Tetrisphere

[DF]

I haven't played this probably since I first got it. This might've been another rental-to-owning kind of deal, but I don't remember playing much of this on console. Not that I'm gonna dig out the 64 and see how far I really got, but this time around, I put in about 7h27m before I gracefully bowed out. I still might do more, but it's getting tough!

What is Tetrisphere?

This is an action puzzle game for the Nintendo 64. This is a different take on the classic block-dropping series.

Setting

There isn't much for a setting, and the intro to Hide and Seek mode introduces a barebones story: There are seven spherical robots that play hide and seek, and to pass the time, they create puzzles that the robot designated 'it' has to clear. As the robot chosen to be 'it', can you clear all of these puzzles and find all of your friends?

Gameplay

Tetris as a series usually involves dropping blocks in a 2D playing field, making lines that span one edge of the play area to the other until you reach the top of the screen. This game really only takes the 'drops blocks' aspect and does something completely different.

The playing field is now a sphere made up of several shaped blocks. Instead of forming lines, this is now a match-3 game of sorts. Your objective for most game modes is to uncover a portion of the sphere's bottommost layer, its 'core'. And to get there, you drag blocks around and drop them from above to make matches of three or better. Pieces in the current stage are preset, and the only blocks that you can drop are from that preset selection. There is no 'hold' feature to save a block for later, so you're forced to play what you're given. You also can't rotate blocks, so thankfully, every specific piece is always in the exact same orientation as every other piece of its kind.

You technically play as a shadow of the current piece that's initially very slowly descending onto the sphere from above. This shadow indicates where the current block will land if you run out of time or manually drop it, and the shadow changes when you're hovering over a valid combo. The shadow also indicates what blocks you can drag around the board, moving them out of the way or into an advantageous position. All you need to do is line up the shadow with the block, then hold B to move it side to side or pull it into a hole where gravity will take care of the rest. A wildcard block is just a 1x1 block, but it can match with any of the standard six blocks or move them around.

Matching blocks causes them to explode in a combo and causes particles to fall on the field. Blocks hit by these particles start glowing, and while standard blocks can only move laterally or drop down, these Power Pieces can be pulled upwards one block layer at a time. Combos started with these Power Pieces also explode much slower than normal, allowing you time to set up another combo. Reaching a combo of 20+ pieces or destroying a 1x1 block that looks like an explosion awards you a Magic item that can be used to destroy more of the environment. Repeatedly scoring these combos or breaking the explosion pieces without using your Magic will 'level up' the item, but its performance may change. The simple firework hits a small area while the next upgrade, dynamite, spreads and hits five areas instead, for example.

There are some advanced strategies other than just dragging and dropping. Because blocks fall when pieces under them are matched or slid out of the way, you can set up a Gravity Combo where a falling piece meets the requirements of a combo, or you can use a Power Piece to set up a Fuse Combo where you drag the soon-to-explode piece to another set of blocks and set off another chain reaction there. You can also use the shadow of the current piece to turn crystal blocks into Power Pieces if you can completely fill the shadow with crystals.

Why yes, I did basically just cover the tutorial here. Give Training mode a try! It won't take long at all.

While the game looks daunting from first glance, the tutorial and above text really does explain most of the concepts well enough. One catch is there being two different rules when it comes to making combos. The blue 2x2 square, the green 1x3 vertical I, and the yellow 3x1 horizontal _ need to be perfectly aligned to count as a combo. The red T, the gray-blue 'lightning bolt' Z, and the purple L just need to make contact at all and don't need to be lined up. Another catch is pieces that are 'exposed' to the camera are valid for matching, so you can have a combo not explode pieces that would otherwise be valid because they're completely buried. You also can't move pieces you can't see, so no trying to 'fish' for pieces in lower layers or anything.

Gameplay Modes, Minigames, and Character Classes

There are several game modes. Each is split into a number of Episodes and Levels.

Rescue
You must dig down through the blocks to uncover a big enough portion of the core so the sphere robot inside of the stage can get out. Sometimes the robot is bigger than normal, so you'll need to make that much bigger an opening to get them out. There are ten Episodes with ten Levels each.

Hide and Seek
This actually has a number of different sub-game types to it.
* Multi: There are multiple pictures on the core. All you have to do is completely cover any one of them to win.
* Drill: There are five pink drills on the sphere. Under one of them is the picture you must uncover to win.
* Unique: You must uncover the image to win, but the image is fairly big and may need a good portion of the core exposed to show. The few times I got this, the image was not square or rectangular.
* Shift: There are four 2x2 images on the core, and using the 2x2 block shadow, you're to uncover the images and then slide these pieces together to form an image. The image was always a dark circle with four chains over it, so figuring out orientation wasn't difficult.
* Brick: There are multiple brick-textured pieces on the board. You can't move these pieces, but you can destroy the blocks around and under them. Your goal is to get any one of these bricks onto the core itself.
* Connect: There are multiple images on the core, but there are also thin lines connecting each other to tell you where the next one is. Uncover all of the images to win.
* Tower: Somewhere on the sphere, there is a tower of + blocks that you cannot move or destroy. The tower sits above the picture you must uncover, so you must clear the area around the tower to win.
* Crystal Tower: There's one tower on the core again, but this time, it's made of fragile crystal blocks. Ramming a piece into the tower or making a combo that touches the tower will damage it, causing an instant Game Over. Clear an area away from the tower and slide pieces away from it!
* Hide & Seek: This is just like the standard Rescue mode.

