Next year marks the 20th anniversary of Tetris on Game Boy, and Nintendo intends to celebrate with Tetris Party, a new take on Alexey Pajitnov's classic puzzler. Available this October for Wii (via WiiWare) and costing 1200 points, the game has 18 different modes and variations of Tetris for both new and old generations. From motion controlled Tetris to online play, it's a sweet package and one of the fall's most promising games.
If you cling to your old school roots, you can play Tetris as its creator intended, but you'll barely scratch the surface of what the game has to offer. Hudson, the company behind Bomber Man, has come up with some fun variations that should keep you busy for hours. Take Field Climber, for example. Normally, Tetris is about eliminating blocks by fitting them in place, but in this mode, you're encouraged to make a mess by stacking blocks haphazardly, the goal to help a little dude climb his way to the top of the screen.
Then there's Shadow, a 30-stage mode that drops a silhouette on the screen and challenges you to fill it in with blocks. We're also fans of Dual Spaces, where you compete against a friend to score the most free space on a grid. You do this by building a mountain of bricks around a chunk of space. The bigger the space, the more points you earn.
Most of these modes are available for up to four players (be sure to check out co-op Tetris, where you work alongside someone on a wider grid), and you can even play online against a friend or randomly compete against players from around the world.
Tetris Party's most intriguing mode, however, involves the Balance Board. Here, you play a simplified version of Tetris by maneuvering your body to adjust the position of a block and where it falls. You don't even need a remote to play.
Of all Nintendo's upcoming WiiWare games, Tetris Party is by far the most intriguing. Plain old Tetris is great, but all of the new modes and the online play help make an old experience fresh and exciting. It'll knock your blocks off.
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