Quarth ROM

Also, be sure to check out Tetris Plus.

Quarth, known as Block Hole outside Japan, is a hybrid puzzle/shoot ’em up game developed by Konami which was released in 1989 as an arcade game. Besides the arcade version, there were also ports of the game to the MSX2 (with a built-in SCC chip), Famicom, and Game Boy. Home releases used the Quarth name worldwide.

With the exception of the Game Boy Color release in Europe of Konami GB Collection Vol. 2, where the game was renamed to the generic title Block Game for unknown reasons. Quarth is a combination of Tetris-style gameplay and a fixed shooter in the Space Invaders tradition. The player’s focus is on falling blocks, and the action is geometrical.

Rather than arranging the blocks together to make a row of disappearing blocks, a spaceship positioned at the bottom of the screen shoots blocks upwards to make the falling block pattern into squares or rectangles. Once the blocks have been arranged properly, the shape is destroyed and the player is awarded points based on the shape’s size. The blocks continue to drop from the top of the screen in various incomplete shapes.

As each level progresses, the blocks drop at greater speed and frequency. There are also various power-ups which could be located to increase your ship’s speed, among other bonuses. The game continues until the blocks reach the dotted line at the bottom of the screen, whereupon the player’s ship is “player’s ship is “quarthed”, crushed flat.