189. Quarth (Konami, Famicom (Arcade), 1990)

Quarth is a home conversion of Konami's 1989 arcade game of the same name. Quarth is a kind of puzzle shooter hybrid: you control a ship that fires blocks, and the objective is to use those blocks to build rectangles out of random assortments of shapes in order to destroy them, lest they crash into your ship.

Quarth is a very simple game that doesn't really change. There are only maybe 4 or 5 types of blocks that appear, so you quickly figure out the best strategy for filling each one in to get it off the playfield as quickly as possible. It's like popping bubble wrap, but slightly more tedious, like if you were popping bubble wrap using only your pinky fingers. Your ship normally moves forward at a crawl, but if you get too bored, you can also speed it up to get to the next set of blocks. Levels are generally very long as well, and don't offer much in the way of anything different to do.

In addition to a boring 2 player trade off versus mode where you are just playing the 1 player version of the game, there is also a 2 player co-op mode where both ships have to share the screen. There is also a 2 player versus mode that is simultaneous, so I'm not sure why anyone would choose the other versus mode.

3/5, the most tedious bubble wrap ever popped