iLounge

Company: Electronic Arts

Website: www.EA.com

Title: Tetris

Players: One

Price: $5

Compatible: iPod 5G

Electronic Arts Tetris

• Digg This
• email to a friend

By Jeremy Horwitz

Editor-in-Chief, iLounge
Published: Monday, September 25, 2006
Category: iPod Games

As launch day buyers of Nintendo's original 1989 Game Boys, we're on record as being long-time fans of Tetris, the Russian block-dropping game that helped to spark a portable gaming revolution and created an entire genre of similar puzzle titles. We've also enjoyed many of the game's official sequels and semi-sequels, particularly the excellent titles Bombliss and Tetrisphere, but none of them have stopped us from going back and enjoying the game that started it all. Now the iPod has its own version of Tetris ($5), and there's somewhat good news for newcomers to the series.

Developer Electronic Arts has given Tetris a sweeping audiovisual overhaul. Strong blue menus and cool translucent overlays make the interface attractive, while the in-game art - famously rendered entirely usable on the Game Boy’s black and white screen - is detailed and colorful, with vibrant blocks and clean backdrops. The 10 by 20 block well is clearly illustrated block-by-block for strategic block placement, while the blocks have highlighted edges that look ever-so-slightly three-dimensional. EA has also remixed the classic Tetris music, adding a more modern techno air to the the old Russian soundtrack, though you can no longer select from several songs at the start - a sad omission given the game’s musical roots, and the iPod’s.

The only bad news here is, like Pac-Man, in the controls. Rather than trying to emulate a joystick or joypad with two buttons - the default way to play Tetris since its inception - EA lets you move left and right by sweeping your finger in a rotary fashion on the Click Wheel, and rotates blocks with clicks on the Click Wheel’s left and right sides. Down drops the block instantly to the bottom, while the Center action button moves the block downwards at a pace faster than gravity but slower than the down button. In a phrase, this control scheme is sub-optimal - rotating with buttons and moving left and right with a rotary controller really doesn’t make sense - and begs for user-selectable control schemes. For no good reason, this default control scheme takes time to get used to, and still doesn’t really feel right once you’ve spent time with it, though we found it more tolerable overall than with Pac-Man.

In our view, Tetris is a gimme of a game title for virtually any system, particularly when it’s been blessed with improved graphics and music, but on the iPod, its great looks and sounds are undercut by an unnecessarily mediocre control scheme. If you’re willing to adjust the way you’ve played Tetris before - something we wouldn’t do - you’ll get more enjoyment out of this title than we did.