One of the games I picked up recently (and, actually, was the first to reveal, thanks to GameFly's advance listing madness) is THQ's Tetris Evolution for Xbox 360, Sure, the game is inexplicably not for XBLA, rather shipping on a disc. But the Mass Media-developed title is at least a relatively cheap $29.99, so we'll have to forgive it for not being Arika's awesome Tetris Grand Master Ace arcade conversion.

Now, there are a couple of notable issues with Evolution - most particularly that nowhere in the manual or the game itself (that I could find!) does it explain the T-Spin, a tricky rotation move that you need to master to get more than one Achievement. Fortunately, the excellent TetrisConcept wiki has a special page devoted to it and mastering it.

In fact, TetrisConcept goes even further in terms of tactics, and has an 'ST Stacking' page, explaining "...a more-or-less sustainable (under Random Generator) method of stacking tetrominoes to form successive 4-line clears and T-spins." And yep, used it and busted out a two-line T-spin in no time, so it definitely seems to work.

Personally, I like Tetris Evolution a lot more than the mediocre Tetris Worlds from the previous gen - though Evolution does have the 'infinite rotate at bottom of screen' or 'Easy Spin' rule by default, which is part of the almost weirdly scary, Henk Rogers-enforced Tetris Guidelines now. I quite like it, but many purists rage over it.

Finally, what's particularly neat is that Evolution has networked high-scores, and you can see the actual game replay from the people on top of each of the (many) Xbox Live high-score tables for each mode. Seeing what the masters are doing is incredibly useful for racking up high scores of your own, particularly for the limited-time modes, and gets a massive thumbs-up from me. [If you don't have the game but wants to see Tetris masters in action, there's an excellent YouTube Tetris video glossary on TetrisConcept, too.]