Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Masterpiece"

The Good: Perfect gameplay balance; slick concept; compelling/rewarding/addicting.

The Bad: Compelling + Rewarding = Addicting. -.-

Mankind has been messing with creating/playing games for some time now--be it sports, board or card games--for the sake of amusement, entertainment or the very challenge itself (all good fillers for some inconvenient warfare, truth to be told). Nevertheless there's not a huge gallery of perfectly crafted/tuned games out there for us to be proud of since pulling something like that out can prove to be quite an exhausting (and uncertain) effort. Well, with Tetris we've got the rare opportunity of getting in touch with such a piece of game--the first among electronic ones to reach the heights of Chess and a few others.

Mr. Alexey Pajitnov (a Russian computer engineer, not by chance researching psychology-related games at the time) came up with a simple yet clever idea for a puzzle game: to arrange falling blocks inside a "glass" aiming for making room to the next pieces about to fall. That can be achieved by clearing perfect (full) horizontal lines of pieces while earning points for that--more points will be handled for clearing more lines at once. The objective of the game is to keep the glass as empty as possible as the levels go up--alongside the ever-increasing falling speed of the pieces.

Many adjectives can be easily attached to Tetris--"compelling", "rewarding", "addicting"--but they're not exaggerations due to the elegant game design and the perfectly balanced gameplay system. Alexey's decision of working only with tetrominoes (figures made of four parts) allowed the game to attain an intrinsic balance value--a feature that's only enhanced by the risk-reward involving choices on letting the stack grow aiming for a higher score or trying to keep it under control to endure more time.

What's impressive in Tetris despite its apparent simplicity is how all those elements come together to build a strong, solid single stainless machine, making it for a real "better than the sum of parts" case (no pun intended). And the fair amount of gameplay options (choosing levels, PC demo play, Phantom pieces...) together with some finely tweaked controls scheme (an interesting keyboard button mapping) sum up for a surprisingly well-finished product--considering it wasn't necessarily a commercial project.

Controversy on the game being in fact a domination tool assembled to be used as a weapon during the Cold War aside, Tetris remains as one of the best pieces of software ever created--and one of the most interesting games in any medium for that matter.