When I first discovered Fintris in October 2004, I had a Duron running Windows 98. For some reason, some few DOS games would run slower on this machine than on a 286 or 386. Arkanoid was one of them, Fintris was another one. It ran so slow that I didn'T actually play it, I took a couple of screenshots mainly of the menus, which I found rather impressive.

Later I played it without problems on a 286, under Windows XP, and in DOSBox, where I finally took some gameplay screenshots. Unfortunately the enjoyment was tainted by frequent annoying shareware messages. Guess the author was rather young when he wrote it, and very eager to sell it. In any case Fintris remains a beautiful and impressive Tetris clone. I never tried out the mana, you can read about it below.

 

From the Doc: Mana

When I started designing Fintris I had two primary goals in mind. First I wanted to create a tetris with great graphics and second I wanted to add more variety to the ordinary tetris concept.

So what's so special about Fintris? Well, first of all there are THREE DIFFERENT GAME MODES: single, simultaneous and duel. There are THREE DIFFERENT BLOCK SETS: simple, normal and complex. Then there's GOOD LOOKING GRAPHICS and last but not the least MANA!

Mana is a sort of energy that you can use to activate cannons and manipulate the block queue. You will get more mana when you collapse two or more rows simultaneously. Mana increases by itself over time but very slowly so you gain mana mainly by collapsing rows. In the beginning you won't have very large amount of mana so you should use it sparingly.

The following operations can be accomplished with mana. REMOVING A ROW can be done by firing the cannon. This is the most mana consuming operation, use it wisely. DUPLICATING A BLOCK is the second most expensive mana operation. When you press block duplication button the next block will be the same as the one before it. Note that the block that was in the block queue next before duplication will come after the duplicate. And last but not the least is BLOCK REMOVAL. This operation is the least expensive of all. When you press block removal button the current block will be removed.

When mana is in use you don't get as points from collapsing rows and dropping blocks as when mana is off. This is due to the fact that it is a lot easier to play when mana is on. So you get points a bit more slowly than without mana, but you can continue playing longer than usually. It's possible to get a lot of points very quickly by manipulating the block queue. Block duplication can prove especially useful in this.

To get the most out of mana you will have to adopt a new playing style. Here are a couple of tips for you to get started with. Use cannons only when it's absolutely necessary. Use block duplication to get blocks with which you can collapse as many rows as possible. Use block removal to remove the blocks that don't fit your pile.