This is going to sound blasphemous for hardcore Tetris fans, but NES Tetris isn't the best retro Tetris game in my honest opinion.

That title goes to Gameboy Tetris. It's just the perfect game to take on the go and play in short bursts.

If you are a hardcore Tetris fan I can see how the improved visuals and control given by the NES release makes it far superior, but as someone who just likes to play for 10 or 15 minutes at a time I'd rather the ease of access the Gameboy provides.

Still the best "match" puzzler on the system though so, so it still has a spot in any collection.

i hate the idea of the "perfect game."

it's true tetris is, mechanically, without meaningful blemish. especially accounting for rerelease after rerelease, it has been polished to a gleaming shine. but it's an unadventurous mindset that decides something's worth on how few flaws you can find with it.

there's a rock-solid elegance to the purity of tetris' easy to learn, hard to master gameflow. but i can't deny that many iterations on it have been even more hypnotizing, if a little more lopsided.

tetris is a beautiful, pristine pearl of gaming history. but i can't help but find more value in the chipped diamond, myself.

tetris for the nes is just amazing. fitting those silly little four-blocked pieces together is so simple yet so eternally satisfying and challenging to both the mind and the hands on later levels. the three music tracks in the game are all pretty pleasant to listen to, and some of the different palettes that the blocks take on can be quite pretty to look at as well. game a and b both have their merits and frankly, everything contained in this cartridge is perfection except for the fact that high scores don’t have any way to save, but we have the ability to take pictures in this day and age so that doesn’t really matter at all.

Basically the Founding Father of Puzzle Games

Tetris (in case you live under a rock) is a side viewing puzzle game from the late 1980s and was released on the NES and arcade machines before being rereleased multiple times after wards and was developed in Soviet Russia. It is a very simple game where blocks of different shapes and colors fall from the sky, and you must turn them to line them up, so they fall in place and make a full row of blocks and each level gets faster, so you have to have a quick reaction time before the blocks fill the screen and you lose. Over the years we have seen different versions of this game most often it isn’t a beatable game and really just endless waves, and some versions are 2 player competitive with a 2nd player being able to race you. Some versions have a B game mode with obstacles in each stage. I think one of the most recent iterations of this is now the battle royal version known as Tetris 99 against 99 other players. Tetris may be a minimal game but it’s a timeless one, one where no matter the age range you can always seem to have fun with it. It really shows us the genius of the creators who utilized the minimal technology of the 80s to create a true classic (Well, minimal by today’s standards). To me, Tetris is one of the few franchises that will never get old or die out. Not because of its simplicity or because it was one of the first big puzzle games that has a nostalgic feeling it gives people but because it’s a milestone in gaming history that continues to influence people all over the world and because of that it is immortal... Also, block game big fun.

10/10