WORDTRIS

Wordtris. Wordtris. Word-Tetris. Not Word Tennis, Word Tetris. Tetris with words.

OK, so, we’ve mentioned the Norman Caruso video on the early licensing history of Tetris a few times now and if you haven’t seen it at this rate it’s required reading. Two companies had the licensing for Tetris: Bulletproof Software which had console and handheld rights, and Spectrum Holobyte which had PC and we think arcade rights. So, Spectrum Holobyte could not release a game called Tetris on the Game Boy, but they could use a similar name in a very similar game with a different core concept. Ergo, Wordtris.

Alright, confession time, we suck at word games like this. Bookworm is a struggle for us, Scrabble we do alright at because we have time to think. Especially without seeing our pieces more than one ahead we struggle hard in this game. The main premise is that you have an area above and under a line. When you place a block down it sits above, lets call it the water line. When you place another block on top of that it pushes the one below it below the water line, until there’s no more space under the water then it stacks up. You can make words horizontally or vertically, and when you do the pieces fall down to or float up to the water line, leading to combos. Any combos we got in this game were purely by accident.

You start with a small set of letters, then once you hit a points threshold you get some more and your board does not clear. The game gives bonus points for words five letters long and above, with longer words giving more bonus points. The word library isn’t the best, it didn’t like ‘zen’ or a lot of very common acronyms like ETA. Also, even when we did have a large word set out the game wouldn’t give us the letter we needed, even when the letter was something as common as E. We don’t think this game has a hirearchy of common letters like Scrabble does, where there’s more commonly used letters in the bag than Q’s and Z’s. Mystery tiles are also fun, in that they don’t fill in a word you have laid out they’re truly random. There’s also bombs to clear one tile and sticks of dynamite to clear three plus one a row down.

We played a few games. In one we just tried our best but our mind kept coming up with not-words. In the next we spent most of the game trying to spell ‘fuck’ but didn’t get a single F or K from then out. Our best word was FEES at 196 points, then LOAM at 168. We did manage to completely fill up the board, which was fun. The game got sort of enjoyable when we spent it trying to spell funny words. The game has good music and if you’re the type of fiend who can spell well (like some sort of dweeb) then this game may be good for you. But uh, our brain doesn’t work like this.