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.

Tetoris/Tetris HD

For today's free Tetris variant, I present to you Tetoris, also known as Tetris HD. You can see the concept, can you not? It really is just the same old Tetris, with a twist. However, the twist concists of the expansion of the glass from the standard ten columns to some three hundred. One single line takes minutes to clear. Also, the height of the glass at a minimum of two hundred and fifty lines, makes the game almost impossible to lose. Supposed that anyone would be patient enough to play it, that is.

What else to say... We do not get any points from just dropping a tetromino. The next tetromino is previewed at it's starting position, which seems to be randomized. By using the three icons at the top right of the screen, we can pause the game for a maximum of five minutes. The "Key" icon gives us another control system, where we have access to two "soft drops", one much faster than the other, but still a soft drop. We have a sparse number of sound effects, which we can mute with the third icon.

This is what the game looks like after leaving it on while writing this post:
As we can see, the randomizer works well in distributing the starting positions of the tetrominos. It will probably take over one hour to reach the top of the glass. We have a timer at the top left, for the patient player who wishes to experiment with these statistics.

In all, it could with a few modifications (i.e. a black rather than white background, and perhaps with tetrominos of double size) become a pretty stylish, although not very efficent, screen saver. As a game, it is the joke it most likely was intended to be. Nothing less, nothing more.

Free Tetris

Hello, dear reader, and welcome to my blog for all things Tetris. Join me, as I venture through twenty-five years worth of pop cultural capital in search for the rarest, most elusive, most memorable, or the best available of the Tetris specimen.

And where better to start than with the very first result from Google for my search for "tetris" this evening: Free Tetris.

Free Tetris, one of hundreds, probably thousands of free flash Tetris variants available on the vast lands of the Internets. It will serve well as an example of how a very simple game design turns out to be perhaps not so simple as concieved.


At first glance, everything seems as it should be. We have ten columns in the glass, the usual seven types of tetrominos, merrily colored for our pleasure. We move the tetrominos with the arrow keys, and even enjoy the luxory of a pause button (the p or the n key). There is a "soft drop", which means that we by pressing the down key can accelerate the pace of the tetramino's progress downward. The upcoming tetromino is shown plain and clear. Every ten cleared lines, the game proceeds to the next level. We also get to choose any level from one to ten to start from at the "title screen".

A few common features are missing. This is common, no variant has it all. Here will we have to manage without the "hard drop" (the drop directly to the bottom from the tetromino's present position), we have no statistics for the tetrominoes, and it is not possible to toggle the "preview window" on and off. Neither do we have any form of high score list. These features being missing are not any serious matter. Indeed, what we have here seems to be a perfectly fine specimen.

But that is not exactly the case.

In most Tetris variants, the controls reset when a tetromino is fixed at the bottom of the glass. This means, that if we drop a tetromino by pressing the down key, the soft drop will only apply for the tetromino that we are presently controlling. In Free Tetris, this is not the case. The instant we soft drop a tetromino to the bottom, the next tetromino shows up at the top of the glass, and is instantly affected by the down key, which we have not yet released. At a minimum, the new tetromino has dropped two or three lines before we have released the key. Annoying at level one. Disastrous at level six.

Despite this fault, which is a serious but not fatal one, it should be clear that Free Tetris has a winning hand in many situations. It is Tetris. And it is free. End of debate. There are hundreds of other variants to find for anyone not satisfied. However, since Free Tetris is, after all, the top Google search result for "tetris", one cannot help but wish that this tiny, but so great, error would have been mended.