3-D Tetris (Virtual Boy)
While its box art prepares you for a no-nonsense 3D twist on a block dropping puzzler, 3-D Tetris doesn’t wait long to reveal to you its oddest touch. While the gameplay itself features standard blocks, each of those blocks is also a character with a face and often some hair or an article of clothing. What’s more, the preview window showing you which block you’ll receive next only shows the character, the player having to become familiar with the block characters if they want to plan ahead properly. Surprisingly though, this odd touch does a bit of extra emotion to the action, personifying your pieces making you think of them as something more than the next blocks to drop into place.
The last game officially released for the Virtual Boy system, 3-D Tetris may bear the name of the familiar block dropping puzzler, but it does more than simply move the line clearing format into a new dimension. The goal is still to survive and earn points by placing pieces in rows that clear out once every spot in a row is filled, but the well you are dropping the blocks into is a five block by five block square with five layers. At first this can feel a bit roomy. A layer is 25 blocks in width after all and most of the pieces you’re given are between 1 block to 4 blocks in size, and depending on your difficulty, they might not even be that challenging in how they’re shaped. However, even on normal you’ll quickly encounter the main complicating element, and that is that 3-D Tetris features 30 different block types. While some are reserved for specific modes or difficulties, on anything but Easy you will encounter more unusual shapes. Beyond just familiar squares, lines, and L shapes, you also see things like a set of four blocks that are each a space apart, a four piece corner where one piece is guaranteed to go up a layer, and a 3 block wide line with a small separate block floating a bit above it. They are hard shapes to describe since they are often designed to be difficult to place rather than something close to a letter or other familiar shape, but they also give 3-D Tetris its unique degree of challenge that makes it more compelling to play.
Clearing out layers in 3-D Tetris ends up a more engaging and involved process thanks to the oddly shaped pieces and the ones where not even all the blocks are connected to each other, and this is where the blocks being made into characters starts to have its effect. While it probably would be preferable to be able to just see the shape of an incoming piece, once you’re familiar with the faces, you start to have emotional responses to their appearance. The goofy smiling face of an L block is something you may come to resent since the seemingly jovial shape is actually a bit rough to fit into the growing 3D pile the harder shapes have forced on you, but seeing the ever helpful 2 block line with its massive hairdo becomes a welcome sight because of its flexibility. These block characters don’t really have a personality beyond what their expression and outfits imply, but because they have faces it is easier for the mind to build up thoughts on them. Funnily enough, some of the character designs should have maybe been taken further, since the 3D shapes of 3-D Tetris can be a bit hard to interpret at a glance, but you will come to know how a character looks after you’ve seen their piece pop up a few times. Even if you aren’t sure what’s arriving, an empty outline of the upcoming piece will appear at the top of your well, although since the piece you are placing currently is also see-through, it can cause a bit of confusion depending on your perspective.
Pieces in 3-D Tetris are also more than just rigid shapes as well. For the ones that contain fully separate blocks, placing them in the well isn’t always as simple as dropping them where you can fit them. If an isolated block latches onto a higher layer, you can then move the remaining pieces a bit before they lock in as well. What’s more, since this block dropping game is presented in 3D, the pieces can be fully rotated in any direction. While a four block square can be laid down flat, you can also flip it so it is instead a 2 by 2 stack, and similarly, while the piece that is made up of two separate lines can be placed apart, you can also make them into a small stack if that fits the state of your layers better. This can mean a piece that was troublesome in regular Tetris like the S shaped block is a lot more flexible than it first appears, but since pieces enter the field automatically and the game speed increases the longer you play, rotating can be a bit hectic to do on the fly. This can become especially true thanks to the specific perspective you have on the play field in 3-D Tetris.
To play into the Virtual Boy’s 3D effect, the well will be constantly moving a bit, but this does also have a practical purpose. The 5X5X5 cubic play field can’t be perfectly viewed from any one angle as you might miss gaps that exist on the other side or overhangs might obscure your view of a clear space. Constantly rotating the play field around helps you to spot every gap, but it can also sometimes leave you at a bad angle during a crucial piece drop. You can wrest some control over the movement yourself, either stopping the movement entirely or nudging it forward in its automatic cycling, but the 3D view is occasionally insufficient. 3-D Tetris’s designers thankfully realized this as well though, and so on the right side of the screen you get to see a cross-section of every layer of the cube. There are no mysteries about where gaps are when you look at the helpful straightforward layer overviews, and you can even see how your upcoming piece will fit in in a way that updates every time you move it. The black and red spartan presentation benefits the game here, no distracting backgrounds keeping you from being able to quickly flick your eyes to all relevant information and keep in the action without it feeling like you’re juggling too many information feeds.
3-D Tetris also takes an interesting approach to failure. If your block stack reaches to high and pokes into the sixth layer outside the designated cube, that isn’t game over. Instead, the bottom layer of the cube is jettisoned and that block that is sticking out disintegrated, leaving you now with only four layers to play in. However, if you are able to fill a layer up and clear it, you will have the lost layer regenerate. Each time you stack to high you will lose more layers though, and once your last layer is gone it is truly game over, but the ability to come back from a slip up already makes it so you won’t resent the 3D shapes too much, and since the bottom layers are the ones that get jettisoned, that also means the layer that was likely to be the hardest to build up is now gone as well, making recovery a bit more feasible. 3-D Tetris also never gets too fast, meaning the often necessary play field evaluation and multiple rotations to fit a block in snugly are still possible even at its toughest levels.
