Tetris DS - Review

The two most important rules in Tetris are:

1. The speed at which tetrominoes shower from the sky should only ever increase. The player should have absolutely no control over the rate at which they fall.

2. The blocks should be sticky. They should rigidly lock themselves into place the moment that their southern most side so much as brushes against another block.

Tetris DS overlooks both these rules, and so – despite what the box says – cannot be considered a proper version of Tetris.

Vinegar & Uranium Flavoured

So I decided the world needed another thousand words on art and videogames. This is the first of a regular column I'll be doing for GAMES? under the secret codename FF(P)S, which basically lets me be mega opinionated but use a "Get Out of Jail Free" card if I ever take it TOO FAR MAN, YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR.

Players Will Be Players

I'm simultaneously proud and utterly ashamed of the piece that's just been posted on Resolution. It's 87% fictional, which is probably a betrayal in itself, but that 13% is still enough to make it hugely embarrassing for me to re-read.

Anyway, it's here if you want to check it out.

Tetris Friends

It's been mighty quiet round these parts lately- partly because my life's been consumed by this brilliantly designed Tetris site. It's hugely worth creating a profile, so that your performance is tracked in the many games you're sure to end up playing.

Possibly the greatest videogame ever made.

I've been playing the two-player battle mode mostly, which thanks to an excellent match-making system means it doesn't take long before you start playing against people of a similar ability to yourself.

Terrifyingly addictive.

Tetris - The 10th Best Game Ever Made

Even after the human race has gotten bored of Beethoven, sick of Shakespeare and tired of Tolstoy, Tetris will endure. As much as that’s hyperbolic (and a mediocre demonstration of GCSE-level alliteration), the simplicity and universal appeal of the Tetris concept makes it practically unimaginable that its charm will ever fade. This is a game that taps into a primordial human desire to sort, categorise and arrange; and as a result is incapable of becoming boring.

Did anyone ever need the rules of Tetris explained to them? No. The game starts, a 4-piece block (or tetromino) inches from the top toward the bottom of the screen, and in the three or four seconds it takes to get there, the game has all the time it needs to complete its tutorial. No-one needs to be told that the blocks should be stacked as tidily as possible- human instinct takes care of that.

Porn for mathematicians

Of course, human instinct also gets a kick out of the way the game forces you to balance risk against reward. As anyone who’s broken the 999,999 score barrier would surely tell you, the ideal is to always remove four lines at once using a Tetris block, as it scores 30 times more points than removing a single line. Yet this also makes you dependent on one type of block, encouraging you to build higher and higher, and putting you in serious danger should the valuable Tetris piece takes its sweet time to arrive (which inevitably it will).

Porn for videogame players

It’s the Gameboy version of Tetris that I’ve singled out for particular credit here. Not just because Nintendo astutely realised that Tetris is a perfect game to play on the move, but for the more significant reason that it spread the joy of the two-player mode to a world-wide audience. If the third pillar of “what human instinct is about” is “screwing each other over” (and let’s face it, there’s plenty of evidence that’s the case), then a two-player Tetris game seems to have been designed to satisfy all your most fundamental needs. There are few things more satisfying than hearing the “cling cling badow!” that accompanies the removal of four lines at once, followed seconds later by an “Argh!” from your opponent as they receive your lines at the bottom of their screen.

Tetris is videogame design at its purest, most restrained, and perhaps most elegant, living up to old the maxim that (almost) every great game embodies: “simple to play, impossible to master ”. It’s probably the least controversial pick on this list, because everyone’s played it, and everyone loves it; and in fact, the controversial thing is probably that it’s not higher up. I don’t care. I’ve chosen the arbitrary order in which to rank all these very different games, and I’m sticking to it.