Reviews / previews
Sega PC's Puzzle Pack provides more variations on
Tetris than anyone is likely to want, and, at the same
time, not quite enough.
The best of the three on this half-cousin to Smash
Pack is Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine--a 1993
Sega Genesis game running via an emulator.
It plays like Tetris with personality: You control
descending rotatable pairs of colored beans. When a
bean lands adjacent
to (but not on a
diagonal with) a
bean of the same
color, they join
together. Once four
beans connect, the
chain trembles and
explodes, allowing
the beans above it
to fall into new positions and destroying any nearby
unmatchable beans that bar your path.
It's uncomplicated, you can learn it without reading
anything, and it's full of its creators' pleasure in the
act of creation. The beans are really cute. Each has
eyes, and when the beans start linking up, the eyes
start going in absurdly different directions. It's as fun
to watch as it is fun to play.
By contrast, Columns III: Revenge of Columns (another emulated Genesis
game) is a bit of a letdown. The original
game has a lovely simplicity, and its
inclusion adds immensely to Smash
Pack. But the Egyptian storyline and
graphical theme don't add anything
significant to the game (save for slowing
it down), the anonymous music could
score anything from a shooter to an
RPG, and the graphics have no sparkle.
It's not a bad game--the fundamentals of
Columns remain in place--but it's also
not an improvement on a classic.
Lose Your Marbles, a re-release of a SegaSoft PC game from the mid-'90s, is
just a mistake. The last thing Sega needed to do was "featurize" Tetris. But
essentially that's what it has done. You're caught in a cross fire. The marbles
are coming in both from the top and the bottom of the play field, and you
control not the horizontal location of the arriving pieces, but the vertical
positioning of each five columns. (The goal
is to line up three or more marbles of the
same type along the center bar.)
It's maddening, sure, but for the wrong
reasons. Tetris is all about letting the player
into the game gently, and then steadily
building up the speed and the pressure.
Lose Your Marbles, with its complications of
direction and control, requires a particularly deft hand at this respectand I
don't see it in action. There's no sense of fun about it. It's less a game than a
mechanism.
After a few minutes, I felt hopelessly overmatched by the mechanism, and
quit rather than play out my losing hands.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro
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