Do you remember the old Tetris game from 1988 that ran on the Mac SE? Tetris was one of the first games for the Mac. I spent many hours playing Tetris! Playing Tetris was what I referred to as "geometric simulation!"
It has been many years since the last time I played Tetris on a Mac! One recent Sunday evening, a friend told me about Quinn, which is a color version of Tetris that uses Mac OS X's graphics features.
Use caution if you download Quinn! Like the original Tetris, Quinn is highly addictive!
Quinn works on any Mac that runs Mac OS X. Quinn 3.2.2 requires Mac OS X 10.4.2. Panther and Jaguar users can play Quinn by downloading an older version from the author's web page
Quinn is not intended to be a redesigned version of Tetris; it is classic Tetris on modern hardware.
Some features have been added though, such as configurable keys, network play via Bonjour or the Internet, multi-user play, and a personal high score for each player. You can also design your own game board and pieces.
Considering it is free, Quinn is exceptional. The author clearly put a lot of effort into writing Quinn. The graphics quality and keyboard response time for Quinn are great!
That being said, I did not give Quinn a perfect rating. When I first started playing Quinn, I was confronted with an unexpected challenge. I assumed the arrow keys on my keyboard could move the falling pieces and that the space bar could rotate them. My assumption was wrong, but I think that's the way the original Tetris worked. As it turns out, those keys do nothing, although they can be configured to work as I expected.
The pull down help menu offers a lot of information, but the information about which keys do what is hard to locate. I figured out how to maneuver the pieces when I looked at the preferences menu, which is where one can define the keys the game uses. Other than that minor detail, Quinn is a superb game.
I give my thanks to Simon Härtel for doing such a wonderful job writing Quinn. Simon informed me that he will offer a new version of Quinn on his web site version soon and he also has some other software, which you can check out on his web site.
