TETRIS PLUS

Tetris Plus. It’s Tetris, Plus’d. This game, as dictated by the rules layed out in our post about Game Boy Tetris, is not tetris. But this game is, probably, the most Tetris of the Not Tetris’es. There is a Tetris mode, for crying out loud, it’s called classic.

Classic mode is Marathon Tetris, but there is no limit on how many lines you need to clear you simply go as long as you can. You get points for making lines and for placing blocks, and funny enough both of these go to raising your level. That makes sense in an arcade setting, the game trying to cycle out people who are trying to build larger structures but here it’s a little unorthodox. This is still before the standardization of Tetris so there’s no bag system for pieces, but you aren’t going to get five in a row. We got two squares in a row once but that was it, there’s some logic going on here. Where the game starts to falter is in how it controls. When you go to hold a direction, either to move a piece or drop it, there is a lot of lag between when you first start holding it and when multiple commands start registering. Going from DX or even BPS Tetris to this it’s very noticeable and quite annoying. Also, pieces stay unstuck for a good long while after they’ve been fully dropped, so there have been multiple times where our timing has been thrown off and we went to move the next piece up, but move the one at the bottom instead and thus ruined our building.

This is annoying in a normal game of Tetris, but this is not a normal game of Tetris. The main attraction of Tetris Plus is the ‘puzzle’ mode, a feature unique to this game. Yes there is tower climber in Tetris Axis but in that mode you want your little guy to go up. In this mode, he must go down. If the little man touches the bottom of the screen you clear the stage and go on to the next one. There are some spikes at the top of the board that slowly encroach. The man will climb one block ledges, and climb to the top of pieces put on top of him.

With all of the control issues mentioned earlier, you may be able to imagine how agonizing this game is. It is too slow to put down lots of pieces, and when we get them where we want they slide out at the last moment because they take multiple seconds to lock down at the bottom of the board. The controls feel so stilted and with the little man always moving (unless he’s in a two wide, deep pit) he will always be trying to get around you. For all of these reasons, plus this games piece system and no holds and only seeing one piece ahead AND never getting the piece you need, this mode feels like pulling teeth.

We said we were going to get to stage ten and stop playing. We got to stage 7, tried it a dozen times, then gave up. This game is agonizing, it is miserable to play for any amount of time. If you get good pieces at the start you win instantly, otherwise you are sturggling to dig, while also making sure the funny little explorer man doesn’t climb up to the spikes and kill himself. But you need to place a piece right there right now, where else is he gonna go? It’s horrid! How did they make Tetris feel this bad and play this poorly and suck this much ass?!?! Even normal Tetris doesn’t feel good to play!

This game feels like a joke you pull on your friends, in fact with the link cable compatiable multiplayer it can be a joke you play on your friends! Twitch streamer Simpleflips has forced his friends to race this game a few times and it’s always hilarious to watch. To WATCH. To actually play this game is miserable, but hey the explorer girl is kinda cute, the art is cute, and there’s a level editor. Stay away from this game unless you get off on being frustrated.