As I said, I never actually liked Tetris much because I'm bad at abstract pattern matching, and I always make one mistake that dooms my game. Now I have another threat to my free time that doesn't suffer from Tetris's sensitivity, Super Tetris.

Also from Spectrum HoloByte (and about the same price as Wordtris, although it's not listed in my current catalogs), Super Tetris takes the basic Tetris concept of falling blocks patterns and runs with it. Now the goal is to eliminate rows of rubble in the pit by filling in the holes. As with Tetris, if you let the blocks pile up to the top of the screen, you lose, but you also lose if you don't fill in the pit with the allotted number of pieces. Admittedly, I've never lost by running out of blocks, but it's possible.

Game play hasn't changed much, although Super Tetris has additional gimmicks, the most important of which allows me to play for more than a short time. When you clear one or more rows, you get a proportional number of bombs, each of which clears away one block. These bombs are wonderful, because they allow you to recover from a mistake or a run of poorly shaped block patterns. Super Tetris includes "treasures," special blocks that give you a coveted long block pattern, destroy the row they're on, or give you more blocks.

Super Tetris uses the additional game types shared by Wordtris (and Tetris Classic, though I don't think it's out yet). You can play timed games, trying to achieve the highest score in five, ten, or fifteen minutes, cooperative games with another player (or, as our friend Sandro discovered, with both hands as an exercise in dexterity), competitive on the same board, and finally head-to-head over a network. This combination of options allows a wide range of possibilities and simplifies playing with others. Highly recommended.

Spectrum HoloByte -- sphere@aol.com -- 76004.2144@compuserve.com