20. Tetris DS (Nintendo, DS, 2006)

What am I going to say about Tetris that hasn't already been said?

Tetris DS is a Tetris game that was developed and published by Nintendo, and it is probably the most polished, fully-featured Tetris game I've ever played (sorry Tetris Effect). Everything about the gameplay is super crisp, the feeling of moving the blocks, the colorful NES-invoking graphics, even the sounds of blocks moving and locking into place are super-satisfying. I really have to wonder why Nintendo never developed another Tetris game after knocking this one out of the park (they did publish Tetris: Axis and Tetris 99, though those titles were developed by third parties).

On top of the excellent base game, there are also a nice variety of different weird modes. These are more fun distractions from regular Tetris for me, but it's always nice to have alternate play styles in a puzzle game. The 2 I particularly enjoyed both made good use of the DS's 2 screens: "Push", a vs. mode where one player stacks from the top and the other stack from the bottom, and "Tower", a non-timed puzzle mode where you have a super tall stack of tetriminos that you can slide left or right with the DS stylus, and you have to keep eliminating blocks until you bring the top of the tower down.

I learned to play Tetris on my graphing calculator in high school chemistry class. To be more specific, I knew the rules before that, but I had never spent a significant amount of time to wrap my brain around the game enough to get kind of good at it. My calculator copy of the game had been passed around the school from calculator to calculator, and as such it came with a high score that I was never able to approach. I regret losing that calculator at some point, because I wonder if I could go back and beat it now.

5/5, I don't need anything more than Game Boy Tetris, but this is my favorite re-packaging of Tetris since.