't know how the game actually works. The most likely thing from the game to lodge itself into your mind quite instantly is the in-game music, which is simultaneously soothing, energetic, earthly yet slightly otherworldly, with early 1990's techno sensibilities hidden under a fairly traditional structure, all of which makes the music feel like it doesn't feel like it should be in any other game. Too bad there aren't any sound effects, but then again, the game's hypnotic feel might get ruined with an overabundance of clicks, crashes and booms.

High score table.

The only serious problem with Coloris is its lack of a two-player mode, which is what made some of the "falling blocks" -type puzzle games on the 16-bit consoles to great later in the 90's. To be fair, though, Coloris is a bit difficult to get started with, if you haven't read the instructions, but once you have come to terms with the gameplay, you might find yourself getting bored rather easily with the Marathon mode. Indeed, nowadays, my favourite way to play Coloris is the Time mode, which ramps up the challenge an insane amount, but makes the game feel properly like no other 90's puzzle game. With that alone, Coloris deserves its place in the midst of all the other "falling blocks" puzzle games, and for what my word is worth, should not be disregarded for its obvious connection to a Sega game.

PLAYABILITY   - 8
GRAPHICS      - 7
SOUNDS        - 7
ADDICTIVENESS - 6
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OVERALL       - 7

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AFTERWORDS & VIDEO

While Signum Victoriae were working on the original Amiga version of Coloris, they had asked Jukka Tapanimäki (famous for Netherworld, Octapolis and Zamzara on the C64) to playtest and write a review of the game, thus earning his name at the top spot in the high score table in the original. Until 2013, though, it was not commonly known, that Coloris was in the works for having a C64 port, along with DOS and Atari ST versions.

Screenshots from two different C64 previews.
Left: Jukka Tapanimäki version from 1990. Right: Stefan Okhuysen version from 1992.

Some workfiles for the C64 version, featuring some graphics and placeholder music by Jeroen Tel, were found from Jukka's archives after he passed away, and released to the Games That Weren't website in 2013. The level of involvement from Jukka Tapanimäki himself have not been confirmed, but it seems as if he was to be the programmer and graphician. Another Coloris conversion was in the works in 1992 by Stefan Okhuysen and Guy Shavitt, which is at least somewhat playable, but also was left unfinished, which is all the same, since it doesn't actually play like the Avesoft game.

Atari ST preview.

Of the DOS version, I only learned through the GTW64 site, and it has no presence in any DOS-centric website as far as I know, but the Atari ST demo version is available at Atarimania, and likely elsewhere. You need to have TOS 1.02 selected as the operating system in your emulator to get the demo to play; otherwise the game will either be uncontrollable or will not load at all. It doesn't look too different from the Amiga version, although there are differences enough, most of all with some blocks having letters in them, and some columns having less than three blocks. This is somewhat explained by the message screen shown when the game is loading, which mentions that this is actually a part of what would have become Coloris 2 - a sequel, then, rather than a port. But from the little that was made available of the game, it appears playable enough.

Anyway, the Atari ST version was developed by Good Job Software, with most of the work done by Vesa Pellinen, with only some help with music by Mika Poikonen. Similarly to the Amiga version, this was to be released by Avesoft in 1990, but didn't get past this available playable demo version.

Just in case my description and review of Coloris wasn't enough, I prepared a small demonstrational video of both of the game's modes for your consumption. I suppose that should be enough to give you some idea as to how far Coloris actually is from Columns. Be aware, though, that this video features a rather long intro segment, just so you can hear the music in the intro as far as I thought was necessary.

While Coloris is not perhaps the best representation of Finnish games on the 16-bits, it's not nearly as inconsequential as some of the other examples are. On that note, I hope this was suitable enough for this Finnish Independence Day, and I shall get back on the topic probably in about 6 months or so. Hyvää itsenäisyyspäivää!