When Mario picked up a tetromino.
If ever a game muddled with time, it’s Tetris.
Wasn’t it there in the code of the universe waiting to be unearthed?
It’s all very weird.
To celebrate the 40th birthday - and finally, a 40th birthday I feel like celebrating!
Tetris Effect is that rare reimagining of a classic that feels practically definitive.
But then play Tetris Effect.
It’s properly one of the greatest games ever, a rocket aimed right at the heart.
If Tetris Effect is the Tetris cathedral, this is the Tetris laboratory.
It’s weird and brilliant down here.
Tetris DS had six different versions of Tetris back in the day.
This felt absolutely wild.
I’m being crude, but so, in its way, is the classic mode of Tetris DS.
Markers for where your pieces are going to land?
This is Tetris curated by Niles Crane.
It was a class act all along!
Now to the variants.
It’s not the design itself, which is rather clever.
It’s Tetris as luggage stack, and that’s fine.
No seams or indentations.
I had a girlfriend once who could not stand the feel of unglazed pottery.
It made her skin prickle.
I feel the same about the tetrominoes in Touch.
(There’s another Touch mode for two players, BTW - let us not speak of it.)
Mission mode next: Mission mode is Zelda themed and very lovely.
Clear lines using the 2X2.
Lovely stuff and I think Link would approve.
This is harmony achieved between theme and mechanics.
Push mode is probably Tetris DS' moment of genius.
But it’s very weird genius, which makes it even better.
They’re building something and trying to use it to push the other player back into oblivion.
It’s clever, but it’s also, like I said, quite weird.
Without meaning to, both players are building something.
A wordless, nameless Tetris Object.
And this brings us to Tetris DS' Metroid-themed experiment whose name I can never remember.
Oh, it’s Catch mode!
Catch mode is properly, properly weird, in keeping with its Metroid coating.
The Tetris Object is back, but now there’s really no avoiding it.
Miss pieces and fail to add them to the block and you lose energy.
Clever, but also unsettling.
This thing will not stop growing.
You rotate it and its shape just gets weirder and weirder.
The last mode is Puzzle mode, which basically turns Tetris into a newspaper crossword page game.
There are dozens and dozens of these puzzles.
I say that’s the last mode, but that’s not quite true.
I say competitively: the people I played against were competing.
I was merely fodder for their brilliance.
For one thing, I couldn’t always connect, so once I could, things felt extra special.
I couldn’t find it, but then I read online that the wi-fi gadget doesn’t work anymore.
So maybe now Tetris DS is actually the perfect package: six versions of Tetris!
And one special online world that is forever out of reach.
Happy birthday, Tetris.
What a beautiful, endlessly mystifying game you are.
