Tetris Party Deluxe came out recently for Wii and DS, and while it is effectively the exact same game as Tetris Party on WiiWare, which is cheaper, it still has the interesting modes from that game.

Chief among them are Stage Racer and Field Climber. Stage Racer requires you to guide a Tetrimino through different courses of increasing difficulty that make you rotate the block quickly to get by obstacles. Field Climber is focused around guiding a little man up to the top of the screen by laying down blocks as stairs.

Both games introduce different genres to the game's classic puzzle stylings. Stage Racer mixes it with racing, and Field Climber does so with the platforming genre. While we've seen puzzle platformers in the past, I don't think anything has been quite like Field Climber before. Neither mode is amazing, but it's cool that the series can still innovate after all these years.

Adding on to that is one of the few new additions to the game: the auto-handicap versus mode. Basically, you play normal multiplayer games and as one player dominates, they start off with several lines on their screens, increasing until it reaches a max of about seven or eight lines. More than one player can accumulate this disadvantage, and it fluctuates until the game finds what it deems is even. It's a partial realization of Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers' dream of Tetris as a sport. Now all we need are teams, captains, an official league, and airtime on ESPN 8.