[User summary]
T.R.A.Z. stands for "TRansformable Arcade Zone".
It was developed as an inteded improvement of the classic Breakout.
You control a bat whose goal is to deflect a bouncing ball so that it hits the bricks scattered on the screen. Once all the bricks are demolished, you move on the next level (complete all the 64 levels and you win the game).
In the meantime, you must also avoid that the ball falls into the "laser beams" usually placed instead of walls on one or more sides of the screen (or the ball is lost; lose all balls and the game is over).
The game features indestructible bricks, monsters hampering your efforts (they slow your bat upon contact and albeit destroyed when hit by the ball, this changes the trajectory of the ball itself in unexpected and thus potentially dangerous ways), bonuses randomly released when destroying bricks (whose effects are mixed: slow the ball, quicken the ball, multiplies the ball, score points, ball becomes unstoppable by normal bricks, grant the bat the option to fire for a limited time to blast bricks and monsters, etc.) and a semi-random sequence of the levels (nor even level 1 is fixed).
The major novelty when compared to Breakout and its clones is that the segments where the ball gets lost can be multiple and located almost everywhere (and not be always exactly all the lower part of the screen); accordingly, you may have to control up to four bats at once.
A cooperative multiplayer option splits the control of the bats between the two players (with the added trick that control of the bats may suddenly switch during game between the two players).
A construction kit allowed the creation of custom levels, granting potentially infinite replay value.