Hide and Seek always goes through several iterations of the above before ending with Hide & Seek, and once you've captured the other six robots, you move onto a new Episode where you do it all again. There are Five episodes with 30 Levels each.

Time Trial
You have five minutes to score as high a score as you can in a Multi game mode. If you expose enough of the core, you're brought to a new stage, though I don't know if you get a better score if you progress further this way.

Puzzle
This time, you have an allotted number of Drops and Pulls you can make. Your objective is to clear the board with these limits in mind. There are 100 total puzzles to clear.

VS
Either take on the CPU in single-player mode or a second player! You each have your own sphere to work with. Making combos will send blackened garbage pieces to the other player's side, and while these pieces can't be used to start combos, they can still be dragged around and destroyed when made part of one. You can either win by uncovering the stated quota of core images first or by making your opponent lose all three of their lives. There are five Episodes with seven Levels each, one for each robot (including a mirror match).

Lines
A hidden game mode, though I didn't play long enough to see if it can be unlocked outside of a cheat code (enter LINES as your name to unlock it until you power off the console). In this mode, you actually don't drop blocks, but you're given a permanent wildcard block. You must drag blocks on the board to form linear groups of three or more, and then standard combo rules apply afterward. While Power Pieces still appear, you can't get the slow explosion effect from them, so they're just there for ease of movement. There are five Episodes with ten Levels each.

Practice
This is a special mode where you can set how many layers deep the stage is and even what pieces appear. You can also set how many core images you must uncover to win.

There are also different robots to play as. Each of the seven are rated in just two categories: Speed for how quickly the cursor moves normally and Power for how quickly the cursor moves when grabbing a block on the board. Wheels is balanced with both categories being even. Rocket, Turbine, and Gear are speed-focused characters, while Jak, Stomp, and Gyro are power-focused.

Microtransactions/Add-On Content

There's nothing here due to this being an old Nintendo 64 game.

How I Played

I stuck with Wheels for the entire game. I'm pretty sure in the past, I used Stomp because I liked their design.

Uh, other than that, I don't know what I can really say here. I jumped around between most of the modes, though I barely did anything with Puzzle and only did Time Trial once. It looks like I got this far in each mode:

Rescue: Episode 7, Level 2
Hide & Seek: Episode 2, Level 4:4
Puzzle: Level 5
VS CPU: Episode 3
Lines: Episode 4, Level 5

Controls

These are pretty simple. The dpad moves the cursor around the board. A or Z button drops the block. B button, when held, can drag blocks matching the shadow of the current piece, and it can also turn clusters of crystal blocks into a Power Piece of the matching block if the shadow completely covers a layer. C Down uses your Magic item. Start button pauses. The control stick doesn't do anything, neither do the shoulder buttons or the other C buttons...unless you're trying to change the numbers in the name entry screen to symbols. L plus C down and C right does that.

Difficulty

There are no difficulty levels, but stages naturally get more difficult the further into the Episodes you play. The game displays the credits when you get through the halfway point in each game mode, then the Episode text mentions that things are going to get more difficult, so I guess you can consider these second set of Episodes as 'hard mode'.

The difficulty largely comes from the amount of time you're given before the current piece drops at a faster rate. Early stages of course give you plenty of time, and making combos will push back the timer, but later stages get pretty vicious and will put pressure on you by not only having the clock tick by faster, but combos will stop rewinding it as much. You aren't penalized if the game forces a drop when it'd make a combo, but you may not have that luxury all the time. There are three states for the clock: Blue is slowest, yellow is faster, and red is the fastest. If you lose a life, the clock will thankfully reset. Time also freezes when you use a Magic item...but losing a life will cost you that item entirely, so use it or lose it!

You only get three lives for most modes, so that allows you up to two mistakes in any one stage. Crystal Tower's failure state ignores lives, so breaking any part of the tower will instantly end the game regardless of how many you have left. Puzzle has no lives either, and not clearing the board with the allotted moves also instantly causes a game over. Clearing a stage gives you a new set of lives to burn, too.

There's no penalty for hitting a game over, just that you have to do the current Level over again.

Saving

The game saves automatically after every stage. There seems to be an account system in place, but each account only has its own save slot, and I don't know how many different accounts you can have on one cart at a time. It doesn't look like the score saves between sessions, so if you want to really place high on the leaderboards in non-Time Trial modes, just never turn the system off or quit the current game mode. That's totally safe, right?

Graphics

Graphics are 3D. Each of the blocks has its own designated color, and these all make up the apparent pseudo-sphere that makes up the game board (apparently it's not a real sphere but a torus whose eastern and western sides are joined as are the northern and southern sides). There are background graphics that move with the cursor, but you're probably not supposed to pay much attention to those.

