no innovative mode, no eye-catching rule-change, no cascading gravity can ever match a single well-made marathon mode where you start somewhere and end elsewhere. early versions of tetris all used faraway places (especially Russia) as their settings -- travel is in the blood of tetris. (we can call this the true predecessor to Tetris Effect, even down to its occasionally racist setting choices!) while we missed some of the coolest environments. i found Sega Tetris to be a paradisical inflection point between harsher old styles of Tetris and metastisized new styles. 9/10, ftwg.