November 19, 2010

By Michael Lowell

Tetris Attack
Super Nintendo, Game Boy (Reviewed for Super Nintendo)
Developed: Intelligent Systems, Nintendo R&D1
Published: Nintendo
Release Date: August 1996

Americans don’t care for thinking games. True story, folks. Thinking games hurt their brains. Publishers (American and elsewise) typically sell puzzle games to the Americans in the same way McDonald’s appeals to children by dressing their toxic sludge with a toy. With rare exceptions from mega-hits like Tetris and Bejeweled, publishers win their American audiences by coupling their puzzle games with beloved mascots. That’s how it goes down. A mediocre puzzle game like Dr. Mario becomes one of the best selling video games for the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Game Boy; legendary puzzler Puyo Puyo is rebranded as both Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine and Kirby’s Avalanche; the unheard-of arcade puzzle game Pnickies becomes cult hit Super Puzzle Fighter.

You’d best believe the fate of Intelligent Systems’ 1995 Japanese puzzler Panel de Pon was going to take the same road. Great game, indeed. But it wasn’t going to matter if she played like grease; Panel de Pon was a fantasy world with cutesy faeries and colorful block-swapping action. “Well, that could target the female audience.” Women only play the hell out of puzzle games they can find for cheap. They’re not playing Tetris if it requires a two-hundred-dollar video game console. That left the male audience to pick up the slack, and good luck convincing parents their ten-year-old wouldn’t get his ass kicked at school when he tells kids about the “faerie game” he’s playing. To compound the marketing nightmare, Nintendo was already hedging their bets on the Nintendo 64. As far as the company was concerned, the Super Nintendo was already on its way out. If Panel de Pon was going to make it to the States, it was going to need some muscle.

So, a couple of things happened. First, Henk Rogers (co-founder of The Tetris Company) lent out the Tetris name to a puzzle game that played absolutely nothing like Tetris. (Years later, Rogers openly regretted doing this.) Good enough, right? Everyone likes Tetris, right? Nintendo decided that wasn’t enough. The faerie thing had to go. How could they convince audiences this wasn’t a kids’ game? They borrowed the cast of characters from Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island. Right. I guess it didn’t matter if the storyline and graphics were a mish-mash of Panel de Pon carry-overs. Yoshi fucking rules and faeries are for faeries. So there, Nintendo got their brand recognition. Tetris Attack was born. It wouldn’t occur to Nintendo for nearly eleven years following 1996′s Tetris Attack (when 2007′s Planet Puzzle League marked the first time the franchise was released in the States as a stand-alone, mascot-free barn-burner) that Panel de Pon is a bad mother, no matter what you call it and how cute it looks.

So how does it work? You get several colors of blocks. Match the colors with a cursor that swaps blocks side-to-side. Clearing three blocks horizontally or vertically eliminates them from the playing field. Sound simple? Yeah, you have the option of clearing more than three blocks at a single time. The points from those combos are quality stuff. But thanks to gravity, that clear can create another set of cleared blocks, the beginning of a chain. Develop the moxy and you can start a chain long enough to take the entire playing field with it. “That’s nice, Mike. But what makes that different from Puyo Puyo or even average puzzle games like Columns?” It’s simple: The playing field can be manipulated in real time. That one design decision changes the entire game. It turns an interesting thinking and planning element (“How am I going to become the architect of this controlled demolition?”) into some beast of an action game, where hand-eye coordination is just as paramount as the ability to think fast.

If you’ve played any of the Tetris games since Arika laid their hands into the franchise, you know exactly what you’re getting here. Tetris Attack does what allowed Starcraft to endure long after the strategy component had been solved; what allowed Street Fighter to continue attracting audiences even as more complicated fighting games with more complicated move-sets followed. Those games treated execution as their most critical and most difficult-to-master skill. Tetris Attack uses the limitations of its input method (the controller and its directional pad) to create a more interesting product. The ability to move around the playing field is just as critical a skill as processing information quickly. (I know what you’re going to ask: “Weren’t you a vocal supporter of multiple-building selection? You know, the interface limitations that increased the mechanical skill required to play Starcraft? Didn’t you hate single-building selection and the unit selection cap?” I was and I still do. That hasn’t changed. Just like the input method works in the context of Tetris Attack, the limitations of the Starcraft interface worked within the context of Starcraft and only Starcraft. Single-building selection and the unit selection cap could not have returned in Starcraft II or any real-time strategy game following it. It was infeasible from a marketing standpoint and it was infeasible from a gameplay standpoint. Good luck telling the World of Warcraft audience that the upcoming Blizzard real-time strategy game would require players to click, click, click like it’s 1998. Thus, the onus was on Blizzard Entertainment to replace the mechanical skill present in Brood War with new and interesting game mechanics. Whether they succeeded in doing so is your call.)

