Tetris Worlds (PS2) Compare Prices

Game Review & Description: Tetris is the best puzzle game--nay, one of the best things--in the world, ever. Tetris Worlds isn't--the developers have taken one of the most perfectly designed games ever and made it significantly worse. As half the population of the world must know, the goal of Tetris is to collect together a variety of geometric shapes that fall from the top of the screen so that they fit together to make one or more horizontal line. Fail to do so, and let the shapes pile up to the top of the screen, and it's game over. It really should be that simple. There have been over 20 different versions of Tetris created in the 15 years since the game's creation and yet bizarrely almost all of these have managed to ruin the beauty of the original. It's as if developers have a blind spot for the game: they either muck up the control system, ruin the pace and atmosphere or try to add in unnecessary complications. Tetris Worlds avoids all these obvious mistakes but just at the last, ruins everything by allowing you to keep rotating and moving a shape indefinitely once it hits the bottom of the screen, completely ruining the carefully balanced difficulty curve and making the whole thing pointlessly easy. It's a real pity because otherwise the presentation and some of the extra options, particularly the four-player mode, are really good. But with the heart of the game ripped out in this way there really isn't much point. Get Tetris DX--the deluxe version of the Game Boy original--instead; it's worlds better (ho ho).--David Jenkins