Adding onto this:
One of the more recent and ubiquitous versions (Tetris Ultimate) is
an embarrassing clusterfuck of performance issues layered on top of a drab, sterile aesthetic. Of course PPT looks good in comparison; just about anything would.
But besides that, I want to directly address the bolded above and argue that
Tetris really isn't the same game as it was ~30 years ago. Have you noticed that pretty much all of the gameplay footage of Puyo Puyo Tetris focuses on versus modes (either against a human or a CPU opponent) instead of strictly single-player stuff, whereas NES Tetris was strictly a single-player affair? Noticed how people constantly pop into these threads to ask "is there a standard Tetris Marathon mode in this game?" over and over? PPT does have those standard modes (Marathon, Sprint, Ultra), of course, but there's a reason why they're never focused on or showed-off.
In short: Modern Tetris (be it Puyo Puyo Tetris, Tetris DS, Tetris Ultimate, or any official TTC-sanctioned version of the game released in the past decade and beyond) is a good multiplayer game, but a poor single-player game.
If you go back to NES Tetris or Gameboy Tetris, you'll notice that the piece movement is much, much more strict. In particular, pieces lock into place instantly upon touching the floor. Combine that with the fact that the piece generators in the old games are much more random, you didn't have a hold box, and you could only view 1 upcoming piece at a time, and it's actually quite challenging to survive for very long. You really have to know how to plan ahead and deal with bad pieces in those old games.
At a certain point, survival becomes unrealistic outside of tool-assistance.
In modern Tetris games, piece movement is
extremely flexible. You can slide pieces around a lot after they touch the ground, even at maximum gravity levels.
You can twist pieces into all sorts of holes that just don't look possible at first. The piece "randomizer" in modern games isn't random at all; you're guaranteed to have completely even piece distribution, you have a hold box to change up your order as you see fit, and you can see 5 pieces ahead at a time. This makes it so that even
perfect clears are feasible to plan for. (This is not just theoretical; it's entirely practical. You will actually see this utilized by high-level players online.)
All of those concessions in modern Tetris games can
feel enjoyable at first, but they come with a pretty big pitfall:
they make it too easy to survive forever in modern Tetris. This is why you don't see serious players messing around with Endless Marathon anymore. When I gave it a whirl in Puyo Puyo Tetris, I survived for about 90 minutes before I just quit the game out of boredom.
And I'm not amazing at this game.
So, modern Tetris is a multiplayer-centric game by default as a natural result of these changes. No matter how long you can survive in Marathon, you still have to be more skilled than your opponent to win a VS match, so multiplayer Tetris doesn't have the problem of an embarrassingly low skill-ceiling that single-player Tetris does.
Players who focus on solo-Tetris tend to play specific games like
the Grand Master series, which use more strict rotation rules. In typical modern SRS Tetris, though, you basically have to impose more constraints and challenges upon yourself (highest score within 150 lines, fastest time for a max-out score, etc.) to keep it interesting. Playing for survival is pointless.
/nerd
Puyo Puyo actually makes a great mash-up for modern Tetris because Puyo was
designed to be a head-to-head game from the outset. It's the standard-bearer for competitive puzzle games.
The AI in this game varies by character. The weakest characters are typically at the top of the character select screen.
I forget what handicap does because I always play on default, but I expect that it would alter # of puyo colors or garbage somehow, not AI.