What does this accomplish? It increases the number of viable decisions by granting otherwise-useless maneuvers prominence. Central to Panel de Pon’s highest levels of play are skill chains. This is the act of continuing your chain with a move that could only be accomplished as blocks are in the act of falling. For example, you can swap a block from a stable column with a falling piece in an adjacent column. The chain does not break as a result of this move. When the substitute piece hits the bottom, your chain (and your points) will continue moving upward. Swapping blocks while one piece is in mid-air? Is it hard? It damn sure can be. Hell, you can play Tetris Attack for years and never come across some of the game’s numerous nuances. They’re not integral to playing the game. But for the players who discover and master these tricks, it creates additional decision-making options: “Do I aim for the easy move higher up the playing field? I may not have the spare time to get my cursor up there. Maybe I should opt for the tougher play closer to my cursor.”

The formula works wonderfully in both major gametypes; marathon modes for scoring and versus modes for launching “garbage blocks” at your opposition. The story mode? It’s the Citizen Kane of video games. And by that, I mean “It’s what one expects when the Panel de Pon storyline is redone and repackaged for Yoshi and friends”, featuring timely character names such as “Flamer Guy”. But you’re still settling this ridiculous clash of worlds in the Tetris Attack versus mode, so it’s all good. The outliers? Stage Clear is what it is; advance from level to level by clearing a number of rows without dying. Puzzle mode is what it is; clear the screen with the alotted number of moves. Are they the most compelling components of Tetris Attack? Hardly. Is anyone forcing you to play them? Not as long as you’re hooked to the other game modes.

Anything there isn’t to like about Tetris Attack? It ain’t perfect. Not a lot of games are. (Roughly zero, by my last count.) What failings do we have? If there can be any complaints, we can unfairly fault the developers. They had no way of anticipating how skilled a number of Tetris Attack players would become. I am not implying that the game falls apart because of it. Don’t even think I’m implying that. It simply changes the rules of engagement. One nasty oversight of a scoring bug comes to mind. The chain system works on multipliers. Every consecutive move in a chain increases the multiplier by one. The maximum scoring multiplier is thirteen. The problem? You don’t earn points for anything past that multiplier. Whoops. This forces the player to complete various erroneous moves while your maximum multiplier is intact (any cleared blocks independent of your active chain receive the same bonus points). And versus mode? It doesn’t quite have the “offense” and “defense” that you would think of in a game like Puyo Puyo. Typically, the best strategy is to ram chains down the throat of the other player, which lead to gigantic garbage blocks (such as the one pictured above) that must be cleared line by line. This garbage can pile up so quickly that the game becomes a marathon where battles are decided by which player blinks first. And of course, this is compounded by a Super Nintendo processor that isn’t fully capable of handling. If you’re playing for score in the marathon modes, a skilled player can very easily reach the highest score, limited to five digits. (That is, five to ten minutes of playtime.)

Of course, this course of events where Tetris Attack “becomes too easy for its audience” assumes a course of events where players have spent years trying to master it. And if the biggest complaint you can levy towards a puzzle game is “I’ve played it for ten-plus years and it can’t handle what I’m capable of”, uh, yeah. Not bad for a “children’s game”, huh?

5 out of 5

(Games rated five-out-of-five are events, amongst the best your calendar year offered. And if you can’t put aside a couple of bucks for stuff like this, give up gaming. It’s never going to please you.)

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Special Thanks To:

Box art scanned and uploaded to the internet by contributors of TheOldComputer.com.