We are in 2006.

Despite its weak hardware (it's following the Gameboy footsteps no doubt), and an industrial design that's not a copycat from the late-00s Apple, the Nintendo DS is slowly but surely reaching a dominance over the Sony PSP

Looking at the game catalog from 2004 to 2006, we can already see how the DS is a console for everything and everyone. A true generalist console, like the PS1 was back in its day.
There are excellent gamer's game like Mario Kart DS, Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow, Meteos, Nanostray, Ouendan!, Ace Attorney, Trauma Center, so on an so forth.
There are licensed game that goes from "meh" to "pretty good (I'm thinking about Jump Super Star).
There are ports of the big license from the home console, with quality also varying (Need for Speed Most Wanted, Tomb Raider Legends).
There are experimental games that takes advantage of the touch screen (Pac Pix, Electroplankton).
And of course there are the occasional shovelware (Ping Pals, Horsez Imagine: Master Chef).

But it's with the huge success of Kawashima¹ , and then of Nintendogs that Nintendo enters the casual market. I heavily suspect that the console redesign is at least in part due to this.

¹: Sorry it's: "Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain?" or even "Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!" instead.

So: we are in 2006, and more precisely we are between March and April.

Internet is astonished by the brightness of the then-Japan-only DS Lite². I heavily suspect that Nintendo wanted to have a good killer app release at the same time as its new DS model. And for that, what better choice than THE killer app darling of the Game Boy ?

²: by the way: "The DS lite I have set to 'Death' and the original DS I have set to 'On'" still makes me chuckle to this day

So, Tetris was born again³, and in a similar circumstance than his big brother the Game Boy.

³: Sidenote: I was wondering why Nintendo was tasked to be the main developer. The Tetris Company at the time had a policy of "one platform, one game", and THQ (infamous for the very meh Tetris Worlds and Tetris Elements) was the main caretaker at the time. I looked at the Game Developer (née Gamasutra) archive: there was indeed a legal dispute precisely because of this. It was settled out of court

This is a Tetris that plays hard on the nostalgia part. There's an unbearably cute title screen where several classic Nintendo character appears in their 8-bit apparel and interact with tetraminoes. Mario hurl hammers at them, Samus blast them with lasers, DK throws them. Alot of UI element are directly lifted from the game (for instance the green pipes acting as the playfield border). Oh, and Sakurai must have been around, because there's some heavy reference to forgotten classics like Excite Bike, Balloon Fight and Devil World.

And there were plenty of solo and multiplayer modes.

On the solo side, we count 6 modes. Some are really creative like the "Push" mode. In there you battle against the AI while sharing the same playfield. In "Catch", you rotate the whole stack instead of the falling pieces. But some modes are less so. "Puzzle" can be brute forced. Mission is boring. And finally there's the obligatory "hey look we're using the touchscreen!" mode, called "Tower". It's very forgettable.

And then there's the standard mode.

Did I told you about the Tetris Company ? It's the company that holds the Tetris IP. Pajitnov itself is a board member, but I think he's just there to receive the paycheck⁴.
One of the condition you have to respect in order to release a Tetris game is to follow some official guidelines. That include game mechanics (I think it's almost a complete game design document).

⁴: I absolutely don't blame him, I would probably do the same considering his situation

The problem with those mandatory game mechanics is that they are not all that well designed. I said this before and I'll say it again: the guidelines 5 makes for a bad single player game. And in the case of Tetris, I think that casual players can get bored once they learn about "the trick", and hardcore players cannot find a good challenge to try to overcome.

⁵: and to make matters even worse, as far as I know, it hasn't been updated significantly since 2005 (maybe some little modification in 2017-ish ?)

The "trick" (called "infinity") in question is this: mash the rotation button and then the active piece never locks. And more often than not, you can climb on your stack and wiggle your piece wherever by mashing the rotation buttons.

This is perhaps crystallized the max-out score (or lack thereof): the maximum score is 9999999. Nice and well. But: due to a bug (overflow I guess ?), the score won't be saved in memory unless you make it exactly to 9999999. Sounds impossible ? Not at all: by exploiting the infinity trick, and by the fact that pressing down slowly increment the score counter 1 by 1, it's very doable. At the time, teenage me found that so shocking he even made a crappy video about this⁶

⁶: random fun fact: Hikaru Utada, the idol pop singer (and, is a total Tetris nerd and she posted a screencap of her 9999999 in her blog. She's nerdy enough that Nintendo organized some promo event with her. I find that so adorable.

