Before Tetris took over arcades and consoles, it was just a computer game.

Not even a Western one. It started on a Soviet mainframe.

What most people don’t know is that its first home versions were for DOS. The very first DOS port came out in 1986, made by Vadim Gerasimov—a Russian developer who adapted Alexey Pajitnov’s original concept for IBM PCs.

Then came the flood. Lots of other DOS ports followed, some barely licensed, others “licensed” in the Cold War handshake sense.

But the first official DOS release made specifically for the West? That was Spectrum Holobyte’s version in 1988. It beat the NES. It beat the arcade version.

And yes—this version was still based on Gerasimov’s DOS design.

Now, I don’t think it’s the best home version of Tetris. But it’s easily the strangest—and maybe the most interesting.

For starters, Spectrum Holobyte leaned hard into the Cold War theming. One of their print ads straight-up asked: “What are the Three Greatest Things to Come Out of the U.S.S.R.?” The answer? The Bolshoi ballet. Stolichnaya vodka. And Tetris. That was the pitch. The ad featured dancers in mid-leap, a frosty bottle of Stoli on ice, and a red game box with Cyrillic text and Saint Basil’s Cathedral slapped right on the cover. It was less a software ad than a cultural export campaign—equal parts kitsch, nationalism, and Cold War tourism. You didn’t just buy a puzzle game. You bought a Russian moment.

Inside the game, every screen drips with Soviet vibes: fishing vessels, space cosmonauts, Russian folk music, even a reference to the “Miracle on Ice.” The high score list? Labeled “Top Ten Comrades.” That kind of commitment.

This was deliberate. Spectrum Holobyte’s CEO literally asked the devs to preserve the “Soviet spirit,” not tone it down. He wanted Americans to want to buy a Russian product. Which, in 1988, was a pretty wild ask.

There was also a plane that flew across the title screen—an easter egg referencing Mathias Rust’s illegal flight into Red Square, which had humiliated the Soviet military the year before. Elorg, the Soviet licensing agency, didn’t love that. It got patched out. Along with a bunch of other Cold War touches. Fighter jets? Gone. Submarines? Replaced with a man on a horse.

Pajitnov himself insisted that Tetris be “a peaceful game heralding a new era in superpower relations.” Apparently, that meant fewer tanks.

Technically, this version of Tetris is barebones—but in a foundational kind of way. It’s missing a lot of what we now take for granted. There’s no hold piece. No wall kicks. No 180° rotation. Some versions don’t even give you bonus points for clearing four lines. Which, let’s be honest, kind of defeats the point of a Tetris.

Instead, scoring is mostly about how fast you drop pieces and whether you survive. That’s it. There is a hard drop, though. And you can set the starting height and level. Which was a nice touch.

Rotation is basic. Just clockwise and counterclockwise. No fancy adjustments. If a piece doesn’t fit, it just doesn’t. There’s no wall-kick logic to save you. And once a piece touches down? It locks immediately.

No second chances. No little delay. You either commit or you stack badly and panic.

Even visually, it’s oddly compelling. Only CGA and EGA are supported—VGA was still too new—but the artwork is stylized in a way that sticks with you. The backgrounds are moody and distinct. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be flashy. It feels… ideological.

I know the Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST versions had more colors. And some fancier music. But the DOS version has character. It’s a cultural time capsule disguised as a puzzle game.

Also worth noting: this version sold like crazy. Over 100,000 units in its first year. The average player? Mid-30s, probably an engineer or middle manager. Half were women—which, for a PC game in the ’80s, is almost unheard of.

And if you’re running this today? You’ll probably get a divide overflow error. You’ll need a patch just to launch it.

This wasn’t just a game. It was a diplomatic artifact. A licensing mess. A Cold War curiosity. A version of Tetris that, for all its simplicity, tells you more about 1988 than most history books.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is, at the very least, ambitious.

Is it good? Debateable.

It suffers from what I like to call Poochie syndrome. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when a franchise tries so hard to be cool and edgy that it ends up alienating everyone. Poochie was a character on The Simpsons added to The Itchy & Scratchy Show to make it more “youth-oriented.” It backfired. Spectacularly.

