Jul 15, 2008 08:05 PM
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The Price: $9.99
The Verdict: Tetris isn't exactly the most ambitious project for a company like EA Games. That's probably why the company's iPhone port is just, well, overdone. A good Tetris implementation - one that would have been wildly successful on its own - wasn't enough for EA, who've loaded this port up with so much crap that it sometimes doesn't even run. EA obviously wanted to use a bit of the iPhone's rendering capabilities, but the graphics are gaudy to the point of distraction. Starting or resuming a basic game takes quite a while because of the layers of menus and loading screens, and the secondary gameplay modes and Magic Mode tools will be ignored by most. On our 3G iPhone, the app would often freeze at startup, a problem that has been reported elsewhere among iPhone and iPod owners. An update is forthcoming that should address stability issues as well as introduce a feature that allows you to draw your upcoming shape directly.
These inspired features, though, are sullied by the showy, buggy execution. Anyone looking for a simple, clean port like Tris (from the jailbreak days. See you soon, Tris...) should probably pass on this $9.99 monster as you can expect a decent competitor to pop up at a lower price point, if not for free. Also, there are already web apps that offer a traditional (though gestureless) Tetris experience in your browser that don't have a 40 second startup time. One more sticky point: if you exit out of the game to check email or take a call and return, it will save your game state. But to start playing again you have to sit through 10 seconds of the intro movie. Freaking annoying and a waste of battery.
Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.
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