Let’s say you have a game that has the word ‘Tetris’ in the title, but doesn’t really involve Tetris at all. Let’s also suppose that you have a massively popular game franchise with highly copyrightable characters. It might occur to you that you want to mix them together. The result would have been something along the lines of Pokémon Puzzle League.
This game is a lot like Tetris Attack. There are only two real differences, and the first one is cosmetic. You can pick which Pokémon you want to represent you in your match, which doesn’t do anything other than change what sounds you get when you do combos and chains. The other difference is the addition of ‘3D mode’. It’s just like ‘normal mode’ except that it takes place on a giant cylinder. It’s kind of a neat novelty, but pretty worthless. Once the game speeds up a bit, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on all parts of the cylinder, and the sheer amount of tiles on it makes it much too easy to do combos and chains.
I should also mention that this game has a mode where you can create your own puzzles and challenge your friends, which is pretty neat, and the timings have been tweaked a bit since the Super NES offering, but you won’t really notice unless you were a real Tetris Attack aficionado. The game was good on its own, but adding the Pokémon characters ensured that people would buy it was a pretty obvious gambit. Thankfully, a version came out some time later with no mascots of any kind.
[...] Around the same time my uncle got a Game Boy, and Tetris, which he instantly fell in love with. He played it bit more than I did, and our link battles turned into fairly one-sided stomp-fests. (It’s OK, I got my revenge years later with Pokémon Puzzle League). [...]
[...] really should have liked this game a whole lot, given that I like Tetris Attack and its derivatives so much. But I guess that my mind is set against trying to play the game in a way where I have to [...]