P(O/I)TT News

« POTT '04 Writeup (with pics!) | Main | Building Tetris »

Arcade Tetris
by wise

So you want to play winning tetris? Well, don't look to this dud of a Tetris implementation to hone your skills on. You'd be better off playing the awkward original Playstation version (The Next Tetris) with its psychedelic wobbling pieces than this train wreck. Where to begin?

The stand-up arcade version of Tetris purports to bring you the game we all know and love, but it almost seems that the designers were more focused on bringing "cute" russianisms into the graphic design rather than focusing on the gameplay. Look! Backwards letters! Crazy kicking dancing men! Onion Domes! IT'S RUSSIA!!!!!

Hinderances to succeeding at this game abound: the gigantic joystick vacillates between horribly unresponsive and hair-trigger sensitive. Each level has a different line total to meet, but when that goal is met, the game stops to play you some maniacal trepak (which was blasting out of the speakers on the particular machine we were test-driving) and recap your progress. When the next level begins, the board is reset, and you might be given a completely different objective! Talk about breaking your rhythm! To top it off, the speed increases almost exponentially, no gradual increase here.

Some levels have garbage, some don't. This, in my mind, is a terrible distortion of the original game, where the object is to last as long as you can, until the bin overflows. I know some variations on the Existing Garbage objective have been around for almost as long as Tetris itself, but all of the competing implementations never agreed on basic rules. The beautiful simplicity of the original Tetris objective is its masterstroke. Like chess or soccer, you begin with very simple available moves, but the complexity of how a single game can turn out is where the beauty exists. Attempts like this to "mix it up" with garbage and non-garbage levels just overreach and distract from what could be a passable implementation.

But the most criminal decision the designers made? The one that should have them serving 10 years in the arcade gulag? NO TETRISES. None. Get four lines and you get points for four lines. No tetris bonus, and certainly no flashing screen atta-boy. What were they thinking?!

Bottom line, it might be tempting to step to this arcade with your friends thinking, "I'm a decent Tetris player, I can hold my own here," but don't kid yourself. This version isn't worth your time.

Comments