Tetraminos Review (avie!!)
look if youre gazing into the review section for this game you probably already know if you want to bother with this or not and the answer is statistically going to be leaning towards "or not". official tetris games exist plentifully on modern systems with steam itself having at least three different options. to me there are two possible demographics this serves today; (1) is people who are looking for a cheap "why not" game or are such cheapskates they dont want official tetris games cos they dont go as cheap as this one, and (2) is weirdos who enjoy playing crusty janky copycats and adjacent games.
my review is for my people, the folks in category 2. now lemme tell ya. this one? this one is pretty dang solid. music is lacking, theres only really one track youll hear, but its pleasant and loops seamlessly as well. visuals are honestly rather pretty, and the voice over lady sounds bored out of her mind in a rather amusing way. as for the gameplay, it's rather unique in that you have dpad left right for movement, a button to hard drop (yes really) and x button to rotate clockwise; no anticlockwise rotation. the movement is pretty choppy and makes playing at the higher speeds actively difficult, the scoring noise is obnoxious and will quickly get on your nerves, the new shaped pieces are honestly rather welcome save for the dreaded + piece (which is thankfully rather rare and seems to come up as a curveball more than anything) and the pieces themselves lock in rather quickly, again hindering that high speed gameplay. i also noted that theres no wallkicking (why would there be, its not using SRS) or t-spinning (sad) but there is an odd lenience towards s-piece spinning for some reason and i have definitely performed what i would loosely call an "s-spin" type move once whilst playing. all in all, its a mildly interesting and largely solid tetris copy that i dont really have much to complain about.
outside of endless/marathon mode theres a puzzle "clear all the coloured blocks" mode which gives you star ratings based on how long it takes you and seems frankly annoying to get 3 star clears on if only because of the rng of pieces and how clunky the movement is in general, and a challenge mode where it asks you to clear an increasing amount of lines with a steadily decreasing time limit. neither of em are really worth bothering with unless you really wanna go for those cheevos.
given i picked this up for the very Nice (tm) price of 69p on sale i aint fussing at all, i got my moneys worth from it very quickly. dont advise getting it when its not on sale tho, tis rather pricy at rrp. jank enjoyers will very much be pleased, i've played far worse clones on ps2.