Sure, you'll limp on into eternity, forever chasing former glory. But you'll never be new or exciting again. Your brand relies on delivering the same, familiar thing instead of providing anything new or ingenious. No reason to be upset. Just think of how many different renditions you've hard over the years. The sheer number of corny spin-offs you spawned is probably the highest praise of all.
(Tetris Attack rocks)
To call the puzzle genre of gaming dead might be too generous. Tetris represents the metaphorical Byzantine Empire of the gaming world - a tenuous shadow of past glories. What I want to know is this - where is the puzzle game to inaugurate the genre's new era?
Console puzzle gaming has probably lost the most ground to mobile gaming, which offers a thousand different cheap and accessible options. You can undoubtedly find an unlimited supply of cheap games (sudoku, crossword, etc.) via the app store. Is there a Tetris app? Probably. And really, isn't Angry Birds just a species of puzzle game?
Is there any hope for console puzzle gaming? No. Not until some developer takes full advantage of the consoles available. Seriously, where is the rule that states that all puzzle games must involve multi-colored blocks falling from above? Someone, at some point, decreed that puzzle games have to all seem retro. If Red Dead Redemption can look as good as this...
...then why can't a puzzle game?
Probably the closest thing to what I'm talking about would be the Portal series, which, I admit, I haven't played yet. Yet the popularity of the Portal series seems like fairly solid proof that there's still a market for that sort of game. But Portal isn't totally a puzzle game, not in the same way that, say, Tetris was.
Come to think, you know what I'm missing? Tetrisphere. Tetrisphere was probably my favorite Tetris spinoff, probably because it had almost nothing to do with the original Tetris. Plus the soundtrack for Tetrisphere was incredible. Check it out, if you can.
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