3-D Tetris (VB, 1996)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube

Credits

Sound Creator: Ken Kojima
Sound Effects: Tadashi Nakatsuji

Info

We did it! We’ve reached the twenty-second out of twenty-two Virtual Boy games officially released into the world: a 3D version of Tetris where instead of clearing a stack of 1D lines by filling them with blocks, you clear a stack of 2D layers by filling them with blocks. The basic idea already existed as Welltris and Blockout and probably other titles because it’s an obvious extension of the formula, but this is the one you can play on your Virtual Boy. Also it has anime personified blocks for some reason:

an anime personified block for some reason

This game was developed by T&E Soft, which means we’re closing out the official releases in the most appropriate way I can think of: with KEN KOJIMA BABY WE’RE SO BACK. Do you think he knows that he composed the most individual Virtual Boy titles of any one person? I hope he does, and he thinks it’s hilarious and tells people about it constantly. I’m stalling for no good reason, let’s actually get to the music.

There’s no emulated audio set for this game and I thought prior to writing this post that the only rip was another extremely bad and incomplete one, but it turns out there’s a complete-looking rip on YouTube, so that’s convenient for all of us. There’s a decent amount of music here for a VB game: all six play modes have their own unique theme, all twenty puzzles each have a unique 30 second outro song(!!!), and then there’s menu music and jingles and so on. The puzzle outros thing is especially wild to me, I can’t remember another puzzle game doing something like this.

There’s no sound programming credit this time but the instruments are again very similar to Red Alarm and Golf, so you can totally tell this is another T&E Soft game. It’s in that general kinda cute-ish action puzzle game style, mostly pretty normal-sounding with a bit of weird crunchy leads and random compositional darkness to remind you that this is still a Ken Kojima work. There’s more variety in the percussion sounds and other instrument programming as well as more active arrangements this time around, so it sounds like he was getting used to the sound hardware, just in time for the system to unceremoniously perish.

We’ve made it through the official Virtual Boy catalog, but stick around because we’re not done yet! I’ve been qualifying that there are twenty-two officially released games because there are two canceled games for which prototypes have made it onto the Online, and we’re going to check them out too!

Recommended tracks:

  • Menu” has some weird detuned bits… or maybe it’s just out of tune

  • Puzzle” has a nice polymetric bit at 1:02 with a few layers doing things in 13

  • Airplane” was one of the most Red Alarm-sounding tracks, which I guess makes sense given the subject matter

  • Bulldozer” has some nice erratic whirring in it, I was kind of hoping it was going to use those to turn into a rave track but it doesn’t

(track titles are unofficial)

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