NOA Press is slowly releasing info on the six modes of gameplay.
Standard: This Mario-themed mode features the same addictive game play that made the original Tetris so wildly popular. Players guide falling Tetriminos (falling blocks) and form horizontal lines to clear them away. Mario™ runs around Super Mario Bros.® levels in the background.
Touch: This unique take on Tetris really shows off the touch-screen capability of Nintendo DS. Players use a stylus to drag and move Tetriminos in a giant stack to make them fall into horizontal lines. In early levels, they can tap Tetriminos to spin them just the way they need them. Players have as much time as they need to carefully plan their moves, so it plays very differently from the other frantic modes.
Touch mode appears to be Balloon Fight-themed.
I put forth the idea that having more preview squares actually serves to increase the advantage a skilled player can have over a n00b. Sure, more preview = more easy seems the obvious relation, but is it really true? Much as a master chess player plans many moves in advance, master Tetris players will now have the chance to do the same and raise their scores and speed to new heights.
It's a change from classic in-the-dark Tetris, to be sure, but I'll always take a change emphasizing skill over a change emphasizing randomness.
I completely disagree. First of all, I played the THQ-developed Tetris Worlds for GC. I couldn't believe that it was possible to break Tetris so badly. The game completely lost its challenge. You can't really emphasize skill if the fun of the game is based on quick action decisions. What did they do wrong? 1. They show a queue of blocks, 6 of them like this version. I submit that this actually reduces skill because part of the skill of Tetris was deciding whether to keep stacking up blocks waiting for the Long Block (with the potential of it never arriving and losing) or playing it safe, but losing out on scoring. 2. The ability to store a piece. This has the same problem as #1. This insurance policy rebalances Tetris, making it too easy. 3. They added a grid. Obviously this makes it easier in that you're less likely to make an alignment error. 4. The music sucked. I hope they bring back Russian music, but I'm not counting on it. Also, I seem to remember something weird about the controls, hopefully that won't be a problem in this version. I'm not sure if Nintendo started from scratch with this game, or if they started work from THQ's now-cancelled version of Tetris DS. From what I understand, the THQ version was absolutely horrible and looked nothing like this version. I hope some of these "features" are customizable in the final game.
Imagine, Tetris online! sounds like fun
Imagine? I've been playing Tetris online since 1997. The games
TetriNET and
TetriNET 2 are 6-player online versions of Tetris with special attacks. I'm interested in seeing how Tetris DS's attacks work. It seems like you only get one attack, whereas in TetriNET, you can store many attacks. This is where I believe the best balance lies between strategy and challenge. Personally, I think that the extra screen space taken by the block queue should instead be used for an attack queue. I'm also interested in seeing how crazy 10-player matches get, and whether or not you can have teams like in TetriNET. This game has tons of potential, I really hope they don't screw it up.
