Tetris

I guess it's classics week here at Me And My Droid and today it's time to review Tetris. Back in May of this year the Tetris Company send a cease and desist letter to Google requesting demanding that all Tetris games be pulled from the Android Market. And so they were. Do a search on Tetris today and you'll see that it hasn't stuck. In fact, Google is a bit of a copyright enigma to me will all of the blatant and not so blatant infringement that goes on in the Android Market (and on other Google owned 'properties' like YouTube!). Google seems pretty good about taking action with cease and desist letters, but nobody wants to fight Google and their deep pockets in court and so would be infringers seem to like to hide in the shadow of Google. And so after my review of Androtris a year or so ago today we'll look at the officially licensed Tetris for Android which is published by EA and is a part of their nice $.99 holiday sale.

I won't spend any time talking about what Tetris is as I don't think there's a game alive (and not too many non-gamers) that aren't familiar with the basics. On these basics Tetris delivers well. It features two modes of play. First there's the traditional play until you drop 'marathon mode'. Next there an 'magic mode' that adds special abilities via tool icons on the left of the screen that you earn. You can use these tools to do things like turn the bricks at the bottom into bubble wrap allowing you to pop them to get rid of them. Magic mode is a nice addition to the game.

Tetris' graphics and sound are done well enough and the game doesn't make the same mistakes that so many other arcade ports do. For a start, there's no real issue with slow downs. Next, the controls are done very well. Swipes are used to drag the falling blocks left, right, or even down and taps are used to rotate the falling bricks. The controls are easy to get used to and fit a touch screen device perfectly. This is just as addictive as it was 20+ years ago on the original Gameboy. The game even includes a nice, quick tutorial than can easily be turned off and you can start on harder levels if you so desire.

There's really not much to say in the negatives for this release. The only two things I can think of are that this needs to be $.99 all the time... not just as part of a sale. I can't imagine paying $4.99 for it and $2.99 even seems steep, but at $.99 this is a staple that all Android owners should have. The other, bigger issue (no pun intended) in that it's 8 meg with no App2SD. That's a lot of storage space for such a simple game even though it's well executed.

If you've got the space then get this while it's $.99. And I have to admit being pleasantly surprised that goliath has done such a nice job with this game. I have really come to expect disappointment in these ports from companies that just rely on their past reputation to get by. EA's Tetris stands tall on its own and fill up the storage on your Android to prove it. 4/5 stars.