The Biggest Game Project on this Planet

Bortlog #1: Tetrisphere

I guess everyone enjoys the odd puzzle game every once in a while, and I know for a fact that EVERYONE on this planet has at some point in his/her life been addicted to some form of Tetris, so it was about high-time I played Tetrisphere again.

The above statement, by the way, is 100% accurate. EVERYONE, every single person in the WORLD, even bums, vagabonds, poor people, recluses and presidents of the US have at some point in their life been totally hooked on a Tetris game, at least for a little while.
The concept of the original game was ridiculously simple. There's a bunch of 4-block-shaped puzzle pieces dropping from the sky, and you had to organize them into complete lines to get rid of them and get points. It's any bookkeeper's wet dream!

By night-time you would get to bed, close your eyes, and all you would see were blocks, blocks, and even more blocks until you went totally insane and did something terribly stupid, like signing up for ballet classes.

I recently watched a documentary on BBC 2 that was all about the phenomenon of Tetris, and that dealt with its origins and the tremendous amounts of bureaucracy, politics and backstabbing involved to get this game to your home console. It was a great documentary, albeit presented in a way a bit too heavy for such a light subject, and you could tell the producers were thinking "Oh dear, we have to do a documentary again! Get out the melancholic music, weird camera angles and sedated voice-over! This has to look intellectual!"
But it was educational all the same (damn you!) and if there's one thing I learned, it's that good old Alexei Pejitnov (the inventor of Tetris, and a really nice guy) got totally screwed over by his country and is now a corporate drone at Microsoft. Poor little blighter.

Still, one good thing came of it, and that was Nintendo outsmarting the entire software world (Howard Lincoln was telling his story extremely unctuously) and getting the exclusive rights to Tetris for the console market causing a world-wide craze with their Gameboy version.
Practically everyone in my entire family (of extremist non-gamers) has played and absolutely LOVED the GB version of this game and there were times when I couldn't even get hold of my own GB because it was occupied.

But that's all for much later, cos we'll get to the GB Tetris, once we hit the T.

One thing that this craze led to, is a whole Slew of spin-offs, one of which is Tetrisphere. Here you have a ball (or sphere, if you will) with a lot of Tetris pieces on it, and it is up to you to erase enough of those pieces by dropping similar pieces next to them, or on them, to expose enough of the core to release some freaky robot inside.
I don't know where that last bit came from, but it's really rather disturbing.

The game offers a plethora (I love that word. Plethora. Plethora. Plethora) of other gaming modes, but they all boil down to exposing the core to some extent.
Also, there's a great puzzle mode where you have to get rid of all the pieces in a set formation, with a predetermined amount of slides and drops, and these can become EXCEEDINGLY hard.

As with any Tetris game, music is of great importance, since you'll be staring at the same screen for a long time trying not to go insane, and, like it's addictive GB counterpart which has pretty much become examplary of Tetris music, this game has a phenomenal soundtrack.
No Russian Cossack ditties (heheh. I said ditties) this time round though, but great techno music that pumps out of your speakers and through your brain and arteries.
These tracks are all of great quality, especially considering they're running off a cartridge, and an N64 cartridge at that.

If anyone's interested I can put up the soundtrack on YouSendIt, but it's a bit of work so I'll only do it if people are actually going to make use of it. Just post a comment or send an E-mail or something.

In short, this is another wonderful game in the Tetris vein that will likely get you totally hooked for awhile, although probably not as long as the original game. It's not quite as accessible and easy to get as the original Tetris, so not everyone will enjoy this, but it's a great addition to any puzzle fan's collection. Another 9.0.

posted by Ingen! @ 3:23 PM