Wordtris (SNES)

When Tetris took the world by storm with its simple but addictive puzzle game design, designers were quick to try and create “the next Tetris”, leading to many unusual sequels and twists on the block-dropping and block clearing formula. Wordtris is perhaps one of the easier ideas to wrap your head around from this surge of new designs, the player aiming to make words out of the blocks that fall into the play area, but while this game wasn’t made by the originator of Tetris Alexey Pajitnov, it was instead the brainchild of three men: Sergei Utkin, Vyacheslav Tsoy… and current President of the country of Armenia, Armen Sarkissian.

 

Unfortunately, having a Eurasian politician design the game doesn’t really manifest in any interesting or meaningful way, and even though Tetris often invokes Russian iconography or music in its releases, Wordtris instead goes for something that neither matches its concept or the nationalities of its creators. Wordtris’s aesthetic of choice, for some reason, is a circus, with the musics and visuals both putting forth that theme despite it having no clear tie to the word game. The music is an odd mix, featuring the kind of flutes and brass you would expect from such a setting but also avoiding a full on whimsical tone as it seems to be reserved and almost a little ominous. It’s a fine enough fit for the lining up of letters and doesn’t get distracting, and some of it barely even sounds like it’s meant to be circus music anyway, but the imagery on the title screen and featured to the right of the playfield never loses its way. In the area of the screen that displays previously played words and their point totals, still images of things like clowns, a bear on a unicycle, and a fire eater serve as somewhat colorful imagery to break up the otherwise dry visual presentation.

Taking up a little more than half of the screen on the left is the area your letter blocks will drop in. These do so one at a time, the player needing to move them around a rectangular play area that is nine blocks wide to place them in an attempt to make words that are three letters or longer. Longer words are worth more points and the tiles used to make the word will disappear from the play area when the letters connect horizontally or vertically, but the word recognition can be rather strange at times. For the most part, most English words you’d expect to be recognized in a 1992 video game can be made, but there are some baffling exceptions. “Beer” for example doesn’t register as a word, and while you might at first assume that is because it accepts “Bee” instead, the game was happy to award points for both “Inn” and “Inns” at the same time. There doesn’t seem to be a filter based on the fact words a bit more profane than “Beer” slipping through, so essentially, you need to avoid overcommitting to creating longer words unless you’re sure the game will accept them. Thankfully, most every other word I tried did go through, so regular play is unlikely to be impacted too heavily.

 

One oddity in how you drop letters into the play field of Wordtris is that, unlike in Tetris, the blocks don’t go all the way down to the bottom of the screen when placed. Instead, one portion of the rectangular play area is black and one is red, and your pieces will at first land right beneath the borderline between these two regions. If you place a tile on top of one that hasn’t been cleared, it will be pushed down, and if too many fill the vertical column, soon you’ll start stacking new letters into the black area, play ending if you stack a column so high that the letter placed atop it is offscreen. This strange way of placing blocks actually makes sense when you consider that horizontal word building would otherwise be rather difficult if you lacked the means to adjust letters as you are made to bury them by necessity to keep up with the quantity of incoming tiles. Vertical word creation requires more planning and careful placement, but it’s also the perfect way to shoot for a special word that appears near the top of the screen. If you can construct a specific longer word, it will completely wipe the field of all letter tiles, presenting a new word to shoot for if you so wish. Progress can be made and points easily earned if you just keep making smaller words of your own choice, but this screen clear option is definitely helpful if you start getting plenty of unhelpful letters.

 

Since there are 26 letters in the English language, the next piece you get in Wordtris is a huge tossup. Vowels are vital but not as common as you might expect, and the game will throw rough letters like Q, Z, and J at you with little regard for what is in the play area. It does at least favor some of the more common ones like S and H, but you can never guarantee that the letter you’ll need will be coming soon, even if it is in the highlighted word you can make for the screen clear. The game presents a normal play session of Wordtris as starting at Level A and going all the way to an endless level J, advancing through these stages by making words leading to harder letter distribution along the way. The speed increases as you go as well, and since the play area already feels rather cramped with letters accumulating in the middle instead of the bottom, it can eventually reach a point where you’re throwing down letters and hoping to make some words by chance.

