Tetris Attack

"Proof that two-player can make a game."

Tetris Attack was a great game, but since it was released a month or two before the Nintendo 64 was released, it was kind of overshadowed. This is a shame, because it's one of the best multiplayer games on the system.

First off, the graphics. This game is just sickeningly cute. There is no other way to describe it. If you can look past all the sugar, however, you see that its graphics are extraordinarily simple. The sugar factor keeps it from looking totally boring. Otherwise, it would just be a bunch of blocks. I just wish everything had been less…cute.

Controls are really simple. You move a little two-square thing over a huge number of blocks and press a button to switch the blocks in the two squares. That's nothing a 5-year-old couldn't handle.

The game plays pretty similarly to Yoshi's Cookie. There are about 5 different modes of play: Standard, computer-multiplayer, puzzle, standard-style-multiplayer, and attack-multiplayer.

Standard one-player is pretty pathetic. It's fun for a little while, but it just gets dull after a while. An endless supply of blocks come up from the bottom of the screen and you need to eliminate all blocks above that line, and/or move what blocks are left under the line. Computer-multiplayer is a bit better, but it's just not the same as with an actual person there. Puzzle mode is easily the best of the single-player modes. It has a pattern of blocks on the screen, and you have to eliminate all of them in a certain number of moves. It's easy at first, but as you get to level 3 or so, they start getting really difficult.

Now, for multiplayer. The standard-multiplayer is basically two people playing the one-player game for a certain amount of time to get the highest score. This is really, really dull once you've played the other mode: attack-multiplayer. Attack-multiplayer is basically what defines this whole game. Two people are given a number of pieces on the screen as the playing board. The game starts, and the stacks start rising up. The idea is to make chains of them to make them disappear. If you make a large enough chain (or, preferably, a combo chain) you drop a monster garbage block on the other player. The other player can only clear it if they make a chain next to it, and then the block becomes normal-sized blocks they have to clear. This gets going, and you just can't stop. It's unbelievable how addictive this mode is. Something about making a combo chain, then dropping a huge garbage block on the other player, only to have them do a combo chain using the garbage block you dropped on them, making a larger garbage block on you, and so on, is just unbelievably fun. The screen shakes harder the larger the garbage block you drop.

All in all, this is a fantastic multiplayer game, and a sort of mediocre single-player. Is it worth the money? Definitely-if you have someone to play it with. Otherwise, don't even bother. This is a game which truly proves that multiplayer can make a game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99