Wetrix+

"Be at the mercy of the weather without having to learn the rules and controls of a sim or sports game!"

I wasn't sure why they put the plus in Wetrix+, as this sort of naming seems more suited to vitamins or a health plan. I'm a bit confused also as to why standard mode is 'classic.' The game assumes a general familiarity beyond what you'd expect for its moderate history of porting, so the nomenclature seems a bit pompous--almost as pompous as using 'nomenclature' twice in a sentence. And once you do get familiar with it, random factors make it make you feel stupid. But Wetrix+ does a decent job of combining the sort of abstract thinking necessary for a puzzle game using 3-d graphics meaningfully with a quick learning curves. There has apparently been no shortage of games that provide a twist on the title 'Tetris' and contain a bunch of falling blocks. I am not sure there are too many sound pure-brick games left to discover, but Wetrix relies on the concept of creating and maintaining pools of water without having too much pour out.

You start with a flat plane, and the computer gives you a few blocks to start with. A hollow square, a T, an L and a straight line build up the walls, which you will need to contain the water sponges that are later added to the random mix. You also have green shapes that reduce the walls they land on to a uniform height. This is important because, if you have too many walls(a graphic on the left slowly spells the word EARTHQUAKE as you continue construction,) an earthquake causes your structures to collapse and water to pour out. Bombs are shuffled into the pack after this; they can create a damaging hole in your plane(worse than if water leaks off the side) if misplaced or reduce walls in a small radius if dropped correctly. Later there are ice cubes that drop by and freeze a lake; this can stop overflow until thaw or it can render fireballs, which vaporize a lake, not fully effective. There's also light rain which falls down and adds to the pools.

The game is forgiving enough to allow a slow drain of the gauge on the right--the one that rises if your board starts leaking water. It also allows you smart bombs that wipe the board clean, providing you can create enough separate blocked off pools as you switch between levels(the game foreshadows this by briefly putting you on, say, level 1+. Just remember to use the smart bomb; with sirens blaring once the gauge is near full, you shouldn't expect amnesty after the fact.) The real rub, though, is the scoring. Fireballs that vaporize all of a pool make chump change out of the points for dropping a piece. The more water zapped, and the higher the level(and thus the faster the pieces dropped,) the more points. So for a maximum score on a fireball dropped(the right one can make over eighty percent of your score with proper planning--and bad luck immediately afterwards,) your best bet is to have as much in pools as you can bear. Better players need to develop ways of creating balanced walls. With five or more pools, you get a bonus multiplier of ten. With one pool particularly deep, a rubber ducky appears there to add more multipliers. Of course pools can be created, joined or destroyed, and the game keeps track of this for you.

There is one major problem; although you can develop strategies to provide for a string of several of the same blocks in a row, you cannot do so at higher levels. The controls get touchier at higher levels. In Tetris, for instance, you have a column that is ten squares wide, and it is easy enough to say, okay, I need to move this piece a couple of squares over, so I'll tap the left key quickly twice. With Wetrix, the column is still ten squares(a line piece makes up three squares) wide, but each movement increment is one-third of a square. Tapping the movement cross on the Dreamcast is a trickier proposition, and I often have to line up my desired location twice. With no overhead perspective, a good deal of determining where a block will land based on shadow projection, and TWO directions to correct rapidly, there are inevitable misplacements that build up quickly on the higher levels. Then, to make matters worse, the game may choose to throw several sponges at you in a row, or perhaps force you to use two bombs in a row. While it has the standard 'next block' feature and deserves credit for being clever enough to 're-bomb,' i.e. drop one at random and probably drain your whole board, if you bomb the same place twice, it doesn't seem to have any algorithm to avoid an excess of similar pieces in a row. This despite its kind introduction at first--only blocks.

The special effects can be stupid as well. The program allows you to turn the sound and music off, but this does not stop the earth-shaking messages swirling across the screen and, more importantly, completely in front of an active board. They're helpful the first time; the second time, you'll be more concerned they'll vanish only when a brick is a third of the way down the screen. There are also cute characters vaguely connected with the game; each holds the standard sort of variations(two player, timed challenge) which don't really add to the underlying abstract reasoning. The strategy is still the same, i.e. build a relatively uniform wall at the side and maybe even pools in the corner(far corner, so as not to block your vision,) and build up and wait for a fireball. And once you get this down, there's not much to do except occasionally complain when you're SURE you just made a pool and of course that wall you made is high enough. Once I got jaded, I didn't even bother filling out the high score list, which put me down as 'too lazy.'

However, the main graphics are formidable. You have the option of rotating or zooming on the board(a perfect overhead view is inaccessible) and I liked being challenged to learn to use the shadow to determine where to drop the brick. And the walls, instead of being blocky, blend in to look like a stock chart or even a landscape in a sim game where you wish to develop wooded area. Few puzzle games manage to use jagged edges and get away with it. You also see a swath of light over where you've punched a hole in the board in case you had to do so in a far corner. The process of a piece dissolving a wall is nice, too, and the game usefully points out the intensities of the dripping. The ducks quacking around even make it cute, and the color schemes and tiling patterns of the flat board show commendable variety. But enough damage has been done to practical play.

Puzzle games can be annoyingly abstract at their worst or at best give you a feeling of creation as you build a structure. Wetrix leans toward the latter but leaves too much to chance to be a great game. It shows commendable balance of elements where you can't say any one piece dropped is intrinsically good or bad, yet too many in a row of one is bad--and there's no option to regulate piece type frequency. Once you achieve a reasonable degree of mastery, you'll find the normal sort of frenzy that goes with trying to solve a game with new ideas wears off quickly. But it is one of the better puzzle games I have played in a while and one of the few that uses a 3-d setting without ever being confusing. And sometimes an imperfect puzzle game, which I can enjoy for a half-hour before the entropy gets to me, is easier to pull away from when I have more practical things I should be doing anyway. The procrastination of which, I admit, are a major cause of me playing a puzzle game in the first place.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/26/02, Updated 10/26/02