You could have another use for that “Wii Fit” balance board gathering dust underneath the sofa when “Tetris Party” arrives later this year on WiiWare.

“Tetris Party” aims to provide “the ultimate ‘Tetris’ workout,” joked Tetris Online VP of marketing Casey Pelkey to MTV Multiplayer at Nintendo’s fall summit last week.

Incorporating the balance board into “Tetris Party” wasn’t originally part of the plan for Tetris Online or developer Hudson Soft., but “Wii Fit”’s success started planting ideas in their head.

Read more…

All day long we’re presenting Patrick Klepek’s favorite games of last week’s Nintendo of America media summit.

Do we really need another “Tetris” game? You wouldn’t think so but “Tetris Party” says otherwise.

This WiiWare “Tetris,” coming later this year for just $12, goes to great lengths to play with the “Tetris” formula we all know and love. This is not the “Tetris” game you’ve played a million times before.

True, the core “Tetris” game is still there, but that’s not what makes “Tetris Party” special. Instead, it’s the fairly wild gameplay experiments developer Hudson Soft embarked on.

The most addictive multiplayer mode was called “Duel Spaces,” where players compete for the negative space on the grid. It’s the opposite strategy of traditional “Tetris.” You want to make closed structures with the pieces with extremely large gaps in-between them. It’s these gaps that garner you points.

You can even use the balance board in this one. It’s not that…fun…but, well, it’s there and certainly an interesting new way to drop blocks.

Rushing through e-mails, sometimes you agree to things by accident.

Take, for example, entering a journalist tournament for N-Gage strategy game “Reset Generation.” The game showed up last week, punctuating what I’d done.

Today, I was matched against IGN writer Christopher Carle. I’d barely played more than the tutorial of “Reset Generation.” I was prepared to accept defeat and move on with my life. But instead, MTV Multiplayer delivered two crushing blows to Carle — his pixels swiftly defeated.

Maybe I’m…good at this game? Nokia wanted us to play “Reset Generation” on phones they’d sent, but neither Carle or myself could get the phone to hold a Wi-Fi connection. Thankfully, the web version allowed us to compete just fine. If by compete, of course, you mean I stomped Charle out! Ooh!

You can track the tournament here, and I highly recommend you check out “Reset Generation” (available free here); it’s an immensely addictive combo of “Tetris” and “Advance Wars” and only takes a few minutes to pick up. It’s too bad it’s limited to N-Gage, but at least you can check it out on your PC, too.

Playing “Tetris” can be serious business. If you came in first place at last year’s first annual Tetris Cup, you could have walked away with a travel voucher worth $1,500.

In November, Blue Planet Software and The Tetris Company hosted The Tetris Cup at the University of Hawaii. Even “Tetris” creator Alexey Pajitnov attended the festivities.

You’d be rightly confused about Hawaii being the homebase for hardcore “Tetris” play, but that’s because Blue Planet (part of The Tetris Company) is in Hawaii.

Last year’s Tetris Cup was a test run. In 2009, you’ll have a shot at the crown, and if Blue Planet has their way, you could someday win a million dollars doing it.

Read more…

I still can’t find “Tetris DS,” but my search during these last couple of weeks has had me talking to Capcom, Electronic Arts and Atlus. I’ve been learning about how to survive the gaming economy.

But it hasn’t gotten me any closer to “Tetris DS,” and no one (even GameStop wouldn’t return my calls or e-mails) could specify when a typical game’s shelf life ends.

Maybe they don’t want to speculate about their own products. “Okami,” a new IP with hardcore appeal, didn’t last long, but Capcom wouldn’t timline their last re-order. “Resident Evil 4,” however, they said will be actively selling for two or three more years.

I decided to ask an analyst instead. Evan Wilson, senior research analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, said there was no answer. When pressed, he caved: the average game has only “a few months” before the industry moves on.

That’s a generalization, of course. An “average game” could last longer depending on the time of year, the health of the platform and genre competition. If you don’t want to buy used, however, you’re looking at just a few months time.

Have you tried to purchase “Tetris DS” recently? Totilo tried to. So did I.

We couldn’t find a copy anywhere. It’s going on eBay for as high as $60. The situation is even worse at Amazon. It’s not in stock at EB Games, Best Buy or any other retailer.

Nintendo claims the title is still in production, but right now, there’s no way to buy it. That got us wondering.

How does a company decide when to put a game out to pasture, after months or years of success?

Read more…

San Francisco — “Tetris” is the “Slim Jim” of mobile games.

At least that’s what I learned at a panel I attended yesterday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The first two days of the event are largely focused on satellite conferences, including one all about mobile games. I decided to check out a session called “TETRIS: Best/Worst Mobile Game Ever.”

“First off, ‘Tetris’ is the best game ever. Not the best mobile game, but the best game ever,” said speaker Rick Marazzani. He’s worked in casual games for over 12 years at places like Broderbund, Maxis/EA/Pogo and Digital Chocolate and is now a co-founder of mobile/web/PC development studio iQ212. And the man loves his “Tetris.” Or so I thought…

After a brief history of how “Tetris” came to be, including the rights debacle and commercialization of the game, he talked about its monumental success — over 70 million units have been sold across different platforms. For mobile games, he estimates that it garnered about one-third of the $140 million revenue that rights-holder EA made on handheld games in Fiscal 2007. It is currently the best-selling mobile game, accounting for 8.5% of all mobile games sold in North America.

Thus, Marazzani called “Tetris” the “Slim Jim of mobile games” (and “not rib-eye or filet mignon”), I guess because of its universal accessibility, although I’m not really sure why meat products were the analogies of choice. So far everything he had said pretty much made sense and was nothing new… But then he pondered the idea of “Tetris” being made today instead of back in 1985. With that in mind, what’s his advice to aspiring mobile game developers?

“If you want to make ‘Tetris’ for today, don’t make ‘Tetris,’” he said. … Wait, what?

Read more…