Rampcube

Rampcube is a puzzle game from 1991, one of the countless small shareware titles that travelled between computers on floppies and through BBS boards. It belongs to the wave of puzzlers that went looking for their own variation on falling blocks after the success of Tetris — and this particular variation is quite fresh, if modest.

The principle has two phases, and it is their alternation that sets the game apart. First, coloured cubes slide down a ramp at the top of the screen while you shuttle a grey catcher beneath them to catch what falls. But every caught cube then has to go somewhere: you drop it into the columns of a ten-by-ten playing field, trying to group colours together, because only deliberate arrangements score. Your attention is therefore permanently split — catch everything mindlessly and you bury the board in junk, ponder your placement too long and you miss the next cube coming down the ramp.

That switching between reflexes and deliberation is the entire game. It works, but it is fair to say it is one idea without further development: no special cubes, no rule twists. The presentation is modest even for 1991, and after half an hour you know exactly what this game will hold for the rest of its life.

Still, it has its place. The shareware scene was a hatchery for exactly this kind of miniature, and Rampcube is an honest, cleanly crafted specimen of it — a trifle for one afternoon, or for short sessions in the moments when your hands want to catch and your head wants to sort. If you enjoy the genre archaeology around Tetris, here is one lesser-known exhibit for the collection.

You can start it on oldgame.cz right in the browser, with no installing and no waiting.