Remembering Spectrum Holobyte.

Here we go. Wordtris. My personal favorite of Spectrum Holobyte's releases.

Like anything with the -tris suffix, you can bet that this game is a falling block puzzler. This was kind of a huge thing back in the early 1990s, when Nintendo got exclusive rights to the home console versions of Tetris and the puzzle genre gained immense footing in the marketplace. What a lot of people don't know is that Spectrum Holobyte's version of Tetris was the first version of the game that was released in the United States, years ahead of Nintendo's release of the "original" Tetris.

Spectrum Holobyte was clearly no stranger to Tetris-likes (they even published a bunch of Alexey Pajitnov's other games, like Wildsnake, Hatris and Welltris, but, once again, that's another story for another time). Wordtris deviates from the Tetris formula in that it is a falling block puzzler, but the blocks are all squares with individual letters printed on them.

Basically, Wordtris is Scrabble and Tetris put together. And it's fantastic. You get more points for the more words you can spell with what you are given, and spelling a particular word (shown at the bottom of the screen) will net you bonus points and a clear playfield, free of unwanted letters cluttering things up.

Wordtris is absolutely addicting, like any good game with -tris in the name. Go and play it. It's not too expensive to pick up for the Game Boy, and the SNES version won't entirely break your bank, either.

Maybe I'll revisit more Spectrum Holobyte games in the future. I just wanted to touch upon a couple of my favorites. It also helped that the three I chose were on-hand at the time of writing.

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