Now,
let's play together...
Together under the
clearest of blue skies...
Tetris Attack was developed by Intelligent Systems, directed by Gumpei Yokoi, and published by Nintendo in the US for the SNES and Game Boy Color in September 1996. (It was also released in Japan for the Bandai Satellaview as Yoshi's Panepon, with the US-style SMW2 skin. Pegging down release dates for BS games is quite difficult, and there are no carts of this version of the game.) The game (as of this noding) is fairly uncommon on the SNES (and borderline rare on the GBC), through a combination of lackluster sales when it launched and a healthy fanbase seeking copies. The SNES ROM is readily available and complete (while the inferior GBC ROM is rarish, as always, due to crackdowns), and the controls lend themselves nicely to keyboard play, so this is definitely a good candidate for emulation. (Of note is an online community of people who play head-to-head with zSNES online, but this requires a connection with very low latency.)
Of note are the Japanese version of this game, Panel de Pon, and the sequel, Pokemon Puzzle League. That said, the gameplay is virtually unchanged in PdP and PPL.
Don't let the kid-friendly Yoshi's Island backdrop fool you; Tetris Attack is considered by many to be the One True Puzzle Game, comparable to such enduring genre mainstays as the original Tetris and Bust A Move/Puzzle Bobble. Part of this is due to the incredibly aggressive two-player game, and part of it is due to the fact that, like many of the most enduring games, it's a cinch to learn, yet a master can do things that don't even seem human.
The concept, like any good puzzle game, is simple (although it has little to nothing to do with Tetris). There's a typical puzzle game well, with rows of blocks of various colors rising from the bottom. The player has a cursor one block tall and two blocks wide, and hitting a button switches the two blocks under the cursor. One three blocks of like color are arranged in a row, they disappear, and the blocks above fall to fill the gap. Of course, if the blocks rise to the top of the well, game over.
Seems simple, right? Well, the game has two little wrinkles. A single move can cause two sets of blocks to clear at once; this is called a "combo", and is one of the eaiest ways to clear multiple sets of blocks. On the other hand, if clearing a set of blocks causes a block or blocks to fall so that another set clears, that's called a "chain". Chaining, while it's simple to first see it (the game gives some examples in the attract mode), requires a lot of preplanning, and the more advanced methods of chaining require exploiting the little windows of time available as blocks clear.
Of course, besides just points, there's another very good reason to clear multiple blocks. The standard one-player mode, as well as the popular vs. mode, relies not only on clearing blocks faster than your opponent, but also dumping garbage blocks on your opponent. Clearing a set of more than three blocks, or clearing a combo or chain, drops a giant block on your opponent. The more blocks you clear at once, the larger the garbage block. Garbage blocks can be transformed into regular blocks, but enough regular blocks to fill the space the garbage block occupied.
Last, and most definitely least, is the Yoshi's Island theme the game is given. The single player game has the player going through a series of enemies from Super Mario World and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, beating them each at a a Tetris Attack match, until finally encountering and defeating (adult) Bowser. It bears mentioning that this is yet another appearance of Raphael the Raven.
The Puzzle mode is more in the Mario Picross template of puzzle games, giving you an immobile well with a handful of blocks, and only a certain number of shifts you can make. These stages finish when you finish the last of the blocks, and score only by time taken.
There's also the typical Endless mode, played by oneself until the well fills too fast to clear, much like Tetris. While this is the best mode to practice, it's also one of the least fulfilling, as there's little reason to make any but the simplest clears.
Sources: The game itself, GameFAQs (as always), Wikipedia, tetrisattack.net, mobygames.com. The opening "poem," such as it is, is from the title screen of the SNES version of this game.