"Tetris Plus" (Game Boy)

A game that still keeps the original Tetris gameplay with some challenging additions. In a way, you might wish that Jo's professor wasn't much in the way.

Tetris Week! I'm sure you enjoyed our little showcase in reviewing a huge list of Tetris games, namely the games I own personally. Running through the games, I run into this...and I don't feel optimistic.

The modes are as follows: Classic, Puzzle, VS and Edit with an Option menu. The modes Classic, VS and Edit are self-explanatory, along with the Options menu so I won't go too much into those. What really twisted my brain was the Puzzle mode, and like I mentioned on the Tetris 2 review, this is the one mode I couldn't bare.

You get to choose four difficulty modes: Easy, Normal, Hard and Very Hard. After choosing, you see a World Map where you get to choose what city to play at: Egypt, Angkor Wat, Maya and Knossos. The goal is to roam the cities acquiring lost treasures, almost reminding me of the classic film Raiders of the Lost Ark.

When playing this mode and choosing your city, the game plays as normal but you must use the eliminating of the lines of blocks to make way for the Professor to reach the GOAL line, which is at the very bottom as best and fast as you can. The trick is to stack the blocks in such a way where the Professor can avoid the spikes at the top, periodically dropping every now and then crushing the blocks in its way. Failure to do so may propel the Professor to climb your stack which may cause him to get hit/killed by the spikes and the game is over. Even if you couldn't beat the stage(s) in an allotted amount of time, as doing so earns you bonus points, at least you can move on to the next stage; In other words, don't worry too much about the clock.

What irritates me about this game is how easily distracted you get, as you get too focused on the random stacks of blocks and trying to clear the lines whilst making way for the Professor. Sometimes, depending on how your stack looks, the Professor never cooperates and spontaneously climbs up a stack and stupidly gets mauled by the spikes ending your game sooner than usual. That part by itself got me to shut the game off because I couldn't handle someone as incompetent as that, and when I do get a solid chance in clearing way, there are times when it's too late because the Professor already climbed up a stack and gets hit by the spikes the moment I was about to clear some lines. I honestly could not deal with such a nuisance of a character, as it was too much responsibility.

Once again, just because I played a terrible game doesn't mean I rated this game low because it was bad. Other video gamers rated this game high and even enjoyed it. Some have even beaten the whole game which I find astonishing. Puzzle mode has 100 stages! I just got up to Stage 10 and at that point, I've had enough of the Professor; He was annoying me climbing on stacks which I had no clue as to why he'd do so knowing that that'd get him killed. Horrible.

There may be one week where I'll put in the effort to try and beat this game. Regardless, after 100 stages of dealing with a crap-shoot of a professor, I never will want to play this game ever again.

Jo, please get a new professor.

Kris Caballero

Founder of KCU Network and KCU Plus, Kris has been writing since he started blogging in late 2005. Officially back to doing computer programming, Kris enjoys reading books on Mathematics, Quantum Computing, Philosophy, plus playing old video/MS-DOS games, digital video archiving, listening to sports, public radio and classical music.

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