The Video Game Revue

Tetris DS

In the past week I've been playing a fair bit of Tetris DS online using Nintendo WiFi. My Wi-Fi Rating tends to hover around 6200-6500, which I'm fairly proud of. I've had it up past 6700 and yesterday it dipped down to under 6100, but 6500 is maintainable so far. According to my Wi-Fi Records, I've played 67 games, with 21 first place finishes and 28 second place finishes. All of this applies strictly to the 4-Player battles with items; I haven't played any of the standard 2-Player or Push matches online yet.

Right now my ambition is to reach a rating 7000+, which should be pretty tough. I've only encountered a handfull of 7000+ players so far, and the highest ever ranking that I've seen in my 67 games to date was just over 7700. Still, I figure that if I can improve my Tetris skills and get into a deep winning streak, I should be able to crack the 7000 barrier. Maybe.

So far my Marathon high score (not on Endless) is 534,596. I don't consider that to be especially competitive, and I'm slowly working on improving it.

I've said befre that all of the non-standard play modes in Tetris DS are surprisingly worthwhile, and that the online play is exciting. Both of these things are still very much true, but I'd like to say a little more about the game here.

Let me start by saying that Tetris DS is worth getting for the WiFi play alone. Playing Tetris DS versus kids from Japan online is one of the best Tetris experiences that I've ever had. The WiFi play does have some very annoying quirks, however; in particular, you usually have to wait far too long to actually get into a game, and people drop from matches (voluntarily, I assume) far too frequently. I rarely ever drop out from a game before it ends because somebody else did, and sometimes I'll do stuff like check the Auction House in World of WarCraft while I'm waiting for a WiFi match to start. In spite of these drawbacks, I still feel that WiFi functionality is a huge win for Tetris DS, and I haven't even used the Friends feature yet.

What really matters to me the most about any given Tetris implementation is how well it conforms to what I believe the canonical Tetris experience to be. Other Tetris games that I've played, such as "The Next Tetris" and Tetris Worlds often mess around with the Tetris formula in ways that I find unsavoury. No matter how good or bad the extra play modes of a given Tetris implementation are, what it absolutely needs for me to take it seriously is a "standard" play mode where you continuously advance through levels of increasing speed at a rate of one level for every ten lines cleared, and a scoring system where the number of points awarded for clearing lines increases exponentially between singles, doubles, triples, and tetrises, as well as increases heavily as levels increase. Tetris DS's Marathon mode is that "standard" play mode that so many other versions of Tetris screw up, and it is--simply put--the single most appealing Tetris implementation that I've ever played, or at least equal to my other all time favourites, including the original Tetris versions for NES and GameBoy.

There are many features of Tetris DS that I would consider "new school." The look-ahead on upcoming blocks is a queue that shows the next five blocks you'll be getting. An old school implementation shows you one. Tetris blocks are "slippery" in Tetris DS, meaning that as long as you keep rotating them, you can stop them from settling into place. An old school implementation has "sticky" blocks that give you less slack in terms of getting the right placement before they hit the ground. Tetris DS has a one-block "bank" where you can sub-out your current block for a banked block using the R shoulder button. An old school implementation would not have such a feature. Each of these new school details is something that makes the game easier and allows skilled players to tackle higher levels than are normally possible. But I don't feel that these are features that dumb the game down or in any way detract from it.

It's kind of like looking at the evolution of Olympic sports and the technology used in them. A lot of Olympic records over the history of the tournament were broken simply because of advances in technology--things like slippery sprinter uniforms coated in Teflon, shoes with plutonium soles, or whatever. Some advances in techology are questioned by sports officials as threatening the character of the game, and they may even be banned for reducing the game to a less worthy competition. Other advances in technology are seen as changing the game in a neutral or even positive way. To me, the features implemented in Tetris DS are of this latter type. They change Tetris and enhance a player's skill, but I don't feel that they make the game any less interesting; in fact, I think that these features add a bit of fun complexity to the game. To put it another way, when I play Tetris with all of these new school features enabled, I still very much feel that I'm playing real Tetris and not some variant of it.

What would have been super swell is if Tetris DS had included a mode (not just settings, but a whole separate mode) where you could select "classic" play with all of the newer features turned off. Similarly, it would have been fantastic if the WiFi functionality had been solid enough that I didn't have to wait upwards of two whole minutes to get into a game a lot of the time. However, these are short-comings that do not ruin Tetris DS, and it is still very much worth any Tetris fan's attention.

If you see some guy playing online as "Parappa" and you kick his ass, feel free to brag about it in the comments.

posted by Parappa @ 1:17 PM