Tetris "A-Hack"
From Paneru De Pon to Tetris Attack

Title screen | Optional mode | Passwords | The heroes | Characters | Garbage Blocks | Stage 4 | Stages 9 - 12 | Audible changes

While not as blatant a rip-off Super Mario Bros. 2 was to Doki Doki Panic, Tetris Attack still retained a lot of Paneru De Pon's original stuff. Though the passwords were changed, the cheat codes and huge Puzzle mode stayed the same! But while SMB2 was mostly a case of sprite-switching, Tetris Attack had quite a bit of original artwork to be done for the panel backgrounds and such.

Title screen

Pretty much self-explanatory.

The more I write about this, the smarter I think Nintendo was; not one to compromise my masculinity, you would never see me buying an English version of Panel De Pon without Yoshi characters. :)

Optional mode

As you can see from the extra choice in Tetris Attack's mode select screen, Panel De Pon never had an Option mode.

Passwords

Another improvement in Tetris Attack was the addition of a password system for the 1-player Vs. mode. (In PDP, selecting Vs. mode from the menu takes you right to the game, giving no opportunity for entering passwords.) Notice the lack of password on the left side of the PDP screen shot below.

In the Stage Clear and Puzzle modes, passwords aren't interchangable between PDP and TA, unfortunately. One reason might be because Tetris Attack has a few more characters available for its password system.

The heroes

Lip's Fairy Land becomes Yoshi's Island.

Characters

These screen shots from the 2-player Vs. mode show all the characters. The "name tags" didn't make it into Tetris Attack.

Garbage Blocks

In PDP, there are 13 different Garbage Block designs; one for each character, matching the theme of their stage. The designs were narrowed down to two in Tetris Attack, with your character throwing out the blue ones, and your enemies attacking with red ones. The Garbage Block design in Tetris Attack is a modified version of Sanatos' blocks (#11).

Stage 4

While most of the stages in Panel De Pon had easy matches for Super Mario World 2 characters, no character really fits in with the jewel motif of Ruby's stage (stage four in Vs. mode). Any character had a chance to sneak into the game here, and Wiggler gets the nod for stage four in Tetris Attack.

Stages 9 - 12

For the three characters right before Bowser, Tetris Attack used the background from the cinema scenes when you're in the Cave of Wickedness. Bowser's stage is a modified version of Dragon's stage (stage 10 in Vs. mode). This leaves PDP's stages 9, 11, and 12's backgrounds unused in Tetris Attack.

Audible changes

Panel De Pon's Japanese voice samples had to be changed for Tetris Attack's "Mario" characters, obviously. And that's about it for sound effect changes.

The music was not changed, except:

• Title screen: SMW2 title music
• Yoshi's theme and Game Over screen: SMW2 "story" music
• Bowser's theme (stage 12) was originally Sanatos' theme (stage 11 of PDP). Corderia's theme (stage 12 of PDP) was not used in Tetris Attack.
• Kamek's theme (stage 11) uses the same music as stage 9 and 10.

Title screen | Optional mode | Passwords | The heroes | Characters | Garbage Blocks | Stage 4 | Stages 9 - 12 | Audible changes