izigame.me

I really wanted this to be good. Going into this, I had tempered expectations: I knew a lot of games weren't going to make it onto this collection, including any that I played from my childhood. That being said, there are so many glaring issues that I can not recommend Tetris Forever, at least on Steam.
The main issues are with the controls: using a keyboard for these games is below subpar: the PC games cannot be rebound at all, and there are some rebounding restrictions on the console games that can be rebound, some of which I assume are glitches. In the case of the AcademySoft MS-DOS version, it assumes you have a number pad to play it, which many keyboards nowadays do not, making it extremely uncomfortable to play. Any way you slice it, you cannot use the full default modern Tetris keyboard layout to play any of the games in Tetris Forever, not even Tetris Time Warp.
Speaking of which, Tetris Time Warp: it's not fun. The game is plagued with an issue where you can't do 2 inputs at the same time (for example, if you are holding left and you try to hard drop, the hard drop won't go through). Due to this, some rotations and kicks as defined by SRS don't work, meaning this game doesn't implement the guideline properly, meaning there are 0 guideline games in Tetris Forever. Also, you can't hold the Time Warp Tetromino you get every 10 lines, and it instantly appears when 10 lines are cleared. Combine all these factors and Tetris Time Warp gives the player a 1 way express ticket to Misdrop city. Also, the Time Warp Gimmick isn't interesting: of the 3 Time Warps, the objective stays static per Warp, and the Warps always appear in the same order. This takes a cool gimmick and makes it more annoying than anything else.
With that, let's talk about the good part of this package: the interactive documentary. The documentary itself is the same story we've heard time and time again, but it's nice to have Alexy Pajitnov, Henk Rogers, and Gilman Louie give firsthand accounts of what happened. The scans and descriptions of the items presented are high quality, as is standard with the Gold Master Series. The problem is all of this can be found online, which pretty easy to research, given the abundance of wikis and articles that detail the history of Tetris and its games in more detail than a single game could ever do. Also, the story told is not the Story of Tetris as advertised: it's a subset of the story of Tetris. I understand focusing on the legal battle for the rights to Tetris, since that's the "exciting" part of the story, but so many important parts of the games get a single mention, like TGM and the guideline. In fact, the lack of focus on the guideline is insane, given it's defined how Tetris has been played for more than half of its existence. With that, it's crazy how no Guideline Tetris games made it into the collection, though this is somewhat understandable given how much third party publishers were relied upon to develop and publish Tetris games post 2000, and a lot of those games having console specific features (Avatars, console-branded Internet Modes, etc.).
Lastly, the elephant in the room, the lack of games. As I said, I came in with tempered expectations: given how Tetris is still to this day entangled in the licensing web, I knew we weren't going to see many non-BPS games. That being said, there are still some easy targets that could have been included, like the Next Tetris, as the parties involved in making Tetris Forever (Modern Atari & The Tetris Company) own all of the rights to that game (to my knowledge, there might be some third party I'm not aware of). I believe one of the devs said in the Steam discussion pages that some games weren't included because they wanted to tell a specific story about Tetris. My only problem with this is this is the first Tetris Collection that has made it out of Japan, and given how backwards compatability is a big focus of consoles now, it's probably the only Tetris Collection that we're ever going to get, meaning whatever games aren't preserved here are effectively lost to the general public.
If anyone wants a list of issues that I've found with the game so far, I created one on the Steam Discussion pages. It can be found at https://steamcommunity.com/app/3180240/discussions/0/4630357755180361562.
I really wanted Tetris Forever to be good, and I hope some day I can turn this into a positive review. But right now, mainly due to the issues with controls and Tetris Time Warp, I cannot recommend Tetris Forever.