Photo By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
The cold war must truly be over:A hand-held version
of Tetris - Tetris Jr. - is available at Wal-Mart for $10.
Now you can indulge your obsession for
this Russian game anywhere.

Attention comrades!
Tetris is now portable

Here's something good to come out of glasnost!

Tetris Jr., the latest and tiniest version of the popular Russian electronic game, is now encased in a durable hard plastic shell attached to a tiny key chain. Despite its tiny size, it contains eight versions of the original Tetris to challenge even the best players.

What's Tetris? Eh, comrade, you been in Siberia or what?

Originally designed as mental exercise for Russian scientists; Tetris became the most popular computer game of all time with more than 40 million sold. It's used by an equal number of men and women. And now it fits in the palm of your hand so you can take it anywhere to pass the time.

So here's the deal: On a tiny screen, geometric shapes - called tetraminoes - descend to the bottom. With the touch of various buttons, the player tries to manipulate the tetraminoes into even lines along the screen bottom to stack as many as possible horizontally. You try not not to stack the blocks straight up or drop too many in one place because once those darn tetraminoes reach the screen top, the game is over.

A score registers across the top.

The tiny frame holds lots of buttons: buttons to rotate and move the tetraminoes, on and off buttons; a pause button, a game selection button, a button that turns the Russian music on and off.

The original Tetris, invented by Alexey Pajitnov, is credited as the game that popularized the Nintendo Game Boy system.

Happy addition!

By Tim Ryan, Star-Bulletin