"Brilliant Idea, Poor Execution."

On paper, there's just no way to make the idea sound bad. Remember playing Tetris on the 8 bit NES? Wasn't it awesome? Shouldn't it thus follow that playing the game on a 16 bit console would be twice as awesome? Oh, and while we're at it, what if instead of just improving the graphics and sound, we also brought back the much loved (and much missed) 2 player simultaneous mode? Not to mention adding some clever new special features like special items and a time trial, which can, of course, be turned off if you prefer to play "classic" style. Wouldn't that rock?

If Sega had actually succeeded in achieving this goal, then yes, it would have rocked a lot, and stood as undeniable proof that Genesis indeed does what Nintendon't. Unfortunately, that's not quite how things played out. While the game technically does deliver the 2 player mode and scant extra features that were promised, the look, feel, and especially the gameplay are all seriously disappointing. To be fair, however, it's possible that this would have been slightly tweaked and improved, had Sega not decided to pull the plug.

I don't care to speculate too much on the reasons why the game was cancelled, though I imagine it would have more to do with the legal issues involved than the quality of the game itself. Given the time frame, it's possible that this game was in development at roughly the same time as the two landmark ports for the NES, by Nintendo and Atari (aka Tengen) respectively. After doing a little research, I found out that Sega's arcade version of Tetris was the one that had taken Japanese arcades by storm, meaning this version would likely be a direct port of said arcade version. Unfortunately for Sega, and for Atari as it would turn out, the courts declared that Nindendo had exclusive rights to produce home console versions of the game. As such, an official release of Sega's Tetris never saw the light of day. Bootleg versions of the game, however, have leaked their way into the world, and sell for an utterly ludicrous amount of money.

At it's core, the game is... well... Tetris. Blocks fall from the top of the board and you need to keep them from stacking all the way back up there. You do this by rotating them and sorting them as tightly as possible. If you fill in an entire horizontal row, they disappear from the board, and bonus points are awarded for clearing more than 1 row at a time. Clear enough rows, and you advance to the next level, where the game is identical, but slightly faster.

A and B buttons rotate the blocks, and the d-pad can be used to move them to the left or right. You can also make them fall slightly faster (soft drop) by pressing down, and make them drop straight down much faster (hard drop) by pressing C. I honestly don't know why they chose to add a hard drop feature to this game at all, much less place it in such a cumbersome and unintuitive location as the C button. Sure, it might not sound like such a big deal, but I don't think I've played a single game yet where I didn't mistakenly hard drop the first couple of blocks. Sadly, this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The main problem with the game is that it simply controls horribly. Moving the blocks to is just slow and stiff, and it feels as though you really need to force every move you make, then they finally start to move and are equally difficult to stop, causing you to regularly overshoot the mark. The blocks also tend to start pressed up against the top of the board, and refuse to rotate until they've fallen down enough spaces that they have room to move. Again, this doesn't sound like much of a problem, but it greatly interrupts the flow of the game, and is just one more nuisance that you really shouldn't have to deal with.

Also, remember the deal where you could slide blocks over a couple of spaces after they landed? Well, that's been messed up as well. Yes, technically, it's still there, but it's so slow and rigid that I never know whether or not it's going to work properly, so much so that for the first day or so, I honestly though it had been removed from the game completely.

Soft dropping, for it's part, is very fast. Which could have been a good thing, but since the controls are so slow to react, it just ends up being more problematic than it's worth. It's fine if the piece is already lined up, but if you change your mind, or need to make a correction, forget it. The game just doesn't react fast enough to let you do anything useful after the block has started to fall. This alone can make the game significantly more frustrating than it needs to be. Even the hard drop, which usually causes blocks to drop down and lock into place almost instantly, is actually slower than the soft drop.

In the name of fairness, however, we are talking about what would have been a relatively early game in the Genesis library, and a game that has been ported, updated, and tweaked more times than my primitive little brain could possibly compute. Is it possible that I've been spoiled by more recent ports of the game? After all, Tetris Worlds for the GBA (the version I play most often these days) is quite notorious for being very lenient with regards to sliding blocks, along with having fairly tight controls. In contrast, just about anything would seem to be stiff and needlessly difficult.

In order to get to the bottom of this, I had to dust off my plug n' play Famiclone, and give the classic version of Tetris a few rounds for a more direct comparison. The result of this experiment was actually kind of telling. The NES game is more stiff than I remember. Sliding blocks is also harder than I though. Maybe I am being a little too hard on Sega with regards to these aspects. On the whole, the NES game seems to move very slowly, but the controls are another story. They were (even on a cheaply emulated p&p console) very responsive. Not only was there no delayed reaction, but there was less twitchiness overall.

In the end, I found that with a bit of practice, it was possible to overcome a lot of the quirks that the Genesis port throws at you, and after doing so, and when directly compared to it's 8 bit counterparts, it seems to play at least well enough. On the other hand, this is a system with roughly twice the processing power. Why, then, do the controls vary between being worse to being just barely equal to the NES port? Certainly, the issues crippling the controls should be quite easy for the Genesis to overcome, as a few rounds of Columns will quickly confirm.

I also found the game to be visually unappealing. The backgrounds are... nice, but the blocks themselves are just plain ugly, and the colours don't help any. I also found the board itself to be a bit smallish when compared to other versions. Even though it's the standard 20x10 square grid, the smaller scale makes it feel squashed.

The music is just barely worth mention. Aside from the title screen and game over tunes, there's only one song to speak of, and it's very uninspired. The song speeds up a bit as you pass certain levels, which is sort of clever, but still not very impressive. The sound effects are just sad.

Fine, you might say, but what of these extra features we were promised? Well, two players can play simultaneously, but neither person's game has any effect on the other. Personally, I prefer it this way, but most people would rather have the option to compete for something other than just a high score. Time trial is kind of clever, though not overly different from the TT features in many other puzzle games. In it, you have two minutes to get as many points as you can. There's also a two player time trial, giving you the chance to directly compete for a high score, though that's about as competitive as this game gets. Finally, there's a two player "mixed" mode, in which both player's blocks drop into a single, extra wide board at the same time. Again, this is far more clever than it is good.

Each game also has the option of adding "item blocks." These blocks will be flashing when they fall into the board, and have various effects. Some will clear every row they touch, regardless of whether it is actually a complete row or not, others will linger for a while then disappear, but most just arbitrarily explode and are otherwise no different from regular blocks. I honestly don't know if item blocks are supposed to make the game easier or harder.

On the whole, I still find this game to be rather unpleasant, and easily one of the worst ports of Tetris I've played so far, although pinning down why is proving to be harder than I thought it would. Perhaps if the Genesis were still a new console, and the cost of the game was reasonable, I'd give it a passing grade, but as it stands, there are so many other versions of Tetris out there that play so much better and cost so much less that this one is truly not worth bothering with, especially at the kinds of prices it's fetching in online auctions.

If you're still curious, it's available as part of the Sega Ages collection on the PS2. It's still a bit of a pain to get on account of being released in Japan only, but should prove much cheaper, and play on more recent hardware, and contains several of Sega's other attempts at Tetris. Of course, you could just stick with the version that came with your cell phone and be done with it!

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/24/08

Game Release: Tetris (JP, 1989)