When I saw this on sale at half price it was one of those kinds of impulse buys where I figured why not? But at the same time, I also figured that whatever this game was like, it surely would be a poor man’s attempt at recreating the Tetris experience.
Well, I can say that I was beyond pleasantly surprised at the result. This game is clearly a few generations beyond what I can remember from the LCD games of old. In fact, as a version of Tetris, this is almost as complete as many version I’ve played from Tetris on the Game Boy through to The Tetris Effect on PlayStation VR. That said, it isn’t as complete even if it is near.
If you’ve played any version of Tetris over the years, you’ll be used to the various shapes each being a different colour. Doesn’t always happen, with the aforementioned Tetris Effect being an example where at times the shapes may have a design choice which limits them being colour coded. Still, for the most part in Tetris history this has been the case. This handheld being an LCD game means that cannot happen. This shouldn’t be much of an issue as a large percentage of players who first played Tetris when it became popular in the era of the Game Boy will not have played it in colour and had to put up with the various Tetris shapes having different symbols inside them. This would help you tell the various shapes apart from one another.
With an LCD game like this, having each shape have a unique colour or pattern to distinguish the various shapes apart wasn’t possible. A limitation of LCD games is that every possible area of the screen that will be lit up needs to have a predesigned graphic assigned to it. This means that you can’t easily have two different designs or patterns occupy the same area of the screen.
What you’re left with on this handheld is that the pieces look different due to their shape as they fall, but once several pieces have piled down on top and next to each other, you can no longer tell which was which.
This game also plays more like the original Game Boy Tetris than how the game has been updated for the past couple of decades. This basically means that a couple of important additions to how the game flows that was added in the late 1990s is not present in this version.
This includes being able to bank a Tetris shape which isn’t useful for you at the moment and swap it back in when you’re ready. This was a handy addition that would help you avoid having to use a piece that didn’t fit and hoping that whatever the next piece to enter the Tetris well would be more useful. Well, that isn’t available in this version of the game. To be honest I’m not sure why not, as with everything else they managed in this take it seems like it shouldn’t be that difficult to include.
The other and more noticeable change from the other modern versions of Tetris is that there is no infinite spin. Back in the day as soon as a shape landed on top of another piece or touched the bottom of the well it would be fixed in position and another shape would enter from the top. The addition of infinite spin would allow a player to continue to spin and flip shapes and this could get you past a mistake. Some early games to include infinite spin would truly allow you to keep rotating pieces until the end of time whereas the newest copies of the game do limit you to rotate a piece for an extra couple of seconds.
This version of the game takes things back to the old school and doesn’t give you that infinite spin that we’ve all become so used to.
Another difference I’ve noticed is hard to describe but I’ll do my best. Occasionally I’ve noticed that if a shape is hugging the side of the well as it’s falling it means you cannot rotate the piece. It’s like the wall is preventing it from turning, which to the best of my memory doesn’t happen in a proper video game of Tetris. In normal Tetris, the piece would just shift out to turn and then still be near the side of the well as close as it can be.
The game gets progressively more challenging and I’ve taken it for a few spins to get to level fifteen which is where Tetris normally ends. Can’t say if it does here or what end screen you may get, because I got tapped out just before the end as the old school rules did make the fifteenth level of this get stupidly hard very quickly.
The sound is suitably Tetris, but you can’t change the volume. It’s either on and annoyingly loud…or it’s off. For me it was off quickly.
But, the important thing to answer is if you should buy this? To be honest, yeah, but only if you want it for the novelty, or know someone who maybe played Tetris on the Game Boy back in the day, but wouldn’t care to play other games nowadays. It’s not like you can’t get Tetris on your phone for free, but this may be a cool gift that someone will pick up for a little while and then forget about until they divider it in a drawer again.
The cost of this is high for it being just one game on a unit which isn’t too dissimilar in size to a Game Boy Pocket. I got mine half price in a sale, and did so as an impulse buy whilst getting the Pac-Man handheld also half price. It wasn’t lost on me that the cost of the two together, if bought at the full price would have been close to the cost of a Super Pocket from Blaze and that there are loads of cheap Game Boy clone devices on Amazon that give you thousands of games for not much difference in price for what I paid for two.
Still, this for what it is, is a fun little unit. The game plays better than I expected and it looks and feels like old school Tetris.
