recommend it if you're a tetris weirdo, but i will never really love to play this verison, yet i love returning to it every now and then.

this is my go-to tetris pallete cleanser when i'm fully in tetris brain, something that hasn't been the case for a little over a year now. this era of tetris is quite fascinating, and of all console versions of tetris, this feels the most like a home computer version with its single rotation, only hard drop and less-conventional lives system. the controls feel as if they were intended to be mapped to arrow keys where a player could have their fingers on multiple separate digital actuators at all times.

this era around the late 80's was probably the most interesting period in the overall splintering and iteration of tetris as it was unleashed up on the world, they were all just learning how to cook up those quadruple rectangles and it resulted in a genuine mechanical variety that unfortunately isn't found in any tetris released in the current era. i have no idea what BPS was even trying to do here, still feels as if they're in the progress of figure out how to make tetris work on a pad. it is of zero surpise that that shortly after this, BPS would devise their own system with lock delay as a core principle of tetromino arrangement. one of the the strains of tetris that BPS would, towards the end of the 90's, overcook and would demand that to be the only tetris dish served. BPS's impending near-strangulation of tetris started here, and on many days, i would rather play this over NEStris. thankfully BPS would figure out how to cook it just right for a bit in their successor to this one (plus bombliss!)