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I have never been overly fond of hi-tech Tetris games with bells and whistles. Usually it is nothing but a distraction. My favorite style is that of Tetrix and the classic Tetris for Windows.
With ACiD Tetris, the case lies different. Here everything just seems to fit, from the menus with bouncing letters to the music and the smiley face that appears at times and comments gameplay with little noises. Pieces land with a solid thud, rows aren't just dissolved, they are blown to smithereens. A little statistic on the right shows how many of each piece have fallen down.
ACiD Tetris was created by Dungeon Dwellers Design, a New Jersey-based demo group. As you'd expect from a demo group, coding is excellent and rock-solid. ACiD Tetris plays without problems under Windows, I even had sound, and in spite of the music and graphics the archive fits on a floppy. The game is freeware.
Gameplay is exactly like the original Tetris, only scoring is a bit different, and you can rotate the pieces in both directions. Default keys for this are A and S, but you can reconfigure all the keys.
The system requirements depend a lot on the sound card used. The best choice is the Gravis Ultrasound, with its hardware mixing it puts the least strain on the CPU. I played it myself in this configuration on a 486DX2/50, where it ran very well. With a Soundblaster, you should have a not too slow Pentium.
Dungeon Dwellers Design have created a few games: Lock'n'Chase (remake of an Atari 2600 game), Psycho Pong (which was never finished), ACiD Tetris (later renamed Super ACiD Block Attack due to…guess what), and finally the space shooter AXiA, their first commercial game. ACiD Tetris was created as a break during the development of AXiA.
