If you've read through the Play Mechanics Section of this review, I'm sure you can tell that Tetrisphere is a lot more complicated that Tetris was. As complex as it may be, the main game is a lot less cerebral than Tetris. Instead of planning ahead to clear lines, Tetrisphere has you frantically scouring the sphere of Tetrads for anything that will work.

For the most part Tetrisphere isn't very difficult. You move the sphere, slide a piece, and drop a piece over and over with little threat of the end of your game. The only times that I messed up on anything but the hardest levels was when the cursor didn't respond as I expected, I accidentally hit a button, or the cursor didn't lock onto a piece for dragging as I thought it did. The game does get a little harder in the later levels, but you may get bored long before then. The game lets you start a new game from any level that you have reached in a previous game, so you can pick up where you left off should you get the urge to play again. Stage completion information is stored to your name on the Game Pak itself.

The Hide and Seek mode is the most interesting mode of play. Brief cinema scenes introduce different goals to complete. These goals vary from finding a brick on the sphere and breaking the blocks out from under it to breaking blocks away from a crystal tower without letting any of the disappearing blocks damage the tower (very challenging). In all of these puzzles you still must break through to the core, and the gameplay is fundamentally the same.

Tetrisphere's Puzzle mode is quite challenging. The puzzles grow in difficulty and complexity very quickly. The farthest I was able to get was Puzzle 19 out of 100. This brings up the Puzzle mode's big problem: there are only 100 puzzles. If you're good at these kind of brain teasers, you may blast through them rather quickly and be left wanting more.

As for the Vs. mode, well, it's not all that good. While it's a nice addition, it's just more of the same. Sure you can drop blocks on your opponent's sphere if you play well, but that's about it as far as competitive gameplay goes. Tetrisphere's Vs. Mode would probably be better for a friendly competition between fans of puzzle games rather than for an all-purpouse multi-player experience.

While Tetrisphere's gameplay may be less than exciting, the presentation of it is extremely impressive. The polygonal models of the Robot players are nothing short of remarkable. The detail and animation of these models is so good that it took me a long time to accept that they weren't CGI sprites like those from Donkey Kong Country. The whole game has an extremely high tech feel to it and even the N logo when you turn on the game is impressive. The overall look of the game is along the lines of one of those non-existent games shown in movies from the 80's exemplifying the "future" of video games. The rays of light breaking through from a sphere's core really do make it look like the game is something from the future. The only problem is that there is a lot of polygon clipping at the edges of a sphere. Its not uncommon for whole chunks of the puzzle to pop in or out of nowhere.

Tetrisphere's amazing presentation doesn't end with the visuals. Tetrisphere is the first N64 game to have music that truly is, well, music. The music in Tetrisphere sounds a heck of a lot like an actual Techno music CD you'd buy in the store. Some of the instruments in the music are the same as those from the soundtracks of Ridge Racer and Wipeout. Unfortunately, hyper, fast paced Techno music gets very annoying very quickly when playing a Puzzle game. With the sound set to random, I found myself regularly changing the music to a more mellow track (such as the Extol track). Still, the fact that this quality sound is coming from a cartridge is amazing.