Blocks in a match turn white and explode, and the combo counter on the top right corner of the screen will rain down white motes that turn regular blocks into Power Pieces. These blocks glow a bright shade of the original color. The core is white unless you're in Rescue/Hide & Seek, then it's a kind of black color since you can't actually see the pieces on the other side of the core...and there's also a spherical creature with googly eyes bouncing around in there!

There's pop-in on the edges of the sphere, but your eyes are very likely not going to be looking over there, either. There were some frame drops too, but I don't remember if these happened on real hardware or not. I was playing at 3x internal resolution, so that could have been a factor.

Each of the robots has a number of limited animations since they're not actually on the game screen when you play. Some modes have them 'ball up' before launching off the screen when you select the mode, each has a victory dance and a defeat animation, and there's a 'face off' animation for the VS mode pre-match screen, too.

Each mission type in Hide and Seek mode has its own intro sequence, from Multi having a small field of blocks explode before the core flies back and "MULTI" appears in big letters, or Drill having "DRILL" in a vertical line before each starts spinning and digging down.

For the UI, the current mission type is shown in the top left corner with the current stage number in the ring. Below this is a series of three hearts, your lives. Losing lives turns these hearts into skulls. Below these is the piece forecast with the current piece on the bottom, the piece after that on top of it, and the second-to-next piece on top. On the top right corner is the score readout in gold, the current combo count is in green/teal, and the score of the current combo is in white. There's a textured icon showing the score multiplier that increases when you do Gravity and Fuse Combos. The combo counter has waves that connect to an open pocketwatch kind of display, and on its face is a blue/yellow/red face that slowly wipes to a darker hue to indicate you're about to move to the next speed. The open side of the pocketwatch holds the Magic item, if you have any.

The UI in VS is quite different with VS and the core quota on the bottom center of the screen with each player's lives hearts on either side of it, then the pocketwatch timer is on the top left and right corners with the combo counter and score multiplier on the top middle. Garbage blocks appear just above the VS icon, growing in size and count to indicate more and more blocks to drop.

Audio

There are no voices in the game.

I really liked the music. I guess there's a lot of techno here, maybe some electronica, I don't know, metal? Genres, man, like wow. Give it a listen. You can either have the game play music for assuming each game mode, or set it to random to give every stage a different theme.

There are also hidden tracks. On the name selection screen, hold L and press C Down and C Right to change the numbers to symbols. Enter your name as "G👽MEBOY" (or G[alien head]MEBOY if that doesn't show up for you) to unlock these hidden tracks. They're considerably different from the songs that normally play, having a very lo-fi feel to them. They're weird!

Stability

I didn't have any crashes or the like, but there were a few times when I'd grab a block and it wouldn't drag. I might've simply tried to move before actually grabbing, so eh.

Replay Value

There are, what, 435 levels not counting Practice or Time Trial? Kind of screws with the concept of replay value, but there's a lot of game here. If you're the type to care about leaderboards, you can try to see how well you can do or beat previous scores in a number of modes, so that might be a pretty strong hook. But as I said above, you had to do it in one session and lose all score if you power off the system.

What Worked For Me

Music
This is definitely near the top of my favorite Nintendo 64 soundtracks. Granted, I realize I haven't really played too many games, but this is competing with Goldeneye and Blast Corps. I'm not really so keen on the hidden tracks, but they're not bad. Different, for sure.

"What about Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time or--"

I mean, those are still good. I just like this and these better!

Lines
Of the different game types, this one ended up being my favorite. It still puts pressure on you to find matches, but in a slightly different way than in normal play. You still have to worry about the timer and an inconvenient drop, but since you have a permanent wildcard piece, you can freely shift blocks around without needing to match them to the shadow.

Hide and Seek
This game mode might take second place just because of the variety of different missions. I mean, yeah, all of them involve 'get to the core' in some way, but because you never do the same mission back-to-back, it keeps things relatively fresh. And it's kind of amusing to sit through the title cards for each of the different types. It's like being back in the bowling alleys in the mid/late 90s.

What I Didn't Like

No permanent unlocks?
I assume Lines mode unlocks at some point, but doing it in the name entry section only keeps it unlocked until you power off the machine. The G👽MEBOY music code also isn't permanent, but since you can't toggle these or ban certain tracks from playing, this may actually be a good thing to some!

Two matching rules
This part is probably the hardest thing to wrap your head around when it comes to what is and isn't a valid match. As explained above, the square and line pieces need to be lined up exactly to blow up, while the T/Z/L pieces just need to touch. It can be a little annoying to keep this in the back of your mind when the game starts mixing these pieces together.

Verdict - 5/5

When I was roughly 12 or so whenever I got this, I never gave this game a solid chance from what I remember. I'm still curious how much I really played, but my attention drifted to other things. I'm really, really glad I gave this one a serious attempt this time around. This was actually pretty fun, though I admit the speed of the timer in some of the later stages sure filtered me good.

I really recommend this one. It's nowhere near as difficult to understand as screenshots might imply, and almost every mode can be distilled to 'get to the core'. It isn't much like traditional Tetris at all, so while you won't have to worry about Mom stealing your GameBoy to play, this has enough of a scratch that might pair well with the itch for a good N64 puzzle game. Check it out.