SAGE 2023 - Complete DR. ROBOTNIK´S MEAN BEAN TETRIS

A fun hodgepodge of assets to make a saturn-styled tetris.

I wanted to like this more but the tetris portion is kinda lacking -- Not being able to rotate a piece in both directions really messes with my tetris habits!
Piece order being truly randomized instead of the standard tetris system also means I'd sometimes have up to two tetrises lined up except the game gives me 10 S pieces in a row 🫠
The pieces insta-locking as they touch the floor is gameboy levels of hard which I hadn't seen in a while. Pausing the game doesn't hide the board though, so you can just take your time assessing when to drop the next piece.

The heat gauge never really did anything during my playthrough as it's quite easy to clear lines fast enough to keep it from rising. Probably thankfully so, as the instalock already means you're done for if the board is 80% full lol

Oh and there's a bonus sonic game demo hidden in there!
Level design was pretty good if a bit lengthy, although the rising spike walls don't make you move when you stand on them, so you can just keep hitting jump without moving at all to clear them.

Nice boss tho

I'm a decently big Tetris nut, so seeing this on the trailer reel was a welcome surprise. That being said, I didn't go into it expecting SRS, or really many of the features of modern Tetris, but in a way it kinda feels TOO basic? At the very least it felt like felt like it should have used the modern Random Generator, IE: makes a sequence of one each of the seven pieces and then rerolls when that sequence has been run through, instead of picking a piece at literal random. However, I acknowledge that this might just be a matter of personal preference and/or keeping in the theme of Mean Bean (insofar as it's a rebrand of a well known game in its most basic state), and if that's the case? Fair enough, you can ignore this.

But even putting that aside, the coding is kind of shonky. Far as I can tell, you can only rotate pieces in one direction, and while I acknowledge the desire not to put a system as complicated as SRS in the game, it feels like pieces should be able to rotate when they're up against a wall but completely clear of any other obstructions. I'm not sure why the pause button is X of all buttons on the gamepad, but it's completely impossible to unpause with the gamepad if you do this - you have to use the equivalent button on the keyboard instead, which iirc was S for some reason. And while I don't expect to have the extra delay modern Tetrises have before committing to dropping a block somewhere, hard dropping on practically the same frame it detects blocks underneath your current piece seems a bit extreme even for classic tetris, and it has messed me over more times than I'd like to admit.

To round everything off, the music doesn't really loop properly, which has always been a big pet peeve of mine - you should probably think about putting your music through Audacity or something and cropping out the fadeout portion of the track so it sounds more consistent and less awkward. I will say though, the custom spritework is beautiful, and if you outdid yourself absolutely nowhere else, it was certainly with that. Hopefully everything else here doesn't discourage you - despite what my tone might suggest, I still look forward to seeing this in a complete state, and I can't wait to see this game with better controls.