"Tetris Blast" (Game Boy)

You Tetris fans must love Tetris Week here at SHOWSOTROS which is an exclusive showcase reviewing the block-stacking classic. I'm certain you'll have a "blast" with this one: Tetris Blast!

This game harkens back to the original concept that made Tetris a mega-hit. With the option to have 2 players, there are three modes: CONTEST, TRAINING and FIGHT. What the Contest Mode features is very much clear the board and you advance to the next stage; The Training Mode is specifically a mode to train your stacking skills; Lastly, the Fight Mode is the one where you challenge against characters only exclusive here on Tetris Blast.

As you can tell, this version includes a ball in one of the pieces. This ball acts as a bomb to explode off the completed lines and pieces of the blocks on each line. The more of these explosive spheres you stack on each line, the faster it eliminates that very line and the lines on top and on the bottom of it. If you stack up four balls in a cube, it converts into one large explosive sphere, which can come in handy when you bust your skills in FIGHT Mode.

On FIGHT Mode, you'll find yourself in a challenge against eight characters, and they are as follows: Cubit, Snaptor, Gloop, Creepa, Squidly, Dug Grub, Shadow and B-Boy. Looking at these enemies, they can perfectly pass off as emojis lots of smartphone and social media users use to add some emotion on their statuses. Anyway, the most difficult enemy I've dealt with has to be Shadow who not only adds rows and rows of blocks but petrifies the blocks that drop restricting you from moving the block to the desired position. Defeat all 8 enemies and you win! The game ends with credits.

The graphics are good but not as artistic and detailed compared to Tetris Attack. The sound/music is fine but I'm still stuck in that whole classical Russian music from the original game. The controls are, as always, excellent and not a single hang-up did I experience during gameplay.

When you play this game on the Super Game Boy, I feel that some graphical borders were lazily done. Nevertheless, it's better than no custom graphics at all, but it's not too big a deal.

Some critics find this game so much better than Tetris 2 (I thought I was the only one). There's something to be had with this game and it will certainly challenge you to a limit. In other words, hurry up and play this game!

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he managed a personal blog made back in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming (software development) and video production, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, playing old video/DOS games, digital video archiving, and listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

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