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Quality-of-Life in Tetris Games

(jcarlosroldan.com)
163 points juancroldan | 3 comments | 09 Apr 25 13:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.216s | source
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jchw ◴[09 Apr 25 13:44 UTC] No.43632004[source]▶
I have a somewhat contrarian opinion. I think if you're making a clone of Tetris you should actually take design cues from the somewhat more obscure Tetris the Grand Master series instead of the "guideline" or NES Tetris rules. TGM's rotation and kick rules are a lot more elegant and avoid a lot of unneeded complexity. Guideline Tetris kicks let you do absurd and weird things (look up the series of kicks that make up a T-Spin Triple and see if that makes sense to you) and rewards doing canned setups really fast, whereas TGM's game design is all about doing good stacking very fast.

The TGM randomization algorithm is also pretty elegant. 7 bag is a bit extreme, it gives you such a perfect set of pieces at all times that it's genuinely less challenging and fun. TGM's random piece algorithm is a lot simpler: the randomizer has a 4-piece history window and it tries multiple times (IIRC, 6) to find a unique piece that hasn't appeared in that window. It is initialized to SSZZ to lower the odds of starting with an S or Z early on. (~~They also use the Mersenne Twister as their PRNG, which was a pretty good PRNG in an era where many games still used LCGs.~~ edit: Apparently, they do not. Don't ask me where I got this, I have no idea.)

Now of course I'm not sure if it matters at all for this particular game since it isn't really a Tetris clone at all, but while TGM is a well-known cult classic for people deep into Tetris it's relatively obscure outside of that circle (and presumably outside of Japan.) The Tetris Company is very strange about licensing and has apparently, as the legend has it, blocked and forced changes on TGM releases for a very long time due to the fact that it doesn't fit with the Tetris guideline rules they enforce in an oddly totalitarian fashion, probably suppressing the game even further in an era where speed games and competitive gaming is a lot more popular.

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1. wodenokoto ◴[10 Apr 25 04:39 UTC] No.43640666[source]▶
I've never played GM Tetris, but have watched the exhibitions on Games Done Quick.

It's my impression that Tetris 99 follows GM more closely than it follows NES.

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2. zerocrates ◴[10 Apr 25 05:02 UTC] No.43640778[source]▶
Tetris 99 was developed by Arika, the developers of the TGM games.
3. jchw ◴[10 Apr 25 05:09 UTC] No.43640819[source]▶
Tetris 99 is very much official guideline Tetris. Arika, the developer of TGM, (and Tetris 99, as pointed out by an adjacent comment,) has done guideline Tetris before, and even implemented it as an option in TGM games in the past (and presumably in TGM 4 which I haven't played yet) and it is assumed this is because of the Tetris Company enforcing it.

You could certainly never do a T-Spin Triple in ARS rotation.

(Though whether it's closer to GM than NES is an interesting question. It's certainly neither since NES Tetris is quite far from what guideline Tetris would become.)