Tetris DS – The way Tetris should be?

[Dracos]

Tetris DS is the latest incarnation of Tetris brought to the Nintendo DS by Nintendo and basically a clear example of painting over the ugly parts to make it worthwhile.  Filled with lots of Nintendo scraps, a couple of modes, and a fair online mode, it's tetris with a fresh coat of paint and variations on its catchy jingle.  In addition to standard mode, it has catch, touch, puzzle, push, and mission modes.

   Its main mode is original flavored Tetris with a lot going for it and also a few glaring problems with it.  On the positive end, each piece gives a ghost image to let you know where on the ground it'll land.  Saves all of us with cruddy side to side perception from those 'just miss' down presses and is a nice addition to have to the core that doesn't really make it easier or harder, just more convenient.  The mode also shows the next five instead of just the next one.  Way to go planning.  This makes the game easier, but in a positive way that really allows you to try and keep more in mind in order to strategize rather than simply react.  Knowing that you got five pieces that aren't the one you need is much nicer than plopping down five pieces waiting for the killer and it just not showing up.  Equally so, being able to see a good piece coming and plan your arrangements for it?  Just ups the fun level to me being there.  Finally, it lets you hold a piece, clearly making it easier but also adding that extra level of strategy.  I can't name the amount of times where just one bad piece at the wrong time creates a domino effect or equally you get the piece you want a few pieces early and are then stuck waiting 15 pieces to complete your tetrad (or dropping it all together).  All of these, to me, really are positive additions to the classic tetris mode and a good thing to see on a port.  What isn't good is the retention of a bug that popped up in Tetris Worlds (or so I am told) that basically shatters the difficulty by providing a half second delay per twist.  Put this on top of a 20 level difficulty limit and Endless is kind of a breeze where a good player could easily crack the 999 barrier in levels and rack up a truly ridiculous score by only spending the time to complete the task.  Standard mode (original flavored) also comes with traditional height challenge mode much like the early NES and arcade versions and a versus mode in which you play against another with the ability to add garbage below their stack by completing lines.  Versus mode wasn't very impressive to me because of the intentional 'game must end' feature they put in that destroys balance in favor of the turn around one combo win.  Each set of lines done over 1 adds some garbage to the opponents side.  BUT, often garbage of a tetrad is conveniently all cleanly organized with a single empty line waiting to return a tetrad back.  On top of this, later line combos will add more garbage than earlier ones, so a quick and decisive set of tetrads is more likely to earn defeat than any other set of strategies.

   Catch was my favorite new mode that basically involved moving a chunk of blocks around and catching other ones, trying to put together a 5x5 chunk or larger and bombing things with that chunk.  It has a samus theme over it and basically rewards for catching larger things and blowing up as much as possible each 'blast'.  The real issue the game has that makes it not quite as good as original is after they reach a certain speed, they start adding pieces as well.  Level 20 basically has swarms of pieces coming at you all the time and it's just not really possible to my eyes to stay alive very long at that.  This is different than standard where at least you're only having to deal with one piece at a time, even when it starts being blurring fast.

   Mission mode sucked.  That's the best thing I can say about it.  It offered a standard tetris experience with a Zelda overlay with the new gameplay element being that you had missions of increasing difficulty that you had to fulfill in a time limit.  Fail the time limit and garbage would push the blocks up.  Succeed and some would be blasted off the top.  Each level brought harder missions, a faster timebar, and quicker falling pieces.  Really, way too much as some of the latter missions, that of course coincided with a blurring fast time bar, resulting in missions that would've been pretty hard at slow speeds being impossible at fast ones.  Building 2 tetrads in a row in a few seconds requires pretty much happening to be in the right place for doing so as it's entirely impossible to do from scratch at level 15 and onward.  How high you get has significantly more to do with the order the puzzles come in than your skill.  A good order and I can get up to sixteen.  A bad order and I struggle at 9.  That's a bit of a large range that has little to do with my skill or lack there of.  Overall, mission mode should be avoided.

   Touch was basically a puzzle game in which you had a stack of tetrads you could move with the touchpad or tap to rotate (when it was allowed) to try and rotate and attempt to get a cage of balloons.  A fun distraction if not really my thing.  It worked well for those who really thrived on strategizing their piece placement and in fact had a puzzle mode that was just a short set of pieces and a challenge to clear them with certain conditions.  The harder difficulty modes of this game involved removing the rotation feature, so not only would you have a mountain of pieces to clear but you wouldn't be able to rotate pieces and thus had to be particularly careful with your planning.

   Puzzle was Yoshi's cookie themed puzzles with Tetris pieces.  Basically it was a fun and simple distraction and addition to the stew.  It had no real depth but it didn't need it as basically a token minigame attached to a working game.  Each puzzle was a few pieces which you could put down in any order and any rotation as long as it cleared a row when it fell straight down into the puzzle.  These started with only 3 piece puzzles and moved up to five pieces for the hardest ones.  There's not much more to say on it.

   Push mode rounded out the set with a very online focused versus mode which really took advantage of the two screens showing both sides of a doublesized Tetris field.  It only has a versus mode where you basically get two tiny blocks in the middle and get to push blocks down on them.  Scoring 2 or more lines pushes the center down towards your opponent and thus the goal is to push the center down far enough that their pieces go over a line on their side.  I tended to find that 3 line scores tended to be the best strategy and enjoyed generally playing this mode.

   Anyhow, that's about it.  If you've never played Tetris, it's a good port.  If you want it portable on your DS, it's cheap for it and all that.  It's enjoyable...but at the end, it's Tetris, for better or worse.