[PC] [VAR] Tetris

[JoshF]

And wait until my reviews of Tetris, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Golden Eye, A Link to the Past, Diablo, etc. come out. I am going to bring all their statues crashing down around their heads and watch them dance around as they try to avoid getting hit by the flying rubble.

I'm looking forward to reading all of these reviews, particularly the Tetris one to see if any of your negative criticisms would be the same as mine (albeit more comprehensive from you).

While I'd say Tetris is a good game, it was certainly nothing revolutionary. In fact, you could call it retrogressive considering it came out after games like Adventure, Pitfall, and Jungle King, and around the same time as Pac-Land. Even as a single-screen action game, the game world isn't as imaginative as earlier ones like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, or Congo Bongo because it simply overlays images of boxes onto the invisible boxes, rather than something more interesting like images of men, barrels, steel beams, etc..

[icycalm]

While I'd say Tetris is a good game

It may be, in the same way that billiards is a good game. But billiards isn't art, and neither is Tetris.

You've got the general idea down, for sure. But it needs to be justified rigorously because calling Tetris "mediocre", which is what I am going to call it, is an even greater blasphemy than calling "indie" games shit -- and with good reason.

And now consider Arkanoid. To a casual observer the games might seem to be on a level, or even worse: Arkanoid might seem inferior since there aren't so many versions of it and there's no "competitive" scene. But I'll be damned if I didn't enjoy it a thousand times more than Tetris, and this can be perfectly justified from an art theory perspective. So it will be an interesting review, to be sure. And it will be met with as much disbelief and denial as the scoring article, and by the same general group of people.