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Tetris on Your Cell Phone: Still The King of Mobile Gaming

I still remember when my dad first bought us the original Gameboy. The thing was the size of a VHS tape and it was a monochrome green/black and the only game we had was Tetris. But we played the heck out of that little cartridge. The game is so simple yet so elegant and addicting. I remember we were riding cross country on an Amtrak train and someone spied us playing and he ran to get his link cable and we played against each other, wired together like telephone poles. Today, Tetris still reigns supreme as one of the top downloaded games. Yet, it’s much prettier, the devices are much smaller and faster and you can play head-to-head with anyone across the world (no wires attached).

TIME just ran a feature on this classic arcade game eliciting comments from that it’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian mathematician who developed the game on his own and sold the rights to Blue Planet Software when he was 29 years old. The game itself is approaching its 26th birthday and has garnered 100 million downloads on U.S. cell phones. Not bad.

With that being said, here are a few of the best Tetris apps for your cell phone:

Tetris for the iPhone

Tetris for iPhones and the iPod Touch is distributed by Electronic Arts and will currently set you back $4.99. You can listen to your iTunes while you play, track your stats and shake it up with 5 different “magic modes.” However, there’s no versus mode yet.

Android Tetris

EA also has an Android version of their official Tetris app, but it costs $7.99. For those looking for a free Tetris clone for Android, check out Cubik.

Tetrix for Symbian Phones

Symbian (S60) phones such as the Nokia smartphones can run Flash lite applications embedded in web pages. That means you can play free Tetris clones online for free from your S60 phone. Check out Tetrix (now known as Free Tetris).

Palm Tetris

Challenger Tetris, a Tetris clone for webOS phones, takes the cake for offering a true versus mode so you can play your friends in a game of Tetris.

Tetris for BlackBerrry

The official Tetris for BlackBerry app is also distributed by Electronic Arts and costs $4.99. It currently runs on the following BlackBerry devices:

BlackBerry 8100
BlackBerry 8110
BlackBerry 8120
BlackBerry 8130
BlackBerry 8220
BlackBerry 8230
BlackBerry 8300
BlackBerry 8310
BlackBerry 8320
BlackBerry 8330
BlackBerry 8350i
BlackBerry 8520
BlackBerry 8530
BlackBerry 8800
BlackBerry 8820
BlackBerry 8830
BlackBerry 8900
BlackBerry 9000
BlackBerry 9500
BlackBerry 9530
BlackBerry 9550
BlackBerry 9630
BlackBerry 9700

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Tags: tetris

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 8:46 am by Jack Busch and is filed under Cell Phone Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.