The New Tetris
Tetris has been released on pretty much any piece of electronic hardware with a screen. I remember back when the original Nintendo GameBoy was still new, people's moms used to steal it away so they could get some personal time with Tetris; bragging about their high score and lording it over their kids. Tetris in itself has always been pretty enjoyable in most any iteration, but by far my favorite version was The New Tetris for Nintendo 64. With a couple small but smart changes and the huge bonus of four-player simultaneous play; which is something that we took plenty of advantage of.
I don't think any one of us actually bought The New Tetris, I think we just rented it a number of times. But on those occasion that we had it available, we put quite a few unbroken hours into this game. When I say unbroken, I'm saying that there was a time when we were playing this and I had gone for such a long time without blinking that when I finally did my contact lens had dried out and folded in half. Tetris is never as much fun as it is when you're playing split-screen with 3 other people. And with The New Tetris' different competition modes, it can be real intense.
The New Tetris did a great job overall just cleaning up the board, the design of the pieces and more than anything, the music. Noone would suspect such a great soundtrack coming from a Tetris game, but The New Tetris really had this fantastic score; each track based on a theme present in the background art. The pieces had a nice clean bevel to the design and took in consideration lighting to really give it a more tangible feel. They added the neat feature of being able to create a big Tetris block by seamlessly (without any bits sticking out) combining pieces to make a 4x4 square. Eliminating these bought you extra points, or hit your opponents hard during multiplayer.
The New Tetris was also a ton of single player fun. Unlike regular Tetris where you are just gunning for a high-score, in The New Tetris all your completed lines got added up to a grand total. As you played more and more the lines built up recreations of the 7 Wonders of the World, which you were able to view once completed. So it definitely had that ongoing draw to play rather that just being your typical timewaster like most puzzle games.
I've yet to find a version of Tetris as complete and clean as this one. I'd really love to see this revisited and re-released in high definition for newer platforms. And if I ever have a retro-game night with some old friends, I'd really like to find a copy of this to play.
Tetris has been released on pretty much any piece of electronic hardware with a screen. I remember back when the original Nintendo GameBoy was still new, people's moms used to steal it away so they could get some personal time with Tetris; bragging about their high score and lording it over their kids. Tetris in itself has always been pretty enjoyable in most any iteration, but by far my favorite version was The New Tetris for Nintendo 64. With a couple small but smart changes and the huge bonus of four-player simultaneous play; which is something that we took plenty of advantage of. I don't think any one of us actually bought The New Tetris, I think we just rented it a number of times. But on those occasion that we had it available, we put quite a few unbroken hours into this game. When I say unbroken, I'm saying that there was a time when we were playing this and I had gone for such a long time without blinking that when I finally did my contact lens had dried out and folded in half. Tetris is never as much fun as it is when you're playing split-screen with 3 other people. And with The New Tetris' different competition modes, it can be real intense.
The New Tetris did a great job overall just cleaning up the board, the design of the pieces and more than anything, the music. Noone would suspect such a great soundtrack coming from a Tetris game, but The New Tetris really had this fantastic score; each track based on a theme present in the background art. The pieces had a nice clean bevel to the design and took in consideration lighting to really give it a more tangible feel. They added the neat feature of being able to create a big Tetris block by seamlessly (without any bits sticking out) combining pieces to make a 4x4 square. Eliminating these bought you extra points, or hit your opponents hard during multiplayer. The New Tetris was also a ton of single player fun. Unlike regular Tetris where you are just gunning for a high-score, in The New Tetris all your completed lines got added up to a grand total. As you played more and more the lines built up recreations of the 7 Wonders of the World, which you were able to view once completed. So it definitely had that ongoing draw to play rather that just being your typical timewaster like most puzzle games.
I've yet to find a version of Tetris as complete and clean as this one. I'd really love to see this revisited and re-released in high definition for newer platforms. And if I ever have a retro-game night with some old friends, I'd really like to find a copy of this to play.
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