I spotted Tetris Worlds at the bargain price of $20 at my local KMart, and jumped at it, ignoring the bad reviews I had seen. At worst, I thought, I'll have a colour version of my favourite game of all time, Tetris on the original GameBoy. Well, I'm afraid that the reviews were all correct. The game has no redeeming features, and is quite awful. I didn't know Tetris could be ruined, but here's the proof.
There are numerous game modes to play with, but they all end up the same. Each increase in level brings a faster drop in the blocks, until you suddenly reach a level at which you don't see the blocks at all before they hit the ground. You won't ever get better with practise, you'll always end at this level. Where's the fun in that?
Then there's the strange ability to rotate bricks ad-infinitum when they reach the ground. You don't need to plan where to place the blocks before they land, just keep hitting rotate and you get all the time you need to move the blocks left or right. That's just plain daft.
The artists have been let loose on the background, producing a wide variety of nicely animated scenes. The problem here is that the scene continues behind the gameboard, making it incredibly difficult to discern the falling blocks. The gameboard takes up only a third of the width of the screen, so the blocks are tiny to begin with. It's an eye-squinting nightmare.
With all this new technology, why have they not included a battery backup in the cartridge? By default, an incredibly annoying ghost block is visible where the block will be once it falls. However, this just makes you think that it's another block to avoid, a block that won't go away. You can turn off the ghost block, but with no battery backup, you have to make this change every time you play.
With all of these problems, I'll be going back to playing the original Tetris on the GameBoy Advance.
Tetris Worlds on Gameboy Advance rating: 25%