LogFAQs > #979107698

Yeah, it's ok. I was neither especially fond of it nor especially averse to it.

The 80's endurance formula is something I really miss. It makes for a game you can play and play forever since you can always top your best score. And the combo of spacial/organizational skills with increasingly tight time limits is really neat. It's positively crucial that this isn't an actually complex puzzle because you don't have time to really think about it, and likewise, it's positively crucial that you're timed because it's not an especially complex puzzle. It goes together like peanut butter and jelly. Maybe even better.

But while it positively nailed the system, it stops there. Sure, the game is ancient, so you don't normally expect much in the way of story or content, but even so, this was the reason I usually only play a couple rounds a decade. Its successors, variations and copycats, like Dr. Mario and Puyo Puyo, would frequently do a better job with this and resulted in a game I could get into a little more.

The other thing was, in the more vanilla editions of the game, I just didn't like the aesthetic at all. The music, while legendary for good reason, just doesn't work for me when the game otherwise feels like it's supposed to be completely devoid of context. Combined with the solid black background, which for the time was standard but still, it just feels like a really gloomy game for no real reason other than it's Soviet I guess. They also played hard into the Soviet/Russian angle with the branding in some editions, which again felt out of place for a game that was otherwise context-free. I again felt like a number of other games based on the gameplay concept would do a lot better about this.

But it's an enduring classic for a reason. The bones of the game are its flawless gameplay, which I really do enjoy for a time every new and then.