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Monday 14 January, 2008
In Tetris, the gameplayer is faced with a screen that is blank at first. Then, different shaped blocks fall down that screen and the gameplayer is able to manipulate their shape using the controls A and B, as well as their direction of descent with the arrow buttons. The objective of the game is to gain points by manipulating the shape of the objects in such a way that they form an unbroken line (or a series of unbroken lines stacked on top of each other) on the bottom of the screen. The level of difficulty the gameplayer chooses controls the speed at which the blocks fall.
I was honestly pretty bored while playing this game, and was glad that I could do it with one hand so that I could smoke a cigarette (or several) with the other while I played. Of course, I was probably bored both because I'm twenty two years old and it's a one person game. I know that the game design of tetris has been changed, though, so that with more sophisticated devices (like an xbox, for example) the gameplayer has the option of 3-D tetris, multiple players, etc. This is definitely a good change, because the overall objective of the original tetris as it was played on my gameboy is not that engaging for the player - there's nothing at stake (other than your dignity, but really, you're playing tetris, so it's not like you're that awesome to begin with), it doesn't require that much skill and you're interacting with inanimate objects (blocks) rather than, say, people on a quest for something.
On the plus side, however, is that it doesn't take a lot of prior experience to become good at Tetris, anybody can do it with a relatively high amount of skill with little or no familiarity with the game. Also, there's the kitsch factor, which is always a good thing in my book. It could either be really lame that I just played Tetris for 45 minutes, or it could be awesome. It's up to interpretation, which I like.
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