Tetrin

As one of you recently pointed out, I've been writing articles for Suite101 for over a year now. In that time, I've covered a lot of different software. In over 50 articles, I've written about databases, web sites, accessories, games, and eBooks. But until now I managed to avoid writing about Tetris. This week I decided it was finally time.

Since its introduction as one of the original Nintendo games, Tetris has been one of the most popular and most imitated games on the planet. The Palm is no different. I just counted no less than 10 tetris clones on PalmGear, not including variations like WordTris and Pilomns. In my opinion, Tetrin by Pixture Studio is the best of the lot.

Tetrin has four modes of play. The standard mode is the classic Tetris mode using the traditionally shaped four tiled dropping pieces. The goal is strictly to stay alive as long as possible. Play gets faster as more rows are cleared. As in traditional Tetris, you can also chose to start with some partially filled rows, making it harder to clear rows at the start.

The second mode, special, follows the same basic game rules as standard and also allows you to start the game with one to four partially filled rows. However, this mode doesn't use traditionally shaped pieces. Instead the pieces vary in size and shape from a small rectangle comprised of two tiles to much larger complex shapes.

The third mode, hunting, is my personal favorite. It uses the traditional Tetris pieces in a round-based game. Each round starts with tiles placed in the shape of the round number. One of the tiles is an x rather than a standard block. The goal of each round is to clear the x by completing its row.

The last mode, sliding hunting, is an interesting variation of hunting. The basic play is the same, but after each piece drops, all of the blocks on the ground shift one to the right. The column against the right wall shifts to the leftmost column. This is definitely an interesting and challenging variant.

Tetrin has full color support, with different shapes having different colors as in the original Tetris game. The game also plays very well in grayscale where each shape is represented by a different fill pattern. Each game mode has its own high scores, only available in the registered version. You can also reassign the keys if you don't like the default key actions. All in all, Tetrin is a well made Tetris clone with several interesting variants when you don't feel like playing the traditional game.

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