I've been playing Tetris DS off and on for a few weeks, and it's pretty fun. There are several differences to regular old-school Tetris, such as the "Hold" function for keeping a piece in reserve. The biggest surprise for me is the floatiness I mentioned discussing Tetris: The Grand Master. As long as you don't hard drop the pieces, you can keep spinning them seemingly forever without them locking in place. You can even spin certain pieces across "hills" in your landscape.
This slipperiness (and whatever difference in speed increase per level there is, but I can't tell) is what lets you get all the way to the Standard Marathon goal of level 20. Once you beat it, you see credits, and then have an "Endless" option in the Standard Marathon game settings. All the music is also available then in the Options menu (songs become available as you beat the appropriate levels).
The other modes are pretty interesting too. Puzzle is fun, with 200 preprogrammed set-ups you solve by clearing all the lines with the three or four particular pieces. There's no time limit and the pieces only fall when you select a piece and orientation; if you get really stuck, you can at least enumerate all the possible solutions to find it. Mission is also a blast, though getting several hard missions in a row later in a game when the time whizzes by is terribly frustrating.
However, the most interesting part is the Push mode is a clever bit of mind engineering. I played it on level 1 and didn't think much of it, but it was totally mind blowing by the time I got to level 3. The concept of Push is you and your opponent are presented with a normal problem in the Tetris grammar, but rather than solving it normally, your job is actually to recontextualize your opponent's problem space to your advantage!
The manual describes it like this:
Each time a player clears two or more lines at once, the entire field will be pushed into the opponent's area. Push the field so that it touches the danger line on the Touch Screen to win. If you get pushed all the way to the top, you lose! The more lines you clear at once, the further you will push your opponent down!
That seems simple enough, but playing up to level 3 against the computer, you rapidly discover that's not the whole game. While you can still clear lines fairly fast, once you and the computer clear all or most of the lines, Push becomes a battle of patching the holes to shift the ground under your opponent.
Take this situation, for example:
Either player (blue on top, green on the bottom) could drop a piece and clear a line. While blue would like to drop the J to clear two lines, if green drops eir O piece soon enough, blue would suddenly be faced with causing a bubble in the crook of the piece if e dropped it there. That is, green could drop a piece to change the blocks in blue's puzzle! (Interestingly enough, if both players drop their pieces simultaneously enough, the game will simply wedge them together and lose the conflicting pip.)
I can't describe how mind-blowing push mode was when I was first playing the computer at it. I managed to barely best the level 2 AI a few times, but level 3 simply whooped my ass. If you remember first playing Tetris, how you dreamed in it as your brain attenuated: it was that same feeling. I was not expecting the same kind of brilliant learning experience in the least, yet here it is, in this strange metagame where you have to fathom solutions in an expanded problem domain to win.
And that's just level 3! I wouldn't be surprised if level 5 required telekinesis.
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