Pokémon Puzzle Challenge is actually more like the Tetris Attack game for the Super NES than Pokémon Puzzle League for the Nintendo 64. But what that means is that this game looks to be nearly identical to the Super NES one, but with different characters and sound effects.

So what do you do in this game? You have your steadily-rising pile of multi-colored blocks and can move them left and/or right to try and line up three or more in a row. Match more than three or set off chain reactions and your opponent loses health. When it loses all of its health, then you win!

But the thing in this version is that you have different Pokémon to choose from, each one representing a different element in the Pokémon universe. If you pick a pokémon that has a type that its opponent is weak to, then your attacks do more damage, and you’ll win quicker. Pick the wrong one, though, and you’ll have to do a lot more chains and combos to win.

I played this game a fair bit, mostly because it was an update to the old Tetris Attack game that I had nearly worn out on my Game Boy, plus it was in glorious COLOR! Which made it pretty ideal for showing off my Game Boy Color, and for practicing up on my Puzzle League skills on the go. Which I find pretty important. You never really know when an impromptu game of Puzzle League can break out, so it pays to be prepared.

You might be asking yourself why on Earth would I want to buy another Pokémon game. And to that I can only say that you apparently don’t know me very well. I just kind of like the series, that’s all. The games are as deep as you want them to be, and I have the opportunity to catch innocent wild creatures and force them to do my bidding, satiating my God complex… Okay, not really. I just like goofing around with it, trying out the different moves, checking out the variety of monsters, and generally trying to create my super-awesome nigh-unbeatable team… which actually usually turns out to be quite beatable.

There is a story in this game, but it really is just kind of a framework for you to work in that slowly introduces you to the world, its inhabitants, and the bizarre organized pokémon fighting culture that has somehow pervaded its world.

Or you could catch them and dress them up to participate in contests instead of fighting them. Or you could dispense with fighting completely and navigate the underground network and attempt to find hidden treasures.

But probably the most interesting part of the game is that it takes advantage of the DS’s wireless capabilities to connect to the Nebulous Internet. You can use this newfangled tech-a-nology to trade whatever you’ve collected with other folks around the world. The interface could use a little work. You can’t, for instance, search for something unless you’ve seen it first. This makes it kind of tough to ‘catch ‘em all’ since lots of the ones you’ll need to actually do that will never cross your paths without some… creative shenanigans.

You might remember that the DS, on the bottom, has a slot that will accommodate one Game Boy Advance cartridge. Once you reach a certain point in your DS adventure, you can utilize the kinda super-secret transfer method to move your monsters that you worked so hard to get in the Game Boy titles over to your DS game. Which certainly will help speed things along, but will definitely leave your prior-generation title bereft of all your hard-gotten uber-characters, which would make it kind of tough to go back and play it… if you were so inclined. Which, history has shown, will happen from time to time.

Of course, if you have a family member who gives you a copy of one of the GBA games that she found in the parking lot of some school, and the game was run over a few times, but still worked fine. Then you would probably not have any qualms about taking all of that kid’s monsters.

At least, I didn’t.

Rampart is a game about castles, wall building, and heavy artillery. You, and up to one of your friends (up to two in the arcade version) each take control of a castle with a wall around it (a rampart, don’t you know).

So, first, after you pick a castle, comes the ‘place your cannons’ phase, and then the shooting phase. Your goal is to use your cannons to bust up the ramparts of your opponents while they’re doing the same to yours. After a few seconds comes the rebuilding phase.

In the rebuilding phase you have a limited amount of time and some tetris-like blocks that you have to use to reconstruct your walls. Your goal is going to be to surround your cannons with a complete wall, but you can also extend your walls to claim other castles to use in your battles. More castles = more cannons at your disposal, but you also have to make sure you claim at least one castle, or it’s game over for you!

There’s also a single-player mode where you get to go up against boats controlled by the computer, but that’s way less fun.

I really had a lot of fun with this game. You really had to use your noodle a little bit to strategically destroy the wall in a way that the weird tetrimino-like wall pieces would have a tough time to fill. But you also don’t have a whole lot of time to do much in the way of scheming, the game just moves too fast for that.

