TOKYO--It has been a long time since we've seen any iteration of Hatris, the almost-ridiculous Tetris spoof that graced the Nintendo Entertainment System and the original Game Boy. Yet at the NTT DoCoMo booth at TGS this year, there was a full version of the game for the mobile platform. Hatris is not yet scheduled for a North American release, although this is not due to any technological limitation or localization requirements--so it's entirely possible that we'll hear more about this game in the near future.

　　Like Tetris, Hatris is a puzzle game in which the objective is to minimize the amount of clutter on the screen created by falling puzzle pieces. In this game, the pieces consist of two horizontally attached hats. The objective is to line up four hats by stacking them on top of each other, which will cause them all to disappear. You can switch the order of the hats by pressing the confirmation button, and otherwise move them around the screen horizontally so that you stack the correct hats on top of each other. The "hat types" in Hatris include a bucket, a traffic cone, a turtle, a lampshade, and a pink...blobby thing. As soon as one of the hats gets stacked on the top of a vertical column, the other one will separate and land on top of the hats down below; and unlike most puzzle games, you can actually still move the remaining piece after it has broken away. Although the standard gameplay of Hatris is excessively simple, since it doesn't require fitting the pieces together in any way other than vertically, the game has a few different modes, including the standard "endless mode" and time attacks.

　　The mobile platform has certainly had its share of puzzle games, which is why it's surprising that Hatris has not already been converted to this format. Hopefully we'll hear more about a North American release of Hatris soon, if for nothing else but the memories.