a fun enough version of tetris if you're into sega rules. not really for me. if you want to 'get into' arcade tetris i'd personally say it's a much better use of your time to play TGM instead, leaving this game as more of a novelty. some nasty sound design.
A competent take on Tetris with nice visuals, music and a few options to tweak the original gameplay.
I played this on original hardware at an arcade, and I gotta say, playing Tetris with a wobbly old arcade stick is... not ideal. That's not really the game's fault, though? Hmmm.
It's arcade Tetris, but with Sega behind the wheel. Compared to other Tetris games of this vintage, it's honestly aged quite decently, mostly due to the lock delay making this game not have that "sticky" feeling that plague various old Tetris games. The pieces are still random, though one interesting thing about this particular version of Tetris is that the game uses the same predetermined RNG seed for blocks getting pulled, which means that the same order of blocks will show up every time the game is powered on for the first time. The game also has a very funky BGM track, crunchy 16-bit JPEG backgrounds for each level, and a game over monke, which makes it feel unique from the more blocky aesthetics of other Tetris games. Apparently the improved game control combined with the social aspect of figuring out the optimal way to play using the power-on pattern made this game quite popular in Japanese arcades. Since I wasn't a Japanese arcade-goer in the late 1980s I can't personally confirm whether that's really true, but given this games solid quality and the fact that its mfin Tetris, I'd believe it. Japanese-developed Tetris games usually used the mechanics from this game as a base, including the ever-popular TGM series, so if that doesn't prove this games solid quality, idk what could.
(also lol the screenshots for this on IGDB are for atari tetris, too bad im too lazy to change it)
(also lol the screenshots for this on IGDB are for atari tetris, too bad im too lazy to change it)