Here's another thing that annoyed me a bit in one of the VB reviews -- when you compare Vertical Force (A great game! Easy, but really, really good.) to the pretty bad game that is D-Force. It's really not much like D-Force at all, that game only has switching in half of the levels and does it badly. There are several games before it that have similar dual-plane gameplay (where you can fly to an upper or lower level in a shmup), which you don't mention in that review. Most notably (though FAR worse) is Sega's Blade Eagle 3-D for the Master System. It's also a 3-d game, since it requires the 3d glasses, but is a very slow and flawed game. The 3d is cool, but I don't find it all that fun to play. Vattle Giuce (a Japan-only Game Boy game from 1991) is a lot better, though it's not in 3d of course. Good game though. The Death Star levels (last two stages) from the Game Boy / Game Gear version of Super Return of the Jedi (1994) also lets you switch between two planes to avoid obstacles and such. You don't need to mention D-Force, of all things, to mention previous games which are like Vertical Force; Blade Eagle 3-D ior Vattle Giuce are closer comparisons. I like Vertical Force better, but that's a matter of opinion, I'm sure some prefer Vattle Giuce. (Aerostar, another GB shooter from '91, also has some slight similarities here; you're on roads and can jump up into the sky temporarily with a button.) None of those games have anything like Vertical Force's feature that lets you store your different powerup addon pod things on the right d-pad, though, they're simpler games. Anyway, this is minor I know.
I regret missing the lock feature my first time through, but I went back and found it doesn't fix 3-D Tetris' other issues: Unpleasant wire frame visuals at awful, headachy frame rates; weird difficulty curve that is either tediously dull or frustratingly fast; overly complex piece shapes that read poorly due to the visual design; etc. It just makes an iffy game a bit less annoying.
The wireframe graphics of dropping pieces aren't "awful", they are necessary. And the game has both shaded and wireframe polygons, it's not all-wireframes like Red Alarm. Remember, the reason why pieces that are dropping are wireframe is because you need to see what's underneath them! If the dropping pieces were solid, the game would be impossible, you couldn't see anything. As soon as pieces hit the bottom of the well they turn solid, so this is not a wireframe 3d game, it has wireframe pieces dropping for visibility into a polygonal 3d well full of flat-shaded polygonal blocks. This is exactly the same thing that Blockout does -- in that game you have wireframe pieces dropping into a solid-color well. Unless you're on a platform where you could do semi-transparent pieces, it's what you have to do to be able to play the game. This isn't a flaw, it's the only way to make this kind of game at the time. Again the polygons become shaded once they reach the bottom and stop moving. As for wireframe graphics in general, before I got Red Alarm I kind of expected to dislike the wireframe visuals, since telling what is a wall and isn't should be hard, right? However, in the 3-d environment of the headset it isn't a problem, the game plays well. Red Alarm isn't one of the best VB games, it has some issues, but it is good. But anyway.
As for the framerate, I'm a horrible judge of framerates so I have nothing to say on that one except that nothing on VB bothers me much framerate-wise. I'm lucky to not be one of the people really negatively affected by the thing.
On the difficulty curve, isn't that pretty much how Tetris works? I've been playing a lot of Tetris 99 over the last few months, the difficulty spike at the end is steep indeed. I haven't won a game yet, but have finished third a few times. Sure, Tetris 3-D starts out easy and then gets hard, but I'd think that that is what it is supposed to do. I do agree that the game is slower paced than 2d Tetris though, that is an issue with all variants on Blockout.
And complex pieces... again, this is a staple of the genre. It's a 3d game, so naturally you're going to have 3-d pieces, and not just the same set of tetrominoes from the 2d games. Blockout for the Genesis lets you choose if you want the "Extended" piece set or not, and the basic ones are simpler than 3-D Tetris's piece selection, but Extended in that game has some crazy shapes that go way beyond 3-D Tetris. It is true that 3-D Tetris doesn't have an option to use only the basic pieces, but the piece selection strikes a nice balance I think, and after not too long you get used to what the options are. As with everything else about the game it's a big improvement over Blockout's weird Extended shapes (go try that mode, it's way harder than 3-D Tetris, and not nearly as good...), and thanks to the 3d visuals you get a much better sense of what they look like too, and control is a lot better thanks to the two d-pads letting you move and rotate individually. Once in a while it can be hard to figure out exactly what a piece is, but between the minimaps on the side and the wireframe, it's something that once you learn you can deal with well.
Oh, and I like the little portraits of the block types, it gives the game more character than your usual, standard block-dropping game.
It's an A-grade classic.