There is a distinct chance that, were it not for Tetris, there would not be a Nintendo DS. Though there were superior versions of Alexei Pajitnov's elegant and dangerously addictive puzzle game available on other platforms, Tetris for the original Game Boy was the reason to buy Nintendo's first handheld. Considering the significance of Tetris to Nintendo's handheld legacy, it's a little surprising that it took this long for it to show up on the DS. Tetris DS features a great variety of gameplay variants and online play, and is absolutely smothered in 8-bit Nintendo nostalgia; yet the package makes enough minor, obvious mistakes to keep it from being absolutely essential.
We're just going to assume here that you've played Tetris before--however, for those who haven't played Tetris since it was rendered in green-and-grey on the Game Boy, some changes have been made to the formula. Top of the list is the introduction of the hold box, which lets you take the active piece in play and put it to the side for later use; it can be a lifesaver when you have a piece that won't fit snugly into your playfield, or when you're setting yourself up for a four-line Tetris. Another less obvious and more damaging change is the infinite spin. This was a "feature" we first discovered in THQ's Tetris Worlds, where, even when a piece had touched down, you could keep it in play by constantly rotating it. It's a genuinely awful thing, though the infinite spin issue honestly really affects only a few of the single-player gameplay modes in Tetris DS, because any competitive mode requires you to lay down pieces as quickly as humanly possible. It's still incredibly bothersome that this quirk seems to be on its way to becoming Tetris canon.
There's also the hard drop, which will instantly place the piece in play at the bottom of the playfield when you tap up on the D pad, as well as the ghost piece, which shows a translucent projection of the piece in play on the bottom of the playfield. Both of these are pretty minor and can actually be turned off, though oddly, the hold box and the infinite spin cannot. The general lack of customization is rather glaring throughout Tetris DS. Sure, there's a number of unique gameplay modes here, but by simply including the option to let the player tweak some of the settings, that number could have increased exponentially.
What's even more immediately striking than these fundamental gameplay tweaks is the presentation of Tetris DS, as Nintendo has plastered the game with all kinds of classic 8-bit Nintendo sights and sounds. It covers the basics with themes based on Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, and Metroid, though it also includes themes based on less well-known properties like Excitebike, Balloon Fight, and Yoshi's Cookie. Ultimately, the biggest problem with the presentation is that it banks too much on nostalgia, and frankly, we don't always want to listen to the Super Mario Bros. music on loop while we play Tetris. A lot of the themes are inexorably linked to specific gameplay modes, which means that if you don't much care for a certain piece of music, you're going to want to stay away from certain modes.
The single-player game is divvied up into six different styles of play, many of which contain several distinct modes. Standard Tetris is about as close to vanilla Tetris as you'll find in Tetris DS, and the modes contained within it are, well, pretty standard. Marathon challenges you to clear 200 lines, line clear lets you set the drop speed and the number of uncleared lines you start with, and VS CPU puts you up against some artificial intelligence that quickly goes from grade school to diabolical Tetris mastermind. Push, which can be played against the CPU or a live opponent, puts an interesting spin on standard two-player Tetris by having both players share the same baseline. Clearing lines pushes the baseline closer to the top of your opponent's field (which, from your perspective, looks like the bottom of your own field) until one of you runs out of room.
The touch style will have you pulling out your stylus and using it to slide around and rotate pieces that are already on the playfield in order to clear lines. Touch features two modes. Tower presents you with a massive pile of jumbled-up pieces that you'll have to clear in order to bring precious freedom to a cage of balloons--yup, balloons--while touch puzzle gives you a relatively limited number of pieces to work with, but challenges you to completely clear out the entire playfield, and without the ability to rotate pieces. While identifiable as Tetris only because of the familiarity of the piece shapes, both of the touch modes can be fun, though the touch puzzle mode provides an especially satisfying, and occasionally maddening, challenge. There's also a non-touch puzzle mode, in which you're presented with a field with a number of lines already on it, and then given a few specific pieces to use in order to completely clear the field. There are 200 unique puzzles, which slowly but surely increase in complexity, and they can be just as crazymaking as the touch puzzles.