This game is the Poochie of Ninja Gaiden.

You play as Yaiba Kamikaze—an undead ninja who got sliced in half by Ryu Hayabusa, then resurrected as a cyborg with a robot arm and unresolved anger issues. The story? He wants revenge. Also, zombies exist now.

So yeah. Not your typical Ninja Gaiden.

This isn’t a tight, serious action game like the NES classics or the 2004 reboot. This is a loud, cel-shaded beat-’em-up where you chain combos, dismember clown zombies, and occasionally say things like “BOOM, baby” while swinging from grappling hooks.

It’s ridiculous by design.

But weirdly, it’s not that far off from the original arcade Ninja Gaiden, which was more of a side-scrolling brawler than a precision platformer. In that sense, Yaiba feels like a spiritual detour—not a betrayal, just a case of missed execution.

And to say this game wasn’t received well is an understatement.

Critics hated it. Players hated it. Metacritic slapped it with a “generally unfavorable” rating. Polygon gave it a 3. The most common complaints? Repetitive gameplay, terrible camera, sloppy controls, and painfully unfunny writing. Fair.

But I’m going to make the case that Yaiba isn’t as bad as people say. It’s just weird. And weird games don’t always land, especially when they carry a legacy name.

Spark Unlimited handled the development. They weren’t exactly industry royalty. Team Ninja helped out. So did Keiji Inafune—yes, that Inafune, the guy behind Mighty No. 9. He designed Yaiba and pitched the whole zombie-cyborg-ninja concept. The idea was East-meets-West. Japanese combat with American humor. The problem is: it leaned too hard into the West part.

The visuals are the one thing that really works. The cel-shaded “living comic book” look still holds up. Blood flies in huge red arcs. Enemies explode into color-coded gore. Yaiba himself looks like a pissed-off character from a graphic novel you’d find in a Hot Topic clearance bin. I mean that as a compliment.

Unfortunately, once the game starts, the wheels start coming off.

Combat is fast but shallow. You get a sword, a cybernetic punch, and a few environmental executions. There’s a rage mode called Bloodlust that lets you tear through enemies, but it takes forever to charge and burns out too quickly. Enemies come in waves. Then more waves. Then more. It doesn’t evolve.

There’s an elemental system layered on top—some zombies explode, some zap, some poison. If you get two types near each other, you can cause secondary effects like electric tornadoes or poison crystallization. It sounds cool but plays like a checklist. The game doesn’t reward experimentation. It just wants you to solve the puzzle its way.

Boss fights are worse. Giant sponges. They kill you in three hits, and you fight them in arenas where the camera actively works against you.

Speaking of: the camera. It’s fixed. You can’t control it. It’s bad. It hides enemies behind geometry and cuts off parts of the screen during fights. No lock-on. No recentering. Just vibes.

Also, the platforming. There isn’t any. You don’t jump. Seriously—there’s no jump button. Movement sequences are QTEs. That’s it. No room for improvisation, no exploration, just press A when prompted.

PC performance is another mess. The game is hard-capped at 62 FPS, and if you try to lift that cap by editing the config files, the game starts breaking. Physics glitches. Soft locks. Entire levels stop working. The framerate is literally tied to game logic. You’d think someone would’ve caught that.

Controls aren’t much better. Dodge is mapped weird. Block is inconsistent. Inputs sometimes just don’t register. It feels like you’re fighting the engine more than the enemies.

There’s a skill tree, but it’s shallow. You unlock new combos and passive buffs, but nothing that dramatically changes the way you play. Some users even reported skill points not saving properly unless you exit the menu a certain way.

And then there’s the humor. The writing aims for B-movie irreverence and lands somewhere between 2007 YouTube and straight-to-DVD energy drink ad. It’s all juvenile innuendo, “cool guy” one-liners, and grotesque slapstick. One scene has a truck fly through a pair of giant mannequin legs. Another has you beating zombies to death with their own intestines. And Yaiba himself? He never shuts up. It gets old fast.

But I’ll give the game this—it commits.

It doesn’t half-ass the tone. It full-asses it. The voice acting is bad on purpose. The plot makes no sense. And every single thing feels like it was made by someone yelling “more awesome!” into a headset. That kind of confidence, even when misplaced, is rare.

