Tetris is one of the most popular games ever to reach the gaming community and it has found its way onto almost every type of gaming platform from early console games such as the Atari to the personal computer to modern cellular phones. It has likely seen more variations, sequels, knock-offs and clones than any other game. Textris is one of the same, developed and published by Charon Software in the early nineties. Textris is a classic game of Tetris with some Scrabble style elements intertwined with it.
While the classic game of Tetris sees falling colored blocks coming from the top of the screen for the user to organize, Textris changes that up a bit. Instead of falling blocks, the user will see falling letters. Instead of creating horizontal, solid rows of blocks, the user will have to create real words horizontally as the letters fall down. The user is also allowed to create vertical words, but diagonal words will not count. The game reads words from left to right, so if two words are made at the same time, the computer will first take the longest word and the left most one will count first if the words were the same length. The ensuing blocks will fall, and then
the computer will look for new words. The words must be more than three letters long, eliminating the easy outs that people often use toward the end of a desperate game of Scrabble. Occasionally, a blank tile will fall from the top of the screen, and the user can use this as a wild tile. All he has to do is select what letter of the alphabet he would like that tile to become and it is done. If he does not select a letter before the wild tile touches another tile in the field of play, the game will randomly select a letter for the user. Never fear…it will likely be a “Q.” The AI is not very helpful to the gamer.
The controls are very easy and quite self-explanatory. The arrow keys maneuver the falling blocks to the right and left. The space key can move the tiles downward more quickly once the user is sure of where he wants to position it. The F6 key is very handy and depressing it will bring up a display that shows what the ensuing tile will be. Unlike Tetris, there is no need to rotate the letters.
This is a fun game to play and will help vocabulary skills as well as some hand eye coordination. It is a challenge to try beating your own high score, and most users will enjoy the test this game will offer them.
