Tetris Attack

The Good
What a great game. It has a Yoshi theme complete with story and all. It is pretty basic but becomes complex through strategy. Rather than the original Tetris scenario where blocks fall from the top in random shapes, this game makes a complete row of random blocks appear from the bottom. This causes all the current blocks to be shoved upward. Eventually the blocks will hit the top of screen and then the round is over. You prevent this by eliminating blocks by aligning 3 or more of the same color. Tetris 2 makes things interesting with its flexibility. It has 4 modes for single player alone! Such as Endless, Time Trial, Stage clear, Puzzle and Vs. In the Endless mode you continually align 3 or more of each color block raising your score and the speed which new blocks appear from the bottom. You do this until your blocks hit the top. Time Trial mode you have a limited amount of time to rack up points before the next level begins. This mode is good for improving your combination making skills. Combinations are big points in this game. The only way to get the best Time Trial score is to do many combinations. Stage Clear mode is basically a story mode. You play five levels per round. There are over 6 rounds including bonus rounds. The objective of this mode is to essentially survive. During a round a flashing line will eventually appear, destroy all blocks above that line to win. Puzzle modes is one of my favorites. Basically there are blocks arranged on the screen that can be eliminated in a certain amount of moves. The moves are counted for and the maximum of moves allowed is displayed. This mode really beefs up your strategy. Versus mode is like 2 player but against a computer. It is split screen and interactive. When you do combos a huge block falls on top of the opponents side. These blocks can only be eliminated by connecting them to combinations. The bigger combo's you do, the bigger the block is that falls on the opponents stack. All this in just single player!! There are also two 2 player game modes to choose from, Time trial and VS. Now you can play these two familiar modes with a friend. This game is so much fun and addictive I strongly suggest forcing a break here and there, for your eyes sake.

The Bad
This game hurts my brain!

The Bottom Line
Awesome addition to the Tetris family. Really fun and challenging. The music is cool and the graphics look good.

The Good
Everything...each mode (Endless, Time Trial, Stage Clear, Puzzle and Vs.) offers unique gameplay challenges and helps develop all your gaming skills; speed, hand-eye coordination, critical thinking, forward thinking, pattern recognition, etc. The graphics are similar to Yoshi's Island, but a little more palatable for older audiences and offer a great backdrop to the action. The sounds and music never get in the way, instead working in tandem with the graphics to provide critical clues as to what's happening (hearing the Giant Garbage Block fanfare while playing against Bowser on Vs. is always a sign that you're about to get hurt...). Music is simple and hummable and you may even find yourself singing the tunes as you play.

There's even a two-player, head-to-head mode that features Time Trial and Vs. so you and a friend can have a go at the action together. Unless you're allergic to puzzle games - or you don't like Yoshi - , there's really no reason you won't like this game.

The Bad
The one singular complaint I have is the puzzles in Puzzle Mode are sometimes a bit too hard...I am even now pulling my hair out trying to figure out Stage 6-09. Otherwise, nothing.

The Bottom Line
A totally unique and thoroughly addicting gaming experience, the only real resemblance Attack has to the original Tetris is the title; in Tetris Attack, you have a pit full of colored tiles that you must switch horizontally to line up matches of 3 or more like-colors, but you can only switch two tiles at a time. While that is happening, new tiles are being pushed up from the bottom (except in Puzzle mode).

Sounds pretty easy, right? Well, it's more complicated than that...when a group of tiles disappears, any tiles above the new gap will fall down to fill it; if another group of tiles is cleared as a result, that results in a chain reaction, which gives you extra points and stops the rise of tiles for a moment. Also, you can line up more than three tiles at a time to form a combo, which has the same effect, if lessened, as a chain.

Chains and combos are the main push of the gameplay, as in Vs. Mode, those moves allow you to attack your opponent by burying them in Garbage Blocks, but more about that later... Combos are relatively easy, and anyone can learn to do them somewhat quickly. Chains are trickier and only true masters can get monster 20+ chains going. (This reviewer has only set up an 8 chain to date...). There are different ways to set up chains and the longer you can sustain one, the more points you will get and the bigger your attack will be in Vs.

