Tris: Addictive iPhone Gaming at its Best… and it’s FREE!
August 17, 2008 by Erik MacKinnon
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my Tris - available for free from the iPhone App Store and created by developer Noah Witherspoon - is a fantastic iPhone implementation of Tetris - the classic game of falling tetrominoes, and one of the best and most addictive iPhone games to be released to date.
Unless you’ve lived on another planet for the past twenty years, you’re familiar with Tetris. If not, here’s a quick refresher from Wikipedia:
Tetris (Russian: Тетрис) is a video puzzle game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in June 1985, while working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow.[1] He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix “tetra-”, as all of the pieces contain four segments, and tennis, Pajitnov’s favorite sport.
A pseudorandom sequence of tetrominoes (sometimes called “tetrads” in older versions) - shapes composed of four square blocks each - fall down the playing field. The object of the game is to manipulate these tetrominoes, by moving each one sideways and rotating it by 90 degree units, with the aim of creating a horizontal line of blocks without gaps. When such a line is created, it disappears, and any block above the deleted line will fall. As the game progresses, the tetrominoes fall faster, and the game ends when the stack of tetrominoes reaches the top of the playing field and no new tetrominoes are able to enter.
Controlling Tris is easy: tap the screen to change the orientation of the falling blocks, and drag your finger downward on the screen to bring the blocks down faster. There’s even a nice little “mulligan” where you can drag your finger upward to bring the blocks a short way back up the screen… and it can be a game saver at times.
Far and away the best function of Tris is that it will pause your game exactly where you left it should you need to leave the application. Answer that SMS, check the weather, surf the web… no matter what you do, when you reopen Tris you will be able to resume your game. Incredible, considering there are many paid iPhone games that you can’t even PAUSE, let alone quit. Your top ten high scores are saved locally and accessible through the menu. There’s also a global high scores function, although when I wrote this I couldn’t seem to get anything to load in it.
If you’re into iPhone gaming at all, or if you find yourself bored and your iPhone is handy, do yourself a favor and download Tris. It went from nowhere to #1 on the free apps listing for a reason - it’s amazing. Enjoy!
Screenshots:
Enjoy!
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Dang, this looks like a great remake of tetris for the iPhone. I think I will be heading to app store just about now… thanks!