Recently, we attended a retro gaming market in Birmingham. For the first time, we saw a Virtual Boy! Nintendo’s failed headset from 1995 was on offer for £350. We didn’t buy it.

But we have always been fascinated with the console’s red and black colour scheme, which looks weird for titles such as Virtual Boy Waterworld.

3D Tetris was a more inventive take on what the headset could achieve, although kind of in a mind-bending sort of way.

3D Tetris and the Pursuit of Angles (meets negative reviews)

Modern takes on the classic Tetris formula include the exhilarating Tetris 99. Really, that’s an absolute marvel of a fast-paced game.

Then there’s the chillout masterpiece of Tetris Effect.

To its credit, 3D Tetris was also trying something a bit different. It’s just this didn’t really work out very well in the end.

Developed by the now defunct Japanese studio T&E Soft, the game launched in March 1996. And that was only in North America, with an abandoned Japanese version called Polygo Block dropping off the schedule.

T&E used a parallax optical trick for its take on Tetris, simulating a 3D effect (whilst not really delivering one).

It’s where there’s a displacement/difference in the position of an object viewed across two lines of sight. Foreshortening renders nearby objects as larger than those further away.

For gameplay, you get a 3D field that’s called a “well”. It has five vertical layers into which you direct all the familiar falling Tetris blocks. You can rotate them around to fit them into position as you please. Behold!

It’s a more advanced version over classic Tetris, with some 30 block types with each one rendered into a 3D wireframe.

Once they hit the bottom of the well, they’re filled in (to help the player understand what needs to go where next).

Sounds great, but as always with the Virtual Boy there were two core problems:

1. Playing with the headset attached was very awkward.
2. The red/black format would induce headaches.

Gamers have a fondness for being indoors away from all that pesky sunlight and annoying people. But the Virtual Boy had a habit of forcing recluses outside to breathe a bit and recover.

3D Tetris met with negative reviews, including a 1/5 from Next Generation magazine. America’s Nintendo Power magazine provided a peculiar 13.6/20 score.

The game was criticised for being too complex, boring, and slow.

In short, the remarkable elegance of the original Tetris, in all its simplicity, was gone in favour of a hodgepodge.

However, Nintendo Life’s 2009 retrospective review handed it 8/10, praising its unique qualities over many other Tetris titles. Although USgamer’s retrospective compared the game to getting pepper sprayed.

There you have it, then!

If you want a Tetris experience that’s akin to having your eyes blasted with capsaicin spray this is the experience for you. Perhaps the police can use copies of 3D Tetris in future riots as crowd control.