drella's Hatris (Import) review

So you actually did it and got it up! Nice. Funny as shit review, as usual.

Typo: "There are squat blue Devo hats are green derbies..." I think "are" should read "and".

Corrected. Thanks.

I really enjoyed this review, too, because I'd heard how bad Hatris was. Apparently even the worker power-ups on the NES are nearly useless!

The only inaccuracy I found is that Pajitnov wrote Welltris(1989) before Hatris(1990), 3 years after Tetris(1986.) Welltris was pretty lame, too, incidentally.

But his weakest effort is Knight Move. If you hated Hatris, you'll loathe Knight Move. Unfortunately, it's not even good enough to write a fun bash review about. He's written some better games since then, but it's interesting how he went into a slump for a while after Tetris.

Yeah, the timeline is a bit off, if only to show what a delirious idea this game was (Pajitnov's fame is the only reason I could see it being made). There was also the listless Wordtris (1991) in his spell of bad games.

Yeah...for a strong intro like that, it's probably better not to bore people with too much timeline. Too many details and stuff.

Wordtris...oh, the flashbacks. And I only played it for 1/2 hour.

Enjoyed the review. Fun read. However, I don't like the arguement that you can't "win" in Hatris.

The same is technically true of Tetris. Sooner or later, you're going to lose.

Unless you play the licensed NES version, which has different graphics featuring all of Nintendo's protagonists if you score high enough.

"Before you know it, you've already lost. You simply don't have a legitimate shot -- short of pure luck -- at lasting extended periods of time like this. Even during the worst of times in Tetris, you still felt like you might be able to pull out a miracle and restore order. In Hatris, you never had a chance to begin with, but were merely trying to prolong the game."

and

"Tetris was over painfully but quickly; this kind of defeat is akin to slowly peeling back the bandage. You're literally forced to watch one tiny error extrapolate in a long, drawn out series of steps that culminates with "game over" printed across the screen."

It's not that you can't win. It's that you're not even succeeding, but merely treading water ninety percent of the time. It's not that you lose, but it's that you know you lost and it still takes ten minutes for the error to play itself out.

Okay, this is what I get for reading reviews while half asleep.

I think I get it now. Your beef is that if you make one mistake in Hatris, then you are more or less screwed, and are forced to watch this mistake slowly snowball.

Well, Tetris is like that to a certain extent, but I suppose there are creative ways of rectifying mistakes in Tetris.