Endless - What is sounds like; you play for as long as you can keep your stack of tiles from touching the ceiling. The catch is, the longer you play, the faster the tiles rise, forcing you to move faster and rack up higher and higher chains to stay in play. This is a good training ground for newbies at it allows them to gradually slide into the game, but challenges them enough to improve over time.

Time Trial - You have two minutes to get as many points as you can. This mode is an excellent proving ground for newbies who have been practicing on Endless Mode to test (or show off) their new skills in a non-competitive but challenging arena.

This is also the mode where pulling off chains and combos really pays off, as super-chains give major amounts of points.

Stage Clear - An interesting twist to Endless, you have to keep clearing tiles from the pit until a line appears. Once you see the line, you have to work to drop the tiles below the line to win. As you progress, the tiles rise faster and the line takes longer to appear.

Puzzle - Excellent practice for identifying chain patterns, Puzzle Mode gives you a specific number of tiles and a limited number of switches to clear every tile. There is always a solution, even if it's not always obvious, and of course the puzzles get harder and harder the further you progress.

Vs. - The Big Match. Sometimes called "Story Mode", 1 player Vs. pits you against a series of opponents, each of which is faster and more skilled than the last.

The story goes, Yoshi's eight friends have been brainwashed by Bowser's evil magic, and the only way to free them of the spell is to defeat them in one round of Tetris Attack. Once freed, your friends will fight with you to defeat the four Boss characters, which means you can select them as your "avatar" on screen. There's really no difference between the characters other than what they say when you attack...and if a character other than Yoshi falls during a match, they are no longer selectable.

The biggest difference of Vs. mode to any other is when you complete a Combo or Chain, it drops a large Garbage Block on top of your opponent's pile, which serves to block the movement of tiles and/or raise their stack to the ceiling quicker. Combos, no matter how large, will only drop small Garbage; never more than 5 tiles wide. Chains, on the other hand, will drop Garbage that crosses the entire pit and can even be two, three, four or more layers thick!

Whenever a chain beyond x2 is done, another layer will be added to the Garbage. So, for example, if you did a x5 consecutive chain, a Garbage 4 layers deep would fall on your opponent. This is good for you as Garbage can be eliminated by clearing tiles that touch the Garbage (the effect will be passed through multiple Garbage Block that are touching each other, regardless of whether every Garbage touches the tiles) and turn to tiles, but when this happens to deep Garbage, only the lowest layer will turn to tiles, and the other layers will revert back to Garbage. This is both a curse and a blessing; the curse is you have to clear each layer of a deep Garbage separately, the blessing is, if the Garbage is really deep, the converted tiles won't drop immediately, allowing you to set up a counter-attack using the converted tiles. The other part of the deep Garbage blessing is the fact that while the Garbage is converting, the tiles stop rising until the conversion is finished.

There is another type of Garbage, too, called Metal Garbage, but this requires special tiles to attack with. In addition to the normal colors, in Vs. mode you will occasionally get gray-colored tiles with "!" on them; line three of these up to send a Metal Garbage on your opponent that stretches across the screen. Line up four and you send two Metals and a three-tile-length Regular Garbage to your opponent.

Metals can be used strategically, as they must be cleared separate of Regular Garbage; if a Regular Garbage is converted while touching a Metal Garbage, only the Regular Garbage will be affected and the Metal will have to be cleared with a separate set of tiles. You can use this to your advantage by dropping a Metal or two amongst a large number of Regulars (especially Deep Regulars) to make it that much more difficult for your opponent to clear all the Garbage quickly. This strategy can usually sound the death knell for your opponent in the late-game when the tiles are rising fast.

2-player Time Trial - Same as 1 player, but this time you are competing with another player to see who can get the highest score in two minutes. This is the less confrontational 2-player mode.