3-D Tetris’s main mode, appropriately enough named just “3-D Tetris”, relies on the rules explained so far, all about staying in the game long enough by filling and clearing layers with the action ending once your whole cube has fall apart. An alternate mode for it exists called “Clear It!” that changes the goal a touch, the player advancing through levels after clearing five layers. The levels just determine the speed of blocks so it isn’t that different save for how points are earned, but the game’s second main mode “Center-Fill” almost feels like it could have been a full video game on its own. In Center-Fill, the middle block of the play field has a strange property. Any blocks you place in the central spot will disappear, but putting blocks in that spot is also how you trigger a layer clear. Rather than aiming to fill the entire layer, in this mode, you earn points only if you can make a layer into a symmetrical pattern. This can be as simple as having two parallel blocks on either side of the central square or a complex arrangement, and this ends up pushing you to place blocks in more interesting ways than simply where they fit best. You can earn a surge of points if you are able to make many symmetrical patterns in a row with smart block placement, and what’s more, since you can clear a layer out so long as it has a symmetrical pattern, you can also handle the often more difficult layouts that trying to make such designs can lead to. Since the center is always clear, you can drop a block in and trigger layer deletions no matter where they are in the stack, Center-Fill a more strategic and rewarding style of play and one where odd separated pieces shine even brighter since they’re perfect for building up symmetry.
Center-Fill also has its own Clear-It! mode where you need to clear ten layers instead of five, at once showing how it can be easier to get a clear in that mode but not as easy to earn points since small patterns or quick clears barely score. It also has its own Type B mode though where the bottom layer of the stack will start off filled with blocks you didn’t place, and whenever you clear a layer, a new randomly arranged set of blocks will become the cube’s new lowest layer. The flexibility of this format really shines with how much it can be shaken up without disturbing the degree of challenge found in it, but while it could have been a standalone puzzle style, having it beside the regular 3-D Tetris makes for a fuller package before you even factor in the third main mode, Puzzle. Puzzle will show you a shape that you then have to build with a group of prescribed blocks that arrive in a set order. Puzzle definitely requires you to plan far ahead to succeed, but you can take your time considering your options before the level starts and the layer view on the right even indicates all spots that need a block to help with some of the more complex shapes you’ll build. It does get tough rather quickly, but should you manage to finish your shape, you’ll be treated to a cute animation of whatever you were making coming to life. Be it an airplane that takes off and flies or a blocky snake that slithers around or even a chair that just sort of bounces about, they all have a cute little musical theme and it is a touch rewarding to see them spring to life. In a very strange inclusion though, the Toadie enemy from the Mario series appears as one of the puzzle solutions, the only specific Nintendo reference in the game. With 20 levels in total some of the mode’s longevity comes from its more difficult designs, its presence making this an even more robust package for a puzzle fan.
THE VERDICT: While the 3D view of the play field sometimes comes up short, 3-D Tetris is a creative twist on the block dropper puzzle formula that knows how to provide useful tools for survival and challenging complications. The layer view means you can make up for the moving view of the well while blocks that are separate pieces or complicated shapes force you out of your comfort zone, even a long piece sometimes not a welcome sight despite being one of the cuter block people in the strange cast. Extra modes like Center-Fill and Puzzle really flesh out the potential of the format, 3-D Tetris perhaps not playing that closely to its 2D namesake but its willingness to explore where an extra dimension can take it means it provides a compelling play style all its own.
And so, I give 3-D Tetris for Virtual Boy…
A GOOD rating. It does take a bit to get used to the movement of the well and the fact your incoming pieces are little block people smiling and posing at you, but once the concepts click into place in your brain, the 3D puzzling moves 3-D Tetris away from its inspiration into more interesting territory. 2D Tetris can be tackled with some homogenizing strategies, but the odd shapes of the incoming blocks in 3-D Tetris require on the fly adjustments and different types of planning. Since they are 3D rotatable shapes though, you also have a good deal of extra control over how they influence your growing stack. The real smart inclusions here though were the layer views and the fact that building outside the cube isn’t an immediate loss, 3-D Tetris understanding its more complex demands require some assistance and leniency if its going to get away with throwing its odd shapes at you. Center-Fill in particular feels inspired, the emphasis on trying to make patterns out of your block placement but with the wiggle room to wipe away layers meaning you can afford to make strange designs without being stuck with them.
Reviews at the time of the game’s release seemed almost more interested on harping on the Virtual Boy hardware, pointing out that it’s obviously not the same as 2D Tetris, or even complaining blocks drop too slowly despite you being able to slam them down when they’re in the position you desire, but explore the game’s depth a bit and don’t play it on the fairly shallow Easy difficulty for too long and you’ll see 3-D Tetris shine as a block dropper with interesting strategies and a variety of well-conceived ways to play.