5/6/2007 - Tetris Ninjas

I got one of the original Gameboys when it first came out, and yes, it was a frickin' brick! It was supposed to be a shrunken-down NES that you could fit into your pocket. The only thing is, if you had pants with pockets THAT BIG, you'd probably be beaten up! I'm really surprised it became a hit. It was bulky, black & white, and could not handle fast-moving graphics (everything would blur like crazy). After dropping it once, my screen would have one or two columns of pixels that became missing. Also, I got tired of it eating my AA batteries so I got an external battery pack that completely destroyed the Gameboy's portability.

It did have one thing going for it, though, and that was the pack-in game Tetris. When I first heard that a puzzle game was going to be the pack-in instead of Super Mario Land, I was scratching my head. Why would Nintendo be shooting themselves in their foot like this? The original NES packed in Super Mario Bros., and Nintendo made gaming history with it. I didn't have a PC, so I did not know anything about this Tetris phenomenon. I thought that it might have been some kind of edutainment thing that would bore me to tears. Boy, was I wrong!

The beauty of Tetris (and of other good puzzle games) is that it's so deceptively simple. Complete lines with falling blocks? Sure it sounds easy, and it is at first. As the pace gets quicker, you'll see how your hand-eye coordination skills come into play. In Game A, you're trying to outdo your High Score. In Game B, though, you're trying to complete a set number of lines with random blocks in the way at startup. You weren't any kind of a Tetris guru until you beat Game B, Level 9, High 5. It's still hard for me this day. What was cool was that you'd actually get an ending! Looking back on it now, it was correct for Nintendo to have Tetris as a pack-in game. It was fun, addictive, and its graphics were so simple that the Gameboy blurriness wasn't a factor at all.

Seeing Tetris as a skit in the Boston 2007 Anime convention has definitely brought back some flashbacks. They got every little detail right, including the music tracks (my favorite was Music-1, though) and the pause screen. The folks that come up with these skits never cease to amaze me!