Tetris on a Roll? Torus is a real innovoation

Erik Ackerlund – There are plenty of Tetris clones out there, and few if any ever really innovate on the given principals of what we know of Tetris. This however is one of the coolest I have seen. Our collective hats off to Ben Joffe for the originality here.

Torus is played around a ring so you can rotate your pieces around in a 3d column. Just think of the Nintendo 3DS and future 3D gaming implications of something like this. The game play is instantly apparent. There many a typical pieces, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The only downside is perhaps a limitation of HTML 5 or the code underneath, but the game play is rather slow. From my tests, I felt that it would be pretty addictive if it was only faster*. This requires an extra memory skill to know what the other side of your column looks like, it plays very naturally however. Quite enjoyable. Hopefully we will see this get developed more into a full product.

Currently it offers three modes, Traditional, Time Attack, and Garbage, all of which are pretty self explanatory. If you can get beyond the slowness.*

* Update from Ben Joffe: “I’d just like to point out one thing, you mention it is slow, I hear this from quite a few of the players, but it is often because the player/reviewer has not played for long enough, it does slowly get faster as you play. In regular mode if you get to about 80 lines cleared then it becomes very fast, and I don’t think I’ve gotten past 150 or so.”

Check out Torus here: http://www.benjoffe.com/code/games/torus/