Game Reviews

Tetris

Star onStar onStar onStar halfStar off
|
| Tetris
Get
Tetris
|
| Tetris

Tetris needs no introduction from me. But to avoid the embarrassment of a couple of blank paragraphs, here goes.

Developed by Russian genius Alexey Pajitnov in the mid-1980s, Tetris has since been released on just about every gaming platform, selling millions of copies.

It single-handedly made Nintendo's Game Boy a success in its early days, and despite the best efforts of mobile publishers to convince us there's more to mobile games than falling blocks, it's still topping the phone charts more than three years after its first release.

Tetris is the 600-pound gorilla of the handheld gaming world, in other words. Well, along with King Kong, who's an actual 600-pound gorilla, but you know what I mean. So it's no surprise to find it as one of the launch downloadable games on iPod, as Apple clearly wants the biggest casual games for its device. And Tetris is as big as they come.

Most of the developed world can skip this paragraph too. Tetris is about rotating and moving falling blocks – called tetrominoes – of varying shapes so they create smooth horizontal lines, which the disappear, scoring you points. You get more points for clearing several lines at once, and the game gets faster and faster as you go along. It's brilliant.

Sensibly, EA hasn't messed around with the game for its initial iPod outing; there are just three straightforward game modes to play.

Marathon is classic Tetris, where you just keep going until the speed is too much to take, the screen is full up of irregularly-placed tetriminoes, and you're a weeping husk of a gamer. Meanwhile, 40 Lines gets you to clear 40 lines as fast as you can – this is the mode supermodels and rock stars play – while Ultra gives you three minutes to rack up as many points as possible.

In all cases, the core gameplay remains the same, which is a smart move, unlike EA's recent attempts to reinvent the game on mobile with Tetris Mania.

So how does it work with the iPod's controls? Well, it's okay. Scrolling left and right moves pieces horizontally while they're falling, while the RWD and SKIP buttons rotate them anti-clockwise and clockwise respectively. The central Select button 'soft drops' pieces, speeding up their fall, while the Play/Pause button does a 'hard drop', plonking them straight to the bottom.

It feels a bit unintuitive. We wanted to use the Select button to rotate pieces, for example, and got a bit tangled up between hard and soft drops for a while. You do get used to it, and Tetris certainly isn't as hampered by the iPod's controls as, say, Pac-Man. But be warned, if you're playing this on a train journey for your first few games, you may end up swearing like a trooper.

Overall, Tetris is still Tetris. EA hasn't messed around with the gameplay, so it's still the same game that you turn on for five minutes' relief, and end up playing for an hour, glowering at anyone who tries to engage you in real-world interaction. And it'll still give you Tetris dreams if you play it too much.

The slightly unwieldy controls take a bit of getting used to, but nevertheless, Tetris on the iPod is £3.99 well-spent.

Tetris

Those falling blocks are still rocking, although they could be easier to control
Score
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)