And thus, I find the single player of Tetris DS a bit lacking⁷.

⁷: of course I'm biased, being a Tetris the Grand Master player and all. I like this game so much that I made a video about it. Go have a look at it and comment on this thread.

But there's some interesting idea still. They were not pioneered by TDS, but that doesn't make them less mandatory. The hold mechanics is a good shield against unfavorable piece distribution and/or adding another strategical layer to multiplayer (more on that later). The so-called 7-bag piece distribution is far from perfect, but more uniform (by design) ⁸.

⁸: if you think me talking out about Tetris game design is nerdy, wait until you discover a sub-part of the Tetris community that's focused on piece distribution analysis ! This article gives a good overview of the main "randomizer" present in the various Tetris game over time, and shout-out to colour_thief for being a beautiful nerd

Now, a lot of those rules I don't like for single-player... works surprisingly well in multiplayer ! In some sort of Aikido-reversal, those perceived weaknesses now become strengths.

What happens is that the game design also favor speed, but unlike TGM it's an intrinsic speed -- the speed comes from the player, not the game. And this is perfect for multiplayer. It's like a fighting game: a duel between two or more player where the game system doesn't get in the way of the player. The games gives as much tool as possible to overcome the opponent; through active attack instead of loitering for a while and waiting for the other to top out naturally. It's player vs player instead of player vs game.

And so, the extreme mobility given by the infinity behavior and that button mashing I talk earlier on is no longer a weakness of game design, but an additional tool against an opponent. One that can save you from a delicate situation by trading some time for more survivability. It's similar from being knocked down in a versus fighting game.
And to continue with this analogy, since it's so easy to get your active piece wherever you want, the role of the holes in the stack becomes different. More often than not, it's not really a lapse of judgment, but a consequence of an offensive action.

It's as if as if the playfield was a vertical health bar. You trade blows by making several lines at once. This sends garbage lines and make the opponent health shrink. But the other one can do the same, and it's your responsibility to regen your health by making lines and clearing garbage.

To this effect, the kind of drop they chose is naturally a "hard" drop (the piece locks immediately, contrary to the TGM one where you have to perform a second move with the stick to lock it). There's an execution trade-off though: you have to careful where you piece is aligned, because a misdrop can have devastating consequence, just like you can punish a whiff in fighting games.

The hold mechanic is no longer just a defensive tool, but can be an offensive one as well by storing an I piece for instance. And in that particular case, there's a bonus (more garbage lines) for making back-to-back Tetris.

Would you believe me if I told you there were some special moves ? Because there are ! It's the infamous T-spin. This consists in exploiting the peculiarities of the guideline "wallkick" mechanic (you cannot do this in TGM because the wallkicks are way simpler) . With a careful construction, you can place a T piece in an unnatural positions. And if you happen to make a line, there can be a significant garbage bonus. Infamously, the "T-spin triple" sends more line than a Tetris.

But doing the preliminary block construction is very risky, because it's far from obvious. And while you're doing it you're weak to a swift counter-attack and a kick top-out. Most of the time is best if you do them in an ad-hoc manner. One thing I find interesting: by exploiting the fact that the randomizer is always give the same amount of pieces (only the order is scrambled), you can craft some opening move that guarantee a t-spin triple or two t-spins doubles.

I doubt all of this was intentional (there's zero mention of t-spins in the manual for instance), but the huge popularity of the game certainly trail blazed a solid competitive scene. In fact, most of the openers that are still used to this day were devised during that time.

Now, I have nearly a thousand words on the game mechanics but nothing on the experience itself.

Tetris DS had two ways to play multiplayer: online and offline.

