Most Overrated Games #5
Tetris (Every fucking platform, every single year)
Do I even need to tell you why Tetris is overrated? No I do not. Every single human being born since June 6, 1984 knows intuitively exactly why Tetris is overrated. Tetris is overrated for exactly three reasons, and, just for the sake of form, I’ll spell them out for you:
1) Tetris keeps getting released and released and released ad infinitum. I mean, hell, Civilization was pretty good, but I don’t recall every game company in the world making a Civilization clone for every platform that’s ever existed.
2) Tetris choked and murdered the puzzle game genre. For about fifteen years, every puzzle game anybody made was just goddamn Tetris with a new coat of paint. The only reason that’s not the case anymore is because Bejeweled came out, and now everybody’s ripping that off instead.
3) Recently — and hilariously — people have begun attempting to enforce intellectual property rights to the name "Tetris," which has the same sort of logic as Bayer suddenly trying to crack down on all these assholes calling their product "aspirin."
I mean, Tetris is a fine game, I suppose, if you’re a big fan of games that just keep going on and on until you lose. Nintendo was very smart to pack it with the original Game Boy, since, hell, it’s a decent enough time-waster while you’re on the train, and I guess a Flash version you can play at work is reasonable, but that’s really about it. And yet, some idiots keep putting it at or near the top of "best game ever" lists, where it clearly does not belong (aside: holy dick is that a ridiculous top ten, IGN). It is an amusing novelty that sold seven billion copies. There’s nothing wrong with that, but come on now. Best? Game? Ever?
I’m trying to be reasonable here, but, seriously. There are exactly seven pieces, and exactly two ways of manipulating them (translate or rotate). So you do the exact same two things over and over again on the exact same seven pieces until — and I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet — you inevitably lose. There’s no goal at all, there’s no positive way to end the game, and there aren’t even any goddamn goombas or anything to stomp on. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that any serious candidate for best game ever has some type of stomp-on-able mushroom men.
Well… I can’t speak for any version except the classic Game Boy one, as I never bought it for any other platform (or downloaded it, or went looking for Flash sites with it), but… while Game A, you do play until you lose, Game B actually has a goal: score… I think it was 25 lines or more, but it might have been a multiple of that, and you win. And if you have it set on level 9, you get… some people playing part of Trepak, and the higher you have the High setting (0-5), the longer the section (though you don’t get the whole thing) and the more musicians play. At High 5, it follows with a space shuttle taking off.
Not a great reward, but hey, better than the one you get for scoring high enough in Game A: a rocket takes off.
Comment by Nyperold | 1 March 2010