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Monday, January 11, 2016

Tetris Ultimate or Why You Should Stick With an Older Version of Tetris

I'm not the biggest Tetris fan, but every now and then, I do like to throw down with the world's most famous puzzle game. Like many, my first encounter with Tetris was on the Game Boy and while I've played numerous other incarnations of Tetris, it has always remained a game I can come back to due to the brilliance in it's simplicity. Tetris is one of those games that can stand alongside Pong, Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. in gaming. Its one of those games that everyone has played.

There are some things that should be immune to sucking. Like, despite the best efforts to make the simplest of things suck, it should be impossible for the suckage to be so. But every now and then, the stars align and the unsuckable gets hit with the suck bat ad thus, mass suckery ensues. Some versions of Tetris are undoubtedly better than others but the idea of Tetris sucking is flat out inconceivable. Tetris, game about falling blocks that you use to make lines, is as basic a concept as it gets for a video game, so the mere thought that Tetris could suck is unfathomable. And yet somehow, Ubisoft has take a game and made what by all rights should be unsuckable suckable with Tetris Ultimate.

It may look decent now, but in motion, Tetris
Ultimate is an unplayable mess.

Tetris Ultimate may seem perfectly fine in screen shots by seeing the game in motion reveals that its a train wreck of a game. Picture if you will, frequent drops of frame rate in Tetris. What's that you say? There shouldn't be any frame dips in Tetris? You better your sweet booty, there shouldn't be! Dropping frame rates in Tetris? A game that was made in the mid 1980s on primitive hardware is struggling with frame rate issues on freaking high power HD consoles that is the PS4 and Xbox One? How the crap is that even possible?! Oh, but that's not all! Versus matches can somehow still continue even after the victory has been decided, skipping brought on by input lag that can cause blocks to fall in places you don't want to among other things makes Tetris Ultimate a nightmarish Tetris game.

Considering Tetris Ultimate has come from Ubisoft, I suppose no one should be too surprised. This, after all, is the company that loves to rush buggy games to launch and them patch them up when they should be more concerned about making sure the game is already running at an optimal level from the get go. But if they did that, I guess they wouldn't be Ubisoft, now would they? Even though Ubisoft had one easy task, they still manged to eff that up and in doing so, they did the unthinkable and made Tetris suck when such an act should be impossible. This is Tetris. TETRIS! Fro crying out loud, how do you royally screw that up?!

It may lack color, but at least it has better music
and is playable.


This whole deal would be funny if it weren't so pitiful but with Tetris Ultimate being such a crappy Tetris game, there is no reason whatsoever to invest in it, not just because Ubisoft turned out such an awful product. No, you also shouldn't give a rat's butt-ox because there are tons of superior versions of Tetris on every single machine that can run a video game. On NES, GB, PlayStation, Mac, PC, heck your phone can run a more competent version of Tetris than Tetris Ultimate, which are all much better options that you should pursue. Sure, the 3DS version is better than PS4 and XBO versions, but the presentation is still pretty drab and you could get far more enjoyable Tetris experiences elsewhere.

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