Length-wise, it’s short. Maybe 6 hours. Eight if you’re bad. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, which is honestly a blessing.

There are bugs. Tons of them. Cutscenes sometimes run at 30 FPS even if gameplay is smooth. Loading screens are long and repetitive. Collectibles bug out and vanish. Some levels don’t load properly if you die in the wrong spot. There’s a DLC where you can play as Beck from Mighty No. 9. It adds nothing.

So yeah. Yaiba is janky, shallow, crude, and annoying.

But also: kinda fun.

It’s not a good Ninja Gaiden game. But it’s not trying to be. The problem is it shares the name. If this had just been called Yaiba: Zombie Slayer 2099 or something, I don’t think anyone would’ve cared. The expectations wouldn’t have crushed it.

What you get here is a loud, dumb, cartoonish splatterfest with a lot of rough edges and a couple moments of actual brilliance—mostly in its visuals and sense of identity. When it’s not glitching out or annoying the hell out of you, it can be strangely entertaining.

Buy it on sale. Don’t take it seriously. And absolutely don’t go in expecting Ninja Gaiden.

It’s not good. But it’s definitely not boring.

The original Steam Controller is undoubtedly one of the coolest pieces of gear I own—and one of the most innovative, too.

I got mine right when it launched in 2015. I wanted to solve a very real problem: I was trying to turn my PC into a console.

You see, Valve had Big Picture Mode, which truly turned your PC into a console-like experience. The problem was that some of my favorite PC games didn’t support controllers. They were keyboard-and-mouse only.

But then—here comes the Steam Controller. Suddenly, I was able to reprogram all the inputs. I could take basic keys, like the spacebar, and map them to a button on the controller—like the A button. And once you did that, you could share your controller configuration with the Steam community, or reuse a config someone else already made. It was pretty awesome.

And those dual trackpads? They were swank. Incredible for first-person shooters and real-time strategy games. They were the next best thing to a mouse. And because of the angle of the handles, it all felt very comfortable in the hand—probably the most comfortable controller experience I’ve ever had.

It’s funny—just a little over five years ago, gamers hated it. Not because they ever used one, but because it was a failure. And as we all know about gamers, there’s nothing they hate more than a failure. It was dismissed as a novelty—something no one would ever use again.

Well, Valve had the last laugh. A few years ago, they released the Steam Deck. And what do you know? It’s a direct evolution of the Steam Controller. And now everyone loves the Steam Deck.

Just take a look at it—it’s got so many of the same things the Steam Controller had: dual trackpads, back paddles, the ability to remap buttons and customize layouts. Having owned a Steam Deck since launch, I can say this confidently: the most killer features on the Deck originated with the Steam Controller.

That said, it wasn’t perfect. There were a few quirks I wish they had fixed. For one, it would’ve been nice if it had dual analog sticks instead of just one. Using a trackpad in place of a right stick is fine in theory, but let’s be real: a trackpad does not replace an analog stick.

Also, unlike most modern controllers, this one didn’t have a rechargeable battery. You needed AA batteries. Now, to be fair, those batteries lasted a long time—but it still would’ve been nicer to just recharge it and forget about replacements.

Then there’s the back paddles. Only two of them. In hindsight, yeah, Valve knew they needed to evolve. I’ve grown so used to having four back paddles on the Steam Deck. They’re incredibly useful—especially in games with lots of inputs. Just good to have.

Still, this was one of the first mainstream controllers to even have back paddles. So hats off to Valve for that.

Honestly, I really wish there was another Steam Controller on the market. I know Hori makes a licensed controller for the Steam Deck in Japan, but it’s missing a core feature the original had: the dual trackpads.

To me, the dual trackpads make the Steam Deck experience. It’s something almost no other handheld has. My wife has a Legion Go, and it does have a trackpad—but only one. And honestly? That makes all the difference. It’s fine. But man… it would’ve been a better handheld with two.

Definitely one of the most innovative controllers ever made.

And yeah, I still use mine. I use it when I dock my handheld. Or when I’m on my living room PC.