Tetris Attack

Shit, if Jacknife is going to do a weekly column, then I’ll try as well, by reccomending old school games, particularly ones that I think don’t get the recognition that they deserve.

Tetris Attack for the SNES (puzzle genre)

I think this is the greatest puzzle game ever created, even taking Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo into account. Released in Japan as Panel De Pon which featured original characters who were faries (the main character’s flower wand was a weapon in Super Smash Bros. Melee), and later released on the Nintendo 64 as Pokemon Puzzle League, it stars characters from the Yoshi’s Island game. The game is great on so many levels. Like all good puzzle games, it’s easy to learn and hard to master. The way it plays is like this. You have a stack of blocks rising from the bottom. If any part of the stack touches the top, game over. You move the blocks by way of a horizontal cursor that can overlap two blocks and pressing A or B switches their position. Destroy the blocks by lining up three or more of the same color in a horizontal or vertical line. The blocks on top of the three or more that you just matched up will fall in place of the ones you cleared out. Simple, huh?

As you get more skilled, you can start to pull off chains. Let’s say you match up three red blocks, and under the first red block on the left, there’s two greens stacked vertically, and one stacked on top, when the red blocks disappear, the greens will match up when they land, creating a chain. While blocks are breaking up, the stack stops moving, so if you continually make matches, you could clear out a large chunk of the stack while it stalls for the blocks to break apart.

The game has serveral different modes which all hold a variety of replay value. Story mode, which pits you against Yoshi’s brainwashed pals, Puzzle mode, in which you’re given a limited number of moves to break up the blocks they’ve provided, Endless and the best, which is VS. Now, when you break four or more blocks at once, it’s called a combo. When you perform a combo or a chain, it sends a garbage block to the opponent’s side. They only way to get rid of this garbage block is to clear out blocks that are touching the garbage block, which turns it into colored blocks. Now, the best part is here. As the garbage block breaks apart, you can anticipate where to place the blocks you have sitting on the stack so that the blocks that come from the garbage block land, the can get multiple chains and combos, sending an even bigger garbage block over to your opponent’s side. I find the best way to play is to let your opponent send over a big garbage block, then break it apart and land as many chains and combos as possilbe to send a massive garbage block to the other side.

I could go on and on about this awesome game, but I’m not paid for this, so I’ll wrap it up by saying you NEED to play this game if you ever liked Tetris Attack. Go to Game Stop or Electronics Boutique. Get a ROM of it. It’s so worth it.