Virtual Boy Complete - Game #1

God, this is a TERRIBLE start. Too bad to be mediocre, but not interesting enough to be a fascinating kusoge. If you've ever played It's Mr. Pants (an actual good game), imagine that but the blocks stack up instead of overwriting one another. The game has a nauseating "90s 3D for the sake of 3D" camera that can often cause confusion (sometimes the camera will pan down in a way that makes an empty row look like a wall), annd would be outright unplayable if they didn't have a 2D version of the game screen on the HUD. Outside of the puzzle mode, which is probably the best use the game gets of its very poor foundation (not that that's saying much, it's still confusing and cryptic), all of the blocks are just straight lines. Unlike the real Tetris, where every problem, no matter how seemingly hopeless, has some sort of solution at any point, every problem you run into here can be solved with a simple "wait for a 1-segment block", giving a double whammy of fustration with an unstatisfying solution - there's never a chance to use the old grey matter, it's obvious solutions where you have to exhaust a bunch of useless tools before getting them, creating new problems with the same obvious solution. Ironically, the game feels less dimensional than 2D Tetris - in Tetris, there is reason to actively let blocks stack up and risk losing (the most obvious reason being to get a combo or Tetris), but here, having blocks on top of other blocks is inherently a burden, since all the blocks are flat and there is virtually no creative ways for them to interact. Additionally, you have to wait until a current block is halfway down to see the next block, so even if the game had blocks that could be used creatively, you wouldn't really be able to use them as such.

I'm surprised Tetris Attack was the game that made Henk Rogers want to pull the plug with Nintendo and not this, as it has far less resemblance to Tetris than Yoshi/Pikachu/Isabelle/Lip/e.t.c's adventures, and - compared to Tetris Attack - it's much less honest about what it is (see: the box art showing 3-dimensional tetrominos and not flat rectangles, Tetris Attack's box art shows a wall of squares like in the game it's promoting).

Hopefully, V-Tetris will fare better.

Finally having the opportunity to go through Nintendo's Virtual Boy library for the first time we begin with 3D Tetris and well it's functional I guess.

This is Tetris but the twist is you're viewing it from this awkward top down view that shifts around to give you a better view of the sides. Instead of being a flat 2D plane that your blocks build on, you now get a full cuboid like arena to put your blocks in. The aim is the same, fill one line of the cuboid to clear that line and earn points. You can build the stack higher to clear more lines at once and you can now rotate the blocks in full 3D directions by using the right d-pad.
It's a good idea on paper but when you need a simplified view to the right to show where your blocks are lined up, it kinda shows how awkward the constantly shifting view of the main arena.

There's a puzzle mode in addition to the main one where you use a set number of blocks to build a shape shown at the start. It's.... fine I guess.
The other mode places a spike like object in the centre that will delete blocks you place there so you can't place anything until the final block to clear the line. It's an interesting idea and it works well enough.

But yeah, puzzle games are at their best when they're simple and this one unfortunately complicates things a little too much to try and make it work in 3D. The shifting view point and everything being just red and black makes it awkward to keep track of where your blocks are and with higher speeds it's difficult to manage rotating your blocks quickly in a 3D space. Good idea on paper, just a little bit too complex to pull off on such limited hardware

This game fucking sucks but at least the idea isn’t awful, I feel like someone could make that work and honestly there’s probably some games that plays like 3-D Tetris in the massive realm of Tetris clones. Thinking about it, Mahjong Cub3D is the first one that comes to mind but it’s not really the same thing, but a 3D Tetris could be executed the same way.

But what makes 3D Tetris so damn awful other than being on a Virtual Boy? The controls sucks, it feels really weird to see this cubic sphere that screams “Rotate me around with your joystick!” But then you realise it’s a virtual boy game and you don’t get to have one of these so you just press buttons a random, praying that it will somehow move the camera in your desired angle but even the devs knew it was dogshit so they let you see at all times the 5 floors of the cube on the side and it’s just so much more practical to use this to place blocks rather than the Star Fox-ass 3D.

The goal of the game is simple, try to fill 3 layers of blocks while letting enough space for a vertical 3x1 just like you would on Tetris 2D but this time it’s in 3D bitch, so it makes you wonder “Why am I dealing with bullshit like this when I can just play normal 2D Tetris” and I’m not sure either because Vtetris is literally just classic Tetris but on virtual boy so you might as well play that.

The game do offers some variety, slightly more than the average Tetris game from the 90s. You get a classic mode which is about obtaining a high score and it’s easy as hell, the only difficulty comes from not being bored.
The puzzle mode which gives you a set of tiles to drop and create some sort of small 3D structure and I’m sorry if I make this sounds cooler than it looks it’s just try over and over until you get the order right, in other words it’s bad.
And the last game mode is just the first one except you can’t place a block in the middle tile of the first layer, fun.

Yeah it’s just another gimmick fest for the Virtual Boy forcing the stupid 3D.