Tetris Plus

Aqui há uns tempos não havia salão de jogos onde não existissem máquinas de Tetris. O próprio GameBoy foi lançado com este quebra-cabeças de loucos. Agora, ele está de volta para nos fritar mais alguns neurónios.

I used to be a big time Tetris fanatic (I have a hot-pink Tetris game watch to prove it), so I was all geared up to play Tetris Plus. And the game doesn't disappoint. It lets you play just plain old, classic Tetris (which is 80 percent of the reason to buy this game) as well a goofy variant with individual puzzles. Two players can play independent Tetris games at any time or battle each other in the Versus Mode. You can even edit the playfield to create especially tricky Tetris scenarios. Sure, the graphics are nothing special and this game could easily have been done on the Genesis, but then Tetris' success was never built on fancy graphics.

So I'm a Tetris die-hard. That said, I was disappointed by Tetris Plus. I would only recommend this game to those of you who, like me, *have* to have a Tetris game on your consoles. IMO the NES version is much better, and if I still had an NES, I would stick with that.

How ironic it is that, at a time when it should be reinforcing its worth as a polygon-pushing powerhouse, the Saturn is getting what amounts to little more than a conversion of a game that even the Game Boy can handle with ease.

Is it possible to follow up a game that's been called "perfect" by veteran game journalists, and even voted the second-best game of all time (right behind Super Mario 64) in a respected magazine? Tetris' creator, the "famed Russian inventor" Alexey Pajitnov, hasn't stopped trying. He's spent the decade since Tetris' debut creating weaker and weaker (hence forgettable) incarnations of his "perfect" game - Welltris, Faces: Tris III, Bombtris. Tetris Plus was converted from a Japanese coin-op, and not conceived by Pajitnov, but it might as well have been. This game seems like something he'd be desperate enough to try at this point.

Tetris Plus is a game that adds extras to a classic that didn't require such an update. Worse, it doesn't even manage to get the original gameplay right. Whether you're a fan or not, you'll want to avoid this game and look for your puzzle fix elsewhere.

Tetris is a classic puzzle game that's widely considered to be one of the great video games of all time, if not the greatest. Despite its simple, blocky graphics, the gameplay is remarkably addicting. It's tough to screw up Tetis, but Jaleco came close with this ill-advised version.