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.
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.