There are three special tools that can help you out though, these feeling like a godsend when you’ve got things like a Q laying around or the speed is starting to lead to sloppy play. The bomb will destroy whatever tile it hits, but the acid vial will spill out in a small cross shape, meaning that grouping problematic letters can lead to them being more easily wiped out provided your luck gives you this acid. The bombs and acid are more consistent than any individual letter in their appearances at least, as is the question mark tile. This tile can be placed immediately so it becomes a random letter, but you can also quickly shuffle through the alphabet to pick which letter you want it to be. This block rarely has the time for you to get really deep into the alphabet, but you can progress either forward or backward, meaning it’s more the middle of the alphabet you likely won’t be able to select rather than the options at the end of it.

 

Wordtris lets you customize how your play will go in quite a few ways. The difficulty settings will determine your starting speed, but the higher ones also require that the words you make be 4 letters long or more for an extra touch of difficulty. You can start on whatever level you like as well so you can either progress naturally or dive right into the deep end if you’re looking for a challenge. To pump things up even more, you can disable the ability to clear letters by making the same word more than once, and you can even add a time limit if you want even more pressure on your play. Cranking up the difficulty in so many different ways doesn’t really feel like its necessary though since Wordtris’s design already has plenty of limitations on it because you are relying on the luck of the letter draw so frequently and the play field can get cramped so easily. It’s hard to really get invested in pulling off anything bigger than a three letter word on purpose save the special highlighted one, and at higher speeds you can sometimes only hope things come together right since you won’t really have the time to think about the incoming letter long enough to place it well.

 

Multiplayer, save the alternating tournament mode where players get their own screens to work on, gets even more absurd by having both players play in the same rectangle. Competitive has you placing blocks to try and use the same batch of letters to make words, but cooperative multiplayer at least means you can possibly coordinate the words you’re working on rather than entering chaos where players can far too easily mess each other up or sabotage any attempt to really get words going. Wordtris is definitely not a game that plays well in multiplayer though in either version, but the main game can at least be enjoyable on your own if you shoot for smaller words and focus on survival over racking up points. Trying to get too fancy can burn you because the odds aren’t in your favor when it comes to making larger words, but there’s still decent fun to be found in noticing a larger word forming and being able to give that extra push needed to achieve a big block clear.

THE VERDICT: Wordtris can’t hold a candle to the simple addictiveness of Tetris, but it hardly feels like a fair comparison. Having to work with 26 blocks types plus the bomb, question mark, and acid special tiles means Wordtris will often feel like you’re making the best of what you’re being given, but the abundance of three letter words means you can still get frequent matches and sometimes work towards those bigger words if the block delivery starts going your way. The options to complicate play further are unfortunately ill-conceived since the gameplay concept buckles under the weight of its random letter delivery once settings are turned up too high, but there’s still a reasonable level of enjoyment to be found in making what words you can to survive.

 

And so, I give Wordtris for the Super Nintendo…

An OKAY rating. Conceptually you might think Wordtris has more depth than Tetris since it uses more block types and the reliance on language means you need to consider a lot more information like how valuable putting two letters near each other could potentially be, but the block-dropping format really doesn’t do well with word formation puzzling. You lack the ability to reliably plan ahead, but the English language has enough three and four letter words that you can make some reasonable matches to stay alive, and the reward for the special word at the top is strong enough to invest in it if you’re feeling brave. Wordtris does suffer more than most puzzlers by the speed turning up because of how important the placement of every single block is, but you can still get a decent length run going so long as you don’t get cocky in the kinds of words you shoot for. The circus atmosphere doesn’t do much for the game, which is perhaps a good thing because it is the main difference between the SNES version and its simpler versions on other systems. Wordtris is also on computers and the Game Boy where that easier level of access makes it much simpler to pull the game out for a short play session as that’s where Wordtris works best. It’s not really designed for long term play, but it can put up a good fight until things get out of hand, and combining letters at least stimulates the brain enough to make the short innings work as an idle amusement.

 

Wordtris doesn’t truly succeed as a block dropper or a word building game, but this puzzler blends the two types of puzzle game into something that has its moments all the same. You’re going to be better off booting up Bookworm or Tetris of course, but Wordtris is a deviation that can be interesting if it’s on hand. It could certainly find better footing if the concept was reworked, a bigger play field being perhaps the first an easiest suggestion for facilitating more complex and reliable word creation. Since one of its designers will probably be too busy running a country now to revisit the concept, we are left with a game that can’t quite meet the potential of its concept but at least has some fun that can be squeezed out of it if you keep your expectations in check.