The “big” Tetris game for N64 starts off extremely promising. There’s a great opening video to a slowed down version of THE Tetris theme. Then you start and you’re presented with a Mayan theme background and a few rules changes – ones that take a simple game and overcomplicate it in unnecessary ways. This is the New Coke of Tetris. Oh, and get used to that background, as you’ll be staring at it for a very long time.  

Tetris doesn’t need visual flair, but some is nice. In The New Tetris, every line you create adds to a running building a “wonder”, complete it and you’ll move to the next one (so another background to star at for ages), up to completing half a million lines to finish the final one. This isn’t really a challenge, it’s just playing the game for an unbelievably long amount of time. Each theme also comes with some utterly atrocious music, and the only other track is the slowed down Tetris theme, which you can select as the music for your game (although you can’t change music mid-game), but it doesn’t fit the flow of the game. Mute the music and play the original music instead.

In terms of gameplay changes, the one that has stuck around is the ability to “hold” a piece for later up. This version also shows you three additional pieces, which is a bit too many. The score is also entirely gone, focusing entirely on lines – which is where this game’s most awkward mechanic fits in.

If you create a perfect 4×4 square of complete blocks, you’ll form a “super” block – silver if you use different pieces, gold if you only use one kind of block. If you use these to form complete lines, you’ll score bonus lines. This is an unnecessary complication for the game, and it means there’s no bonus for completing two or three lines at once – although you do get a single extra line for clearing four lines at once.

The New Tetris has a few slight variations that feel the same, although the multiplayer does support four players. Overall though, the other N64 Tetris games – Tetris 64 and Magical Tetris Challenge – are both much better variations on Tetris than this. One thing The New Tetris did give us, though, are all the wonderful rants slagging off the producer hidden in the code.

Fine

So imagine our surprise when The New Tetris turned out to be the big screen adaptation we’ve all been waiting for. The designers of the game, H2O, haven’t gone crazy with the kind of new shapes nonsense seen in Magical Tetris and Tetris 64, and the only gameplay additions are a couple of new tactics and a revised scoring system – the old points tally being replaced by a simpler lines score. It works brilliantly, and it’s far better than having a high score table full of seven-digit numbers.

Martin Kitts, N64 Magazine #33. Review Score: 88%

Remake or remaster?

While I don’t like it, new Tetris games should include specific rules sets like this.

Official ways to get the game.

There is no official way to get The New Tetris