A whole slew of new screenshots of Tetris DS for the Nintendo DS have appeared online that seem to fully reveal the various game franchises that will spice up the Tetris experience.  The standard old reliables are there, of course: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, and Metroid are prominent.  What surprises me are the inclusion of both Yoshi's Cookie and Balloon Fight, two games that few people seem to remember these days.

Interestingly enough, take note that the Yoshi's Cookie elements are based on the classic Nintendo Entertainment System version of the game and not the more colorful Super NES version.  Why is that, you wonder?  Yoshi's Cookie is actually a Nintendo-branded version of a puzzle game called Hermetica.  Nintendo had the rights to produce NES and Game Boy versions of the game, but the Super NES rights were gobbled up by Bulletproof Software.  In order to keep the games unified, Nintendo licensed Mario and Yoshi to the company.  However, even all these years later, Nintendo does not own the Super NES version or its various elements (beyond what was originally licensed, of course).  I'm confident that is why the NES version is depicted in Tetris DS instead of the more advanced Super NES version.  Nintendo doesn't have the rights to use the brighter, more colorful character models that it did not create.

(via 4 Color Rebellion)