Valgus 2 (or possibly “Valgus Squared”, thinking about it) for Atari 8-bit is an interesting and creative take on Tetris that, for once, doesn’t just knock off someone else’s game.
While superficially resembling Alexey Pajitnov’s official follow-up Welltris, Valgus 2 is actually a rather different sort of game, tasking you with surrounding a central piece rather than making lines on the floor of a “well”.
Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!
Tetris is a timeless classic that remains relevant today. Its various sequels and spinoffs, on the other hand, have varied somewhat in how well they’ve persisted over the years.
One such title that has been largely forgotten today is Alexey Pajitnov’s official follow-up to the original Tetris, known as Welltris. Developed in Soviet Russia, ported to a variety of platforms and published by Spectrum Holobyte and Infogrames around the world, Welltris takes Tetris into the third dimension.
It’s a solid game… but you have to approach it very differently to Pajitnov’s more enduring classic!
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
G’day cobbers, it’s time for another MoeGamer Podcast featuring both Me of Here, and Mr Chris Caskie of MrGilderPixels.
The MoeGamer Podcast is available in several places. You can subscribe to my channel on YouTube to stay up to date with both the video versions of the podcast and my weekly videos (including the Atari A to Z retro gaming series); you can follow on Soundcloud for the audio-only version of the podcast; you can subscribe via RSS to get the audio-only version of the podcast in your favourite podcast app; or you can subscribe via iTunes. Please do at least one of these if you can; it really helps us out!
Or you can hit the jump to watch or listen to today’s episode right here on MoeGamer. (I encourage you to watch today’s episode if you have the means to, as there are lots of cool things to look at!)
Continue reading The MoeGamer Podcast: Episode 23 – Drop, Connect, Erase
Imagine Tetris. Then imagine it wrapped around a sphere. Then forget whatever you just pictured, because Tetrisphere is nothing like that. It’s still great, though.
Technically Tetrisphere is a little outside of MoeGamer’s normal remit in that it was not developed by a Japanese company, nor was it ever actually released in Japan. It did, however, find its home on a Japanese games console — the Nintendo 64 — and as such it totally counts. Particularly as it’s an awesome puzzle game, and we’re all about awesome puzzle games.
So how can one possibly make something as simple and elegant as Tetris work in a three-dimensional, spherical space? Well, as I’ve previously alluded to, you don’t; you do something a bit different.
Puyo Puyo Tetris is cause for great celebration, particularly for those of us who have been missing certain aspects of “the good old days” of gaming, whenever those might have been in your personal opinion.
Why is it noteworthy? Well, numerous reasons: it’s one of the few Puyo Puyo titles to have made it West without significant modifications or complete rebranding; it’s a reinterpretation of Tetris that doesn’t suck (EA and Ubisoft, pay attention); and perhaps most importantly, it’s a standalone puzzle game that not only isn’t a microtransaction-riddled, play-throttling mobile phone game with infuriating touch controls, it also got an actual, honest-to-goodness physical release. In fact, in the case of the PlayStation 4 version, the physical release is, oddly, the only way to get hold of a copy.
It’s also an absolutely cracking game, so let’s take a closer look at what it offers to puzzler aficionados.
