KNIGHT MOVES

Another non-GameBoy game? Heresy! Well, at least this one is by Alexi Pajitnov!

Shortly after Pajitnov created the iconic game Tetris, he came up with the idea for Knight Move. The game was purchased by a Soviet-US joint venture company called JV Dialog, and was later released as a Famicom Disk System game, only in Japan. The port is published by Nintendo.

Knight Move eventually got an updated Windows release in 1995 that had Pajitnov's face on the box, in the same way WildSnake did except Knight Moves is an idea he came up with. The gameplay is dead simple, a knight in chess can move two spaces forward and one to the side or vice versa, so your knight in the game can only move in that way as well. You pick up hearts for points, and every time you land on a tile it fades until it disappears. Hearts replenish missing tiles, but in game mode B you need to collect 3 or more hearts before tiles are replenished.

That's the whole game, collecting hearts and trying not to die. You can save your high scores onto the disk which is fun. The game was available either as a standalone disk via the Famicom Disk Writer Kiosk.

I don't know when else I'll get to talk about this but the Disk Writer Kiosk was a way for people to get new games without having to buy new disks. You would take your old disk to get rewritten, and the kiosk would even dispense you a new instruction card and J-card for your plastic case. Knight Moves looks like it could be small enough to be a single sided game (all magnetic disk media was double sided, with data being written on both sides of the physical disk,) but I can't tell if you would need to flip the disk to write your high scores or not. As you can imagine, obscure Japanese games and their tech specs on obscure Japanese hardware aren't something I can easily research.

I have some complaints about Knight Moves, specifically in the way the game controls. Instead of pointing the D-pad in the direction you want your piece to land, you press left and right to quickly choose a direction. This is incredibly confusing, and I've gotten messed up on more than one occasion because I couldn't point the knight to a move I know it could legally make. Also, the music isn't that great and every time you get a heart the whole background flashes in a way that gives me a headache, and I don't have photosensitivity issues.

The two principal means of scoring in the game are to make pits by landing on very faded tiles and holding down the A button mid-flight, which adds points per I think frame? Every now and then the knight will flash and the words "go, go!" will appear on the bottom of the screen. If you clear a tile after that you get 50 points, plus an extra 50 for each additional tile you clear in a row. So 50, 100, 150, etc. This adds a lot of risk to the game, especially in speedier play, since the game is encouraging you to take risks and go for big points while also not killing your run.

The game clicked for me sort of all at once: The goal of the game isn't to get hearts, it's to get combos. You make a large area of deep blue tiles, then try to remember your sequence of moves as you clear through them one after another, racking up heaps of points.

That's why there's a counter for the amount of holes you've made, that's why the game boo's you when you don't follow through on a combo. (The only other game I can think of that boo's you is Tempo on 32X, or is that a laugh track when you die?)

It's addictively fun, like a lot of Pajitnov's games, but it has to click first. This is our problem with future Puzzlerama feature, Yoshi's Cookie, that game hasn't clicked or me yet. But Knight Moves has, and now I wish I could play it all the time. If anyone is listening, this game could use a fresh coat of paint, I'd pay a few bucks to get this on Steam or even on mobile. Oh, definetly on mobile.