2-player Vs. - Same as 1 player, but like with 2-p Time Trial, you are now competing against another person in a best-of-three match. All the other rules are the same.

No matter which mode you play, you will be challenged, but you'll always come back for more, too, because once you get Tetris Attacked, there's no going back!

The Good
I have stated before that Mario can be used on pretty much anything as some sort of quality-guarantee stamp, the beloved Italian plumber has been in so many different games and genres that context or consistency have long since been abandoned. It however seems that Tetris wasn't Mario's thing, so instead we have Yoshi and his buddies as the main theme of this game. The results are quite astounding, not only is the game packed with a cheerful atmosphere, but I would honestly say that I like this game better than the original Tetris because of this.

The music and sound-effects are the only components that weren't taken from the Mario or Yoshi franchise, though you'd be justified in thinking that they were. The brilliantly composed songs really fit with the aforementioned atmosphere this game has going and sound-effects were always a joy to hear. There are also some smaller parts that are new, such as a character who is practically a walking alarm-clock, but nothing really worth mentioning.

Now that we have the atmosphere down, the next step should be the gameplay. In Tetris Attack you pretty much play a variant on the classic Tetris, blocks rise up from the ground and you have to swap the positions of different blocks to form rows of three. Once you get a row of three or more, the blocks disappear and you get points, however, if the blocks reach the top of the screen, the game ends. This creates a very fast-paced puzzle game and especially in the versus-mode you'll have to think really fast and learn to think ten seconds ahead of what you're doing.

The versus-mode is probably the best part of this game, just like how it was with Dr. Mario. You and a friend both get your own screen and you need to make sure to keep your blocks low while also trying to sabotage the other player. Making combos will cause extra blocks to drop on the other players, which gives you even more incentive to think ahead of your moves.

Challenge mode is also pretty fun and has you going down a number of different worlds with increasingly difficult stages. It starts out pretty easy, allowing new players to learn how to play the game before been thrown into the faster levels. Difficulty is pretty good in this game overall, setting the game on an easy setting will have blocks appearing much slower and start you off pretty easily, while setting the game on a higher difficulty will have much faster scrolling and blocks may already be stacked up pretty high.

This game as a whole subscribes to the ancient "easy to learn, hard to master" philosophy. Almost anybody can pick the game up and play it fairly well on the first try, but to become really good at it, you will have to spend a lot of time with the game. If you go on Youtube and look this game, there is bound to be some videos of people showing off insanely fast moves and I have even seen one of them do it in real-life. It's pretty amazing to watch, to say the least.

The Bad
I think the game would have benefited if you had the option to swap blocks around vertically. One opinion I have always had about puzzles is that the player should always be able to finish them. I hate it when I am trying to solve a maze in a newspaper and I make a mistake, I can't go back and undo it or something like that. I have also never been a fan of games like patience. Tetris Attack also falls for this trap because sometimes there are just no moves to make and nothing the game gives you can help you make some, been able to vertically swap blocks would have solved this.

In the challenge mode you get passwords, which are an ass to write down and I always end up losing the notes. A save-system had been used in games before and after this one, so why can't we have it?

The Bottom Line
Tetris Attack is a game that is very dear to me, it been one of the first games I ever played on this system and a title I wanted to experience again for a very long time. There are some minor problems, I am not really cool with only swapping the blocks around horizontally and the lack of a save-system is kind of annoying, but overall I don't let that ruin the game for me. I play Tetris Attack when I am feeling a bit down, because this game is made to make people smile. From it's overly cheerful presentation to it's enjoyable core-gameplay mechanics, Tetris Attack is a very good puzzle-game.

If you have a Super Nintendo and consider yourself to be a collector, then this game would make for a wonderful addition. This title is also very good for the Mario fans and the casual gamers, even children like my little sister seem to really enjoy this. If you don't like puzzle games are simplistic games to begin with, then this is likely not you thing though. Just like how these games are incredibly hard to review for me.