Retro Roulette #104: Pyramid (NES, 1990)

At least, we know who build the pyramids – it was me!

Skulls with maces in their mouths? Made by what sounds like a low-budget Tchaikovsky rip off? Buckle in, everyone.

I’ve talked here and there about my appreciation for the weird assortment that is the unlicensed NES library. This week’s game, Pyramid, is one of those – specifically, it’s one of the hard to find releases from American Video Entertainment, a company that sounds like it makes porn, but instead makes bad games that I have to deal with. Another of their games, Trolls on Treasure Island, was the very first Retro Roulette! Neat.

This week’s game is also part of a rather fascinating “genre” of the early 90s, which I will generally call “What if Tetris had different pieces.” For instance, instead of regular boring blocks, games in this genre would instead, say, drop hats on people:

Image result for hatris
You may have thought that last thing was a joke! It was not.

Unlike Tetris, Pyramid does not use block-like pieces, and it instead uses, uh…pyramid-y blocks instead. Ugh, I’m a bit starved for words here. I feel like at least in theory, the question of “would this other set of geometric also objects work well as a puzzle game?” is a reasonable one to ask. You’ll be glad to know that I’ve done the research, and I have the answer.

No.

A quick glance at the screen above should make it somewhat clear why – you see all those empty spaces of weird shapes with no realistic way to fill them? Yeah. That’s why. While you do occasionally get a sequence that sets you up nicely, it’s pretty rare. There’s no ‘I’ piece in Pyramid to help you clear a few lines at once, and a lot of pieces will fall with no remotely logical place to put them. The worst offender is the piece you see falling in the following image, which is the work of the devil himself:

Seriously, screw this piece.

It’s almost as if Sachen was fully aware that this game didn’t really work, because the game also gives you a small number of bombs to blow away a bad tile placement. This is a mildly helpful tool, but it’s one that shouldn’t even be necessary – differently designed tiles could’ve made this worlds better, but we can’t have nice things. If the actual pyramids were built in the manner of the ones you “make” in Pyramid, they would look like crap an no one would come visit them.

Just awful. King Tut must be rolling in this…well, you know.

Oh, and did I mention that the game squares you off against the Queen of Fun?!

The above is from the game’s manual, and every word of it is insane. Game designers everywhere, I need you all to understand that your Bad Tetris Clone does not need to have a story, and it especially doesn’t need to have this story. My goodness.

If you’re truly desperate for less fun versions of Tetris or appreciate an utterly bonkers and pointless backstory, then I suppose Pyramid is the game for you. If nothing else, it’s at least mildly *interesting*, even if it’s not for ideal reasons.

An early Activision title is on the docket for next week – I tend to enjoy these, which means this one is probably inexplicably awful. See you then?