Tetris DS [DS]

So here I am, holding a Nintendo handheld system, and I'm hooked on a little Russian puzzle game about falling blocks. Man, it's like 1989 all over again. Like a lot of people, my first exposure to Tetris was during that fateful year when Nintendo included it with its shockingly-large-by-today's-standards portable system, the Game Boy. Now, here we are a whopping 17 years later, and sure enough, Tetris is just as addictive as it ever was.

If you come into Tetris DS expecting to see a bunch of onion-topped Russian buildings and hear those classic Tetris tunes, you're going to be disappointed. This is Tetris for the Nintendo fanboy. For whatever reason, Nintendo has decided to plaster this game with 8-bit sprites and retro music. Whether you like the NES sensibility of the game or not is purely your call, but I thought it was a lot of fun. Of course, Nintendo doesn't need to keep reminding us that it created the awful Urban Champion, but that's neither here nor there. For the record, the NES version of Tetris is referenced in the game, so you'll still get a cameo by those funky buildings.

There are six different modes to choose from in the game. The one that the majority of people will be most at home with is Standard mode. Standard is just like the old Tetris, where you rotate and place falling blocks in the pit in order to create solid lines. The lines disappear and you earn points. Clear four lines at once and you get a "Tetris." There are two sub-modes to Standard: Marathon and Line Clear. At first, Marathon is an endurance test of sorts. You must survive long enough to clear 200 lines. Doing so unlocks Endless mode, which allows you to keep playing until your screen fills up with blocks, thus ending the game. Line clear challenges you to clear a set number of lines after you set the starting level and how high you want the initial stack of blocks to be.