Offline had this super handy "Download Play" feature (or "game sharing" ? I don't remember the specific name). In short, you only needed only one game cart to play to full multiplayer game. They're not the first one to do this^{9</sum>, but probably the first one to do it via wifi. Anyway: you could link up to 8 console together. I haven't had much experience with that kind of game (although there's one memorable match I had once whereI managed to win a 1 vs 4 match; epic !), but I know that was a mainstay of various DS-centric meetup.}

^{9</sum>: it's very similar to the "spawn installation" of early Blizzard games}

I spent most of my time in the Online modes: there's 2-players, 4-players and Push versus.

Push is the same as in 1 player mode, except the opponent is of course a human. It's a test of speed, and curiously enough there's no provision against perfect clears. Granted, it's super rare (it happened to me exactly once) , but if you happen to clear the playfield of everything... the game simply go on forever, until one player disconnected.

2-player is a very pure experience, and probably similar to what people experienced with a link cable and two Game Boys back in the day.

But for me at the time, the real meat was in 4-players versus. Why ? Items ! It's like in Mario kart: as you play, you can get some special item to help you (like the star who gives you only I pieces for a few seconds) or hurt others (like the dreaded lightning bold). Offense or defense. Fortunately, there;s no rubber-banding mechanism like in Mario Kart. Small elitist anecdote: the mushroom item, which speed up the game considerably for a random opponent... isn't that much of a detriment to an experienced player. In some case it's even good for them, because they can play faster !

You could play with your friend online and customize some match. But no account ! You have to use those effing "friend codes". Those 3x4 digits long sequence were as painful to use as they sound like.

There was a clever system for tournament: since it was mostly a 1vs1 affair, you could very well start a 4-player versus with two spectators.

Most of the time I was playing against rando. There was a matchmaking system that worked a bit similarly to Elo: you start at level 5000, and you lose and gain points depending on the result of the match and the point delta between you and the opponents.

Now, unfortunately, those point were shared within all modes. So it's not possible to play a Serious Game (tm) of 1vs1 and then relax around whit a 4 players battle royale with items. Moreover, one frustration we had is that it's easy to lose point but hard to gain them; a single loss can be devastating.

But overall, I had excellent memories of this online mode. There were indeed some very tense duels, and it's really a shame that Nintendo didn't implement a system where you could add an opponent as friend or something similar.

I had a rating that was between 6500 and 7100, which was medium-good. The very good players were between 7500 and 8000, and only a few gods could go over 8000.

This was also around the time when I joined Tetrisconcept (a message board centered around Tetris), and we all did what all gaming clan did by prefixing our handle with a "TC-" tag.
There were other tag, and one of the most feared was the TGM one. They were all TGM player. We now know for sure that TGM-HOLiC was for sure Jin8 (the one in the original TGM3 invisible Tetris viral video, and the first person to get the Gm grade in TGM3), and TGM-Arika was Ichiro Mihara, Arika vice-president They were somewhat famous enough that some copycat appeared (people with none of the skill nor the Arika connection), to a point where a parody clan (TCM, standing for "The Chicken Master") was created.

Some jealous cheaters were also using the TGM tag; I've met some of them. There were several types of cheater, and they were fortunately not numerous enough to ruin the game.

The worst of them were the one who disabled the loss flag. There was simply no way to beat them (they somehow cleared to playfield when they top out). The second one were way more interesting. It's the one who were in a perpetual state of star item, nothing more, nothing less. And that's also means that it's still possible to beat them ! If the cheater fills its screen with blocks, it's very possible to beat them with a well timed attack. Humiliating a cheater by doing this is extremely gratifying feeling (many thanks to "Lucky-☆" for losing to me). The last type of cheater were mostly invisible, as they deactivated losing rating points (why wasn't there some server side validation I don't know). But at that level they probably get crushed very quickly by the legit top100 players.

And speaking of leaderboard, I have to mention blockstats.org. It's a website that regularly crawled the leaderboard (they were publised online at the time) so that you could find your real place in the global leaderboard, and track your progress. You could also blog and there even was an IRC channel, where you could play again some of those 7500+ (hi Caithness !).

So yeah, Tetris DS was kind of a big deal for me. It's a game that was with me during that transition between high-schooler and college student, and most important of all made me discover competitive Tetris, TGM, and by extension the arcade game experience (quite hard to have when the last arcade in the city closed down 3 years prior).

Thanks for reading this to the end !