But you have plenty of time for trash-talking whoever’s sitting next to you while you tear their walls down, which just kind of loses something if you do it over the Internet.

Blockout is, supposedly, the next logical step to Tetris. I won’t bother explaining how Tetris works, I’m pretty sure you already know. But imagine, if you will, that instead of looking at the playfield from the side that you’re instead looking at it from above. And further imagine that you gain the ability to rotate the pieces on both the X and the Y axes. You’d, of course, have to imagine new pieces that would be possible in this strange new space. And then you imagine them slowly falling into the bucket, or pit, or hole, or well, or whatever you want to call it, and your goal is to arrange them so that they complete layers instead of mere ‘lines’. Then you will start to have a grasp on this game.

This game was really hard for me. The different layers are color-coded, so that’s a plus, but I had three big problems with it. One was that my brain just doesn’t seem to work in a way that allows me to see how these 3D pieces need to be manipulated to fit properly in the 3D space. The normal pieces are pretty easy to deal with, but the corkscrew-like pieces just screw with my head, and I invariably panic and put them in the wrong spot. The other problem I had was that I couldn’t keep track of where my gaps were in the puzzle. So if I had a partially-unfinished layer, and had to start another layer on top of it, and then had to put yet another layer on top of that I pretty much forgot where the gaps were in the second layer, and the bottom? That may as well not exist as far as my brain is concerned. The last problem I had was with the perspective. I’m used to playing classic Tetris by lining up the piece where I wanted it and then driving it home, but I just have a real problem doing that with any kind of accuracy in 3D space. So I ended up making lots of bad drops, which makes for a frustrating time.

At least one of those problems could probably be somewhat alleviated by practicing the game more, and there’s a practice mode just for that where there’s no ‘gravity’ and you can play as quickly or as slowly as you like. And I had a degree of success with that. But not being able to reliably keep track of where the gaps were made it difficult for me to really make any kind of headway. But I’ve grown to accept that my brain just doesn’t quite work that way, I can’t even reliably solve one side of a Rubik’s Cube. But I still have fun trying.

Tetris & Dr. Mario is, fairly obviously, a combination of the two titular games, with only minor graphical and audio upgrades. Single-player, multi-player, it’s all the same, really. But the real draw is what’s called ‘mixed mode’. In mixed mode you and another player compete in a little Tetris, a little Dr. Mario, and then a little more Tetris. This alone justified the purchase for me.

If nothing else, the game’s just a way to have two puzzlers in one convenient package. And, since everyone knows how to play Tetris, and nearly everyone knows how to play Dr. Mario, it’s pretty easy to pick up and play, too. Bonus.

Meteos, like Tetris Attack, has a grid of multi-colored blocks that you have to manipulate in such a way that three or more of the same color are lined up together. In Tetris Attack the pieces disappear, but in Meteos the matched pieces start to fly off the top of the screen, taking any on top of them with them. But the key gameplay difference is that in Tetris Attack you can only move your pieces left and right, but in Meteos you can only move them up and down.

There’s a story mode that tries to help explain the story behind the game, something about multicolored meteors plummeting onto the planet and you having to match them up to send them back into the ether, but it’s really mostly unnecessary. It just kind of gives you an excuse for the space-themed backdrops and characters.

I 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 think along the y-axis instead of the x-axis. And as a result, the only time I played this game, I did really poorly at it. Couple that with the fact that one of the people I was playing the game with was able to get a degree of success by scribbling on the screen, kind of made me suspect its worth as a puzzler.

But maybe I’m being too hard on it. Maybe it is a great, awesome, compelling, and addictive game. But I have no desire to play it any more to find out.

This game is really just the same as the pack-in Tetris game I got with my original gigantic Game Boy in ‘89, but with little splashes of color everywhere and some slightly tweaked gameplay mechanics.

But I guess, as the saying goes, it wasn’t broken, so there was nothing to fix. You can still play endless mode until your brain and fingers just can’t keep up, or you can play “B Mode” where the playfield is drastically shortened. Or, if you were lucky enough to know someone with a Game Boy Color and this game and had the forethought to bring your link cable along, then some head-to-head action could be had.

