Tetris (Radica)

Radica Games Limited is an electronic games company, which since the mid-90's publishes a continuing series of handheld "arcade classics", such as Tip-Tap-Toe - and Tetris, of course. They also publishes a "classics" series of plug-and-play devices for television sets, including among others a baseball title, a football (American) game - and Tetris. I am going to review one of those three, and you get no extra points for correctly guessing which one.

The game itself looks and plays a bit like Tetris on the Nintendo Entertainment System (the Nintendo version, not Tengen's), with ordinary soft-drops and Russia-esque backgrounds. Not bad, but not very exciting either. There is also the ordinary two-player option, and what in Nintendo's legendary Game Boy version was called "game B" (when you start with a number of randomly placed blocks over the bottom lines, and has a target number of lines to clear before "beating" the challenge). No disappointments, but nothing extraordinary. So, it is much more fun to talk about the controllers.

The controllers look awesome, and are probably the greatest achievement ever in design for a low-price plug-and-play game. They are in 100 % plastic - the metal of the 90's - and the player 1 controller even has the luxury of weight, due to the four AA (LR6) batteries required for the game to even start. As you might have understood by now, the controllers are great in every way but one - they are useless to controll the game with.

In theory it all looks fancy and all. You bend the red tetramino (the control stick) left and right to move the tetraminoes in the game, and you twist the stick to twist the tetraminoes. It would be a good control method, if the red block was not so big and clumsy, and if any moving the tetraminoes was not so... rather, if you could controll the pace of sideways movement, not only the direction.

Summa summarium: Good game (well, surprise, it's Tetris), nice package, user friendly, easy just to unpack and plug in. Good looking controllers. Worthless controll over play. Developers neglected the most important issue, but surprisingly succeeded on almost every other subject. Pity.

Inverted

What could ever be better than Tetris? Two Tetrises, of course! Inverted, "a new spin on Tetris", replaces the standard glass with a line in the middle, and tetrominoes of two colors, each corresponding to the other half's background. One tetromino falls towards the division line from above, another rises simultanously from the bottom. With every pair of tetrominoes, the area "hold" by each background color changes, until, as in ordinary Tetris, one tetromino exceeds the top, or in this case, the bottom, of the glass. Sounds complicated? It is not. Let me show you.

Both tetrominoes fall towards the border. The top one is controlled by the arrow keys, and the botton one by the ASDW-keys. When they hit the border, they modify the area of their background colors as follows:And, as mentioned above, you control this simultanously. It is not impossible, but I dare say ridiculously hard. If you are alone, that is. But then again, with a friend, you could as well play the other mode, which is versus mode. Compete with each other and see who will conquer the others "territory" first.

Another break from orthodoxy this time (however, the blog has now been officially revived - for the time being at least). No deletion of lines means no Tetris proper, but an amusing game none the less. Nice music, I might add. And you can play it for free, so you really have no reason not to.