Strong Lines

Strong Lines is a 1994 DOS arcade game built on the field-claiming formula: you carve pieces out of the playfield and try to clear it before one of the roaming enemies catches you. Anyone who has played Xonix or its many Lines-style descendants will pick it up in under a minute — the controls are minimal, and the difficulty scales through enemy speed and count.

It shipped on the German Mad Data label (bhv Verlag), the same house imprint that carried Bump-Bomp, Mad Mac and Sergeant Slotte from the Dnipropetrovsk team Common ShockWare Group. That makes Ukrainian authorship likely but not documented: the attribution rests on the label and the surrounding series rather than on names in the credits. The genre itself was a staple of post-Soviet development in the early nineties.

Strong Lines can be played directly in your browser at OldGame.cz.