Collection essentials #396: V-Tetris (VB)

Today’s post is gonna be nice and brief, ‘cause there’s really not a whole lot to say about V-Tetris. You already know what Tetris is, so I don’t have to explain that part to you. The game has two modes that you’d expect to see in other early Tetris games, those being endless and line clear modes. 

It’s the third mode, “Loop Tetris”, that puts this game on the list. In this mode, you are basically placing Tetris pieces in a cylindrical playing field. In other words, the stack of blocks you see at any given time does not represent everything in play. If you press the shoulder buttons on the controller, you’ll find that there is an entire background layer, and pressing one of those buttons rotates the cylinder one column at a time. This provides a totally unique spin on Tetris! You do not need to have a perfect string of blocks across the entire cylinder in order to clear them, just what’s on screen. But there’s actually a small penalty for only clearing one row at a time, as an extra block will fall in the background whenever you do! So you are incentivized to try and clear multiple in one move.

The Game Boy lacked the buttons required to pull off this Loop Tetris mode, so it’s understandable why this game wasn’t made for Game Boy. But it’s rather baffling that this mode wasn’t recreated in a console iteration of Tetris at the time, OR since! To my knowledge this way to play Tetris is still exclusive to this Japan-exclusive game on a flop of a console! That’s so odd!! 

As a big fan of Tetris (as we all are) and owner of a Virtual Boy, this game is an obvious inclusion on my list.