Art of the iPhone

There have been many successful versions of Tetris across many gaming platforms, but perhaps its biggest success was the 1989 Game Boy version. It was addictive mobile gaming at its finest. Tetris was the original “easy to pick up, hard to put down” mobile game. 20 years later, Tetris (iTunes link) comes to another mobile gaming platform, the iPhone. While the basics of the game haven’t changed much, the controls sure have.

Tetris is still addictive, and this version offers a lot of polish not found on other mobile versions, but sadly, the touch controls create problems just when the game starts to get serious, creating an inferior version of the game that won’t stand the test of time. People looking for a casual game of Tetris won’t be disappointed, but when the game pace starts to pick up, more serious players will find an inability to accurately position and place their Tetris blocks. We are rating Tetris a 6.9 out of 10.

Tetris offers two game modes, Marathon and Magic. The latter offers a unique style of play that takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometers and multitouch in the form of special tools that can be used to change or remove Tetris blocks. The tools are gained by progressing through the levels until you have all 5 at your disposal. The tools are:

• Minimizer squeezes a Tetris shape into a tiny block when you make a pinching gesture.
• Bubble Wrap turns all the bricks into bubbles that you pop by tapping.
• Magic Crayon allows you create any Tetris shape by drawing it.
• Wrecking Ball is activated by shaking. It creates spiked balls that bounce on the screen, destroying bricks.
• Smashdown is also activated by shaking, causing the Tetris shapes to collapse downward.

I found the Magic mode to be ridiculously easy. It’s simple to rely on the tools to clear the screen of the required lines to move on the next level. The features are fun for their novelty, but the novelty quickly wears off, leaving a pretty shallow, gimmicky twist on Tetris.

There is also more traditional mode called Marathon. The object is to stack bricks to form solid rows in order to remove the bricks. The more solid rows you create, the higher the level, and the faster the bricks appear and fall. Anyone who has played Tetris before should find it very familiar.

Tetris for the iPhone would be very solid indeed if it weren’t for the touch controls, which work like this: a tap on the right side of the screen rotates the shape clockwise, and a tap on the left rotates counterclockwise. Dragging you finger left or right drags the shape in the same direction. A quick swipe downward brings the shape crashing down.

The controls work fine during the easy to medium levels. It’s only when the game speeds up that its flaws become evident. It’s very difficult to place shapes precisely by rotating and dragging them to the correct position. Many game designers still haven’t realized that a finger doesn’t provide accurate aiming, especially on a screen the size of the iPhone.

Conclusion

This version of Tetris is fine for the casual player, but the touch controls become frustrating in the advanced levels. We rate it a 6.9 out of 10.

Tetris is a $4.99 download in the iTunes App Store.