Gameplay Basics:
Tetris Attack is the most unusual puzzle-fighting title I have happened across yet, but also the most fun. First of all, you do not drop pieces from the top of the screen like in most puzzle fighting games, but rather move a cursor around a grid of tiles, and swap tiles around to line up three in a row vertically or horizontally, as you can see demonstrated on the left.
The field is 6x12, and made up of five or six different colors of tiles. Tiles rise from the bottom, and if the stack reaches the top of the field, you lose the game. You can delay the rate at which the stack rises by setting off combos and chains. Similar to Puyo Puyo, a combo is when you eliminate more than 3 pieces at a time, and a chain is when you have a big chain reaction of events, as is illustrated below.
When the left-most cyan block is swapped one to the right, the three cyan pieces will be eliminated. After those pieces disappear, the upper-most purple block will fall and line up horizontally with the other two purples. After the purples vanish, the yellows will line up vertically and vanish, leaving the red to fall and line up horizontally, and finally, the greens will line up and die, for a spectacular level 5 chain. Whee!

 


Two Player Mode:
Tetris Attack is fun one-player, but two player mode is even better. To send garbage, you try and set up combos and chains. Enormous solid garbage blocks are dropped from the top of the screen, as illustrated on the left. To break open garbage blocks, you first need to eliminate any block which is adjacent to the garbage - Just like in Puyo Puyo. If a garbage block which is broken is adjacent to another garbage block, both blocks are broken.
When you break a garbage block, the bottom row of it is turned to regular blocks. If the garbage block is only one row high, then this means the entire block disappears. You can see on the left that all five of these blocks were broken. The bottom-most block and top-most block were two rows tall, so they were not completely destroyed like the others.
Combos send smaller half-blocks, which are never more than 1 row tall. If you want to send the bigger, thick blocks, you need to use chains. A level 3 chain sends a garbage block which is 2 rows tall, a level 4 chain sends a garbage block which is 3 rows tall, and the pattern continues. Skilled players can get level 13 or greater chains, which send garbage blocks which actually fill the entire screen!

 


Strategy:
Most of the skill in Tetris Attack comes from spotting groups of three which you can swap to match together. The more of these groups of three you can spot, and the quicker you can spot them, the better you will play.
When I am trying to start a big combo, I search for a row near the bottom of the stack with two tiles of the same color. Then I look up three rows to see if there is a single tile of the same color. In this example to the left, I spotted these three cyan tiles which I have outlined in white. Now if I line up three tiles vertically, I can make the top cyan tile fall three rows, so it will line up horizontally. This is a great way to start a combo, and usually gives you lots of opportunities to expand.
Here you can see I've lined up those three purples, and the cyan tile is about to fall into position. Right now I have about 4 seconds to plan ahead! I am able to see these three red tiles which I have marked, and I notice that if I swap the upper-left red tile to the right one, then I can make this into a level 3 combo. If I am quick, I can probably expand this situation into a level 5 or 6 combo, before I run out of tiles.
At higher difficulties and handicaps, blocks will disappear faster, and fall faster, which can make "skill chains" very difficult. For this reason, on higher difficulties, try and rely less on skill chains, and more on regular chains and maybe even combos if you must.

Don't be afraid to raise your tiles! Raising your tiles puts you in a better position both defensively and offensively, assuming you are skilled enough to be able to stop the stack from raising indefinitely... Here are the benifits of raising your stack, in greater detail.

First of all, if your opponent sends you a huge garbage block - Let's say 10 rows high - If you have only one or two rows of blocks to work with, you will die, simply because you can not match up anything to get rid of the garbage block. But if you have 8 or 9 rows of blocks to work with, even though this pushes the garbage block off the top of the screen, you will have a few seconds before you die, so that you can match up tiles to destroy the block. So whereas having 2 or less rows means guaranteed death, having 8 or 9 rows means you have a chance.

Secondly, the more tiles you have on your board, the bigger combo you can set off. In the above example, I only have 30 tiles on the board, and they don't all match up properly - I have four yellows for instance, and five greens, very odd numbers. The greatest level combo I could possibly get would be a level 7, no matter how I shift them around. But if I had raised my level four rows before starting off my combo, then I would have 24 more tiles to work with! I could possibly get a level 11 or 12 combo.

 


Review:
An absolute 10. Graphics are colorful and they gave the blocks different colors AND shapes, so that you can distinguish them very easily. The control is flawless, you can move the cursor extremely quickly between blocks without troubles. The music is catchy and original, and they have a remix of the Yoshi theme for Yoshi's music, and changes when you are in trouble (so it does have something in common with Tetris after all! A-HA!)

The 1 player modes are more enjoyable than the 1 player modes in any other puzzle fighting game. Stage Clear, in particular, was both fun and challenging. Each level, you need to keep eliminating blocks until all of them are beneath a certain line. On later levels, the stack raises faster, and you don't get as much time to rest, so you really need to make use of combos and chains to survive!

You can play against the computer in Versus mode, or you can go into the "Options" menu and tell the computer to control either first or second player's controller, and you can set its skill level. This is a great feature, it means that even after you beat the game and are extremely good, you can set the computer to control the second controller, and face it in time attack or versus modes, and handicap yourself if necessary.

The 2-player mode is of course spectacular! Of course you have to find someone to play with. You can play in either Versus (whee) or Time Attack (yawn) modes. Handicapping is available, but don't expect it to help too much!

Before you get the Game Boy version, be warned that they could not program in the AI, so in Versus mode, you just randomly receive garbage blocks every once in a while. Also, the size of your field has been decreased from 12x6 to 8x6, making it much more difficult to score big combos. Barf.

If you spot this game for the SNES, absolutely definitely buy it! It's the best puzzle game out for the SNES, or any system for that matter. Choc-full of days upon days of gameplay, and unbelievably cute Yoshi characters to boot... Click on Gargantua Blargg and his Flamer Guy cohorts to march back to my main puzzle fighting page.

 BACK... Gargantua Blargg frightens two "Flamer Guys". Hooray for unintended nintendo innuendo.