It's a brilliant game. Nintendo made one of the best moves in the history of the gaming industry by pairing the new portable with this spectacular puzzler, as Tetris was a perfect fit for play on the go – tons of people got hooked on this game 20 years ago. Seriously, it was a phenomenon. You think Angry Birds is huge today? That was Tetris back at the dawn of the '90s. A megaton hit.
This particular version can no longer compare against more modern revisions in terms of featureset – newer releases like Tetris DS, Tetris Party Live or Tetris: Axis are all packed to overflowing with extra modes, online multiplayer and more. And in fact, this 3DS Virtual Console edition of Game Boy Tetris has had a chunk of its content cut – since Nintendo's VC re-releases are still not supporting multiplayer, you can no longer go head-to-head against a friend here (which is particularly sad, since Tetris was the game that actually established two-player Link Cable play in the first place.)
So Tetris has its negatives, granted. But I still think this re-release is spectacular, deserves your attention and demands four of your dollars – because it's the Tetris!
Really, this one wins on its nostalgia. That's a factor in all Virtual Console re-releases, of course, but this one is magnified in that regard – because everyone had this game before. Everyone – every Game Boy owner across a whole generation of the industry. Its audience was huge. Its impact on pop culture more pervasive, more engrained than even the Mario and Zelda releases of the same era. And if you think that a thin argument, I dare you to do a quick Internet search to bring up this game's iconic background music and see if you can resist the pull of reaching for your wallet.
Beyond just pure wistfulness for the old days, though, this Tetris really does succeed in several other areas. It's the core Tetris game, the design that's been so endlessly replayable that it's gone on to inspire over two decades' worth of spin-offs and sequels (let's see if anyone remembers Angry Birds in the year 2033). It includes both endless mode (A-Type) and a 25-line score attack with adjustable levels of garbage blocks (B-Type.)
And Tetris has also benefitted quite a bit from being presented through the new 3DS Virtual Console emulator software. Its Restore Point functionality is interesting to use in a puzzle game – you can cheat and artificially increase your high scores to a certain degree by scouting out several pieces ahead and then resetting back to an earlier save state – but more intriguing is the simple power to now suspend your session in progress.
This lets you do two things – first, you can get several minutes deep into a run through endless mode without worry that a need to leave your game idle will ruin a high score in the making. And second, you can save your high scores. That seems such a simple thing, but the original Tetris Game Boy cartridge didn't have battery back-up – so you could enter your name next to an impressive point total, but it would always get erased every time you powered off your system. There was no permanent way to track your scores. Now, that issue's resolved – simply leaving Tetris by way of the Home Button on the 3DS will also keep the same session of the game saved and active, so you can put up scores for weeks, months and years now without fear that a drained set of AA's will delete all record of your achievements.
![Tetris [Game Boy]](https://assets-prd.ignimgs.com/2022/01/28/tetris-gb-button-edit-1643393575715.jpg?width=114&crop=1%3A1%2Csmart&auto=webp)
