MacBreak and Tetris for iPod
2006-10-12 01:09:54
I wrote to Leo of MacBreak Weekly, which if you dig Apple at all, is worth a listen. And if you don't... well... there's always TWiT. Regardless:Howdy Leo,
Thanks for taking the time to glance over my email. In this past week's MacBreak Weekly there was conversation about Tetris for iPod and you had mentioned "Tetris would be a good game on the iPod" and "...because you could rotate -there's not much to it." Ouchie!
The control scheme is hackneyed from our experience in attempting to play it, as to pull off maneuvers in a modern Tetris game with L-rotations and T-spins is rough enough at 20G but made downright impossible when one can't do three movements at once. There's also no "hold" key which is fine for classic renditions of Tetris such as the one that was for Gameboy that utilized a piece randomization that didn't guarantee a particular piece within 7 pieces like the newer versions, but muxing both the new rules for piece randomization with the lack of a standard hold key makes the game impossible to "play forever". It doesn't just make it harder, it doesn't even give someone a fair shot.
For an example of what some Tetris-heads say about it, here's a link to the tetrisconcept forums in regards to the iPod version:
tetrisconcept.com
The important posts, as usual, are Sully's and not my own.
Anyway, what inspired this email was the line of "not much to it", and indeed, this version of Tetris has made "not much to" the game due to an awkward control scheme and shows no progression of the evolution of Tetris. What scares me is that I know this version of Tetris will sell more copies not only of any other game at the iTunes Store, but probably more copies than even the current gold standard in America; TetrisDS for the NintendoDS, and it's, for the most part, going to leave the impression that in 20 years nothing has changed in the strategy of Tetris, when the landscape has changed so much in the last few years.
Summary: much as a chunk of us love Apple products and aesthetics, the Tetris for iPod does not reflect the latter and is a horrible example to show what mini-gaming can do for Apple and makes the modern versions of Tetris, which are oft-equated with professional Chess (even our ranking system is the same), look like Tic-Tac-Toe. Where the opponent always gets the center-square.
Thanks again for taking the time to give this a glance through, and I hope that you can let MBw listeners know that Tetris aficionados as a whole are none too impressed at what's been done to our game. Or not. :)
Usual TWiT Annoyance,
Jonathon "Phydeaux" Warden
Just a hint that I was the guy that would not shut up during the MWSF '06 broadcast. He might want to forget me, but I thought that it was worth wasting an hour of my time to be a voice of dissension... Because that seems to be all I am on TWiT. :p :D
As you were.
Post Comment1 Comments
Cosmonaust is right.
2006-09-12 23:10:05
This dumb AR cheaters are God's gift to us.blockstats.org
Ptppie! is the latest addition to line block cheaters that I have faced and beat. He's down to 7600 now thanks to me. What's awesome is he lost... and then he kept playing. Losing several more times. Amazing.
He wasn't all that easy to beat, either. I had to pull it all out to take him on.
Post Comment1 Comments
Video
2006-09-08 21:59:24
See previous post.Notice how not all the pieces to the side are changing ala Starman.
www.whoisphydeaux.com
Needs Quicktime, less than 1MB.
Post Comment0 Comments
Gen Y Putrid Punks
2006-09-08 21:06:05
A lot of kiddos in the general forum at NSider are pumping a shit ton of denial... I swear, it just flows and flows. The Tetris only kids seem to be smarter, but as you hit the general Wi-Fi... ugh.The current claim of NINTENDO IS BEST ZOMG is that regardless of what *you* think of the Wi-Fi system, Action Replay IS NOT EFFECTING THE LANDSCAPE.
Say it with me, WUH TUH FUH.
Of course we know I went out to get an Action Replay just for this kind of dispelling, and I went and tested it right now; you can get unlimited "I" blocks in Tetris DS with an Action Replay. So if any of these punks say otherwise, point them to me, because I'm about as reputable as you can get this side of the dark side.
The difference between expensive hack of yesteryear and the Action Replay is that instead of showing all of the next seven pieces to be "I" tetrominos, the Action Replay changes the next piece to "I" on the fly, leaving your randomly generated tetrominos to the side in the order that you would've otherwise received them.
The kid with the 5000 rating and a Japanese name probably went through 10 different emotions as he saw my "I" pieces with some panic but snapped back into his game mode once he noticed was making purty designs with the blocks before allowing him to top me out. Le sigh.
As a said, pictures after the break, and you tell those snot nosed brats that if Phydeaux says it's ruining the landscape, it's ruining the fucking landscape, only you'll have to do it in a way without the word fucking. Or frickin', that's blocked by the word filter, too. My choice at the moment in honour of Firefly is ruttin' which is akin to fucking but with rotting corpses. BIG FUN.
As you were.
Post Comment1 Comments
Damn Dirty Cheaters
2006-08-21 19:53:05
Phy: Well, look at this! Appears we got here three Action Replays in stock. What does that make us?
Pfg: Damn dirty cheaters, sir.
Phy: Ain't we just.
Good day folks, some of you have ran across me before, some of you have not, but regardless, I'm the Internet's Bob Saget; popularly known as Donovan Osaya, fido, Phydeaux of Amalgamate or simply Phydeaux. I've been playing Tetris on the GameBoy since 1989, so I'm far from any sort of pro compared to the TGM guys. It's funny, I got the Gameboy at that time as a gift because I wanted to play powerhouses like F-1 Race, Super Mario Land and... and... well, there were others. Truth is, I never really played anything else due to the portable nature. If I wanted to play a side-scroller, I'd want to play it on a screen I could see, and the 1989 Gameboy WAS painful to view.
So Tetris was always in my slot, and never really left it.
Though I had an SNES and an N64 with a couple of games each, I didn't fall back in love with gaming until Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Gamecube. Enough that I bought one specifically for it. When the DS came out, I held off for a solid year... until Tetris DS was whispered. When I heard one was coming that would utilize internet play, I bought a DS the next day. I didn't have any games for it, until months later, for heaven's sake, when I got MarioKart DS and didn't play it all that much until my pre-ordered Tetris DS and Metroid Prime: Hunters came in stock. I've clocked maybe an hour into MP:H Multiplayer, more into single player, but I'm stuck in a few places. In contrast, I spend at least two hours a day on some variant of TetrisDS. At least.
So this lengthy background comes to you for the reason I'm going to start updating this blog; I've always been an underbelly kind of guy. So while I'm too good to actually use
THE ACTION REPLAY
in competitive WiFi play, I'm going to be keeping up and documenting everything about it in relation to Tetris and it's variants, in this blog. This is not to say that now that I own this device that I have joined the cheaters fold, rather it further encourages me to pummel the face in of whoever I run into at a Meet-N-Greet who has used this device to push themselves up the charts.
In addition, I'll be listing out the cheaters and my experiences with them, because darned if I don't always run into them, unfortunately I seem to be in the bathroom and away from my computer when I do. :/
So there we go, inaugural post, let's embarrass these baddies.