It’s weird, every few years a new system will come out and eventually there will be a version of Tetris for it. Then I’ll inevitably pick it up and realize that I haven’t played the game in quite some time, which will lead to me losing far too many hours to it until the next system comes along and I pick up its version of Tetris.

I do sometimes wonder, though, how many times Nintendo can sell me the same game.

What makes this Tetris ‘New’ are three new play mechanics: hold pieces, t-spins, and ‘bonus squares’. Hold pieces are just that: you can swap out the currently falling piece for the one in your ‘hold area’. You can hang on to that long piece until you really need it, or any number of strategies. It’s so handy that I’m surprised it hadn’t been done before.

T-Spins are a little harder to describe, but basically you take a T piece and just before it hits home and is cemented in place you rotate it so that it fits where you normally couldn’t move it. this causes all of the pieces below the t-spin to crumble into pieces and fill in the holes left over from Tetris-gravity.

The squares, though, there’s where you have the chance to get ‘bonus lines’. Basically what you have to do is to make a 4×4 square out of the falling pieces. If your square is homogeneous, you get a mono-square, if it’s heterogeneous, you get a multi-square. Clear lines that include parts of the squares and your lines get multiplied, more points for the harder to make mono-square, of course. You also get a bonus for performing a tetris, and that can be multiplied as well, for all kinds of lines all around!

One of the kind of neat things about this game is that you use the lines that you win in the various modes to construct ‘wonders’ of the world. Every time you hit a milestone you get a new wonder with some interesting factoids and a new background and musical score to go along with it. The only problem I had was that to unlock all the wonders you had to clear 500,000 lines total. On a good day I can get about 2000 lines in a session. That means I have to play about 250 sessions. Each of those sessions takes me about an hour. So, rather than sink 250 hours into the game, fun as it is, I kind of quit playing it after I got a new system and a new version of Tetris to distract me. I keep telling myself that I’ll pick it back up one day and get the rest of those wonders, and maybe one day I’ll believe it.

Tetris DS starts out normal enough, it’s got the standard brick-stacking mode, but this time with old Nintendo characters cavorting on the top screen. Keen!

But the meat of the single player game comes in the other modes. Mission mode, for example, tasks you with clearing lines a certain way in the time allotted to slay some Zelda enemies. Though I swear some of the challenges on the later levels are impossible. Then there’s Catch mode where you have a puzzle floating through space and you have to crash it into other pieces, some with explosives on them, and blow up the bricks… This mode is very boring, I played it about twice. Push mode has you and an opponent on opposite sides of the same puzzle area, and each time you clear two or more lines it shoves the puzzle slightly closer to your opponent. Make it cross their ‘danger’ zone and you win! This mode is actually pretty fun, especially if you have an actual person to play against. Puzzle mode is pretty tame. You have a pre-set puzzle and a few blocks to place to try and clear the whole screen, but you can undo as many times as you want, so you’ll go through the permutations pretty fast. Touch mode has a giant tower of blocks and you have to use the stylus to move them around and clear lines. This one takes a bit more thinking than the other modes, but is still distracting for a while.

But, oh man, the game has Wi-Fi capabilities. What this means is that now, when you need to get your Tetris fix you can hop online and search for a random opponent. And there is always someone way better than you just waiting to give you a savage beat down. I can’t decide if I was more jazzed about the ability to play against four friends at once or that I could play against someone if I’m anywhere in the world that has an Internet hot-spot.

This game is, so far, my favorite implementation of the series. I’ve got my $30 out of it several times over.

The game has reached a saturation point now, so I don’t think I really need to go into detail about it. Shapes fall from the sky and you have to artfully arrange them to form complete rows which disappear and shrink the stack. The game is super simple, and easy to pick up and play. But as you continue it gets tougher and tougher until you just can’t take any more.

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).

But I really would like to see more games like Tetris, which the industry is seeming to come back to. Games that are easy to learn, tough (or impossible) to master, and have a broad appeal. I simply can’t see this as being a bad thing.