Tetris 2 wanted to be both Tetris and Dr. Mario and failed at being either

Tetris was originally made sometime in the 1980s somewhere within the Soviet Union by a man named Alexey Pajitnov. Pajitnov had no real ownership of the game, living in a communist country and all, so the burden of releasing Tetris to the world fell upon Elektronorgtechnica (ELORG for short, thankfully), the Soviet Union’s organization in charge of releasing and licensing software. Pajitnov didn’t end up seeing the rewards of his product until the Soviet Union fell in the 1990s.

What’s interesting about the paragraph that I just wrote is how almost none of that (ELORG, Mr. Pajitnov, communism, Tetris) has anything at all to do with Tetris 2 for the NES.

The actual gameplay and general idea of Tetris 2 is barely comparable with the original Tetris. The tetriminoes (yes, that’s the official term) are still present to a certain extent, but every piece has multiple colors to it, and some of the pieces are barely connected at all.

But they finally added the "looks like a penis" piece the first game was missing

I refuse to believe that anyone does not know the rules of Tetris, but on the off chance that anyone reading proves me wrong, please understand that the rules of Tetris 2 are almost completely separate from its predecessor. Oddly enough, Tetris 2 is closer to Dr. Mario than it is to Tetris.

Single blocks start scattered near the bottom of the play field (like the viruses in Dr. Mario) and the player must match at least two other blocks of the same color to those blocks in order to make them disappear. One of the blocks of each color will be flashing, and if the player can eliminate that particular block, the rest of the blocks will be eliminated as well.

That's it, down there at the bottom

The fact that the blocks have four segments instead of two and the thing with the flashing block are basically the only things separating Tetris 2 from Dr. Mario. Well, that and the droning music loop in Tetris 2. The main problem with all of this is way that multicolored pieces of four blocks don’t work nearly as well as the two-segment blocks of Dr. Mario, and clog up the screen quickly. That’s the biggest problem with Tetris 2 right there. It’s too similar to Dr. Mario in concept, but not in quality.