
After-effects
Loved it. Less keen on the after-effects: putting my head on the pillow in bed after an evening playing and still seeing those falling blocks ...
Forget the oil, forget the gas – even forget the aggressive foreign policy. The commodity that granted Russia its modern day super-wealth is clearly Tetris, which clocks up its 30th birthday today. Youtube Video Poor old beardie Alexey Pajitnov – the title’s original designer and programmer – bashed out his first attempt on a …
@monkeyfish - After Effects - To be fair, that happens with any video game if you play it long enough. I've had it with wipeout, tony hawks, even doom.
I nostalgically remember we played so much of The Sims when at uni, my housemate dreamt of living his life by progress bars! Good times.
Can't say I would want to have a Doom dream mind.
I've got the GB version on the 3DS now, and the music started playing in my head as soon as I saw the the word 'Tetris'.
But my favourite version has to be Tetris 2 on the ZX. It had a challenge mode with 99 levels. Some gave you a quota of 1's, 2's, etc, others gave you certain bricks to destroy, or just survive for 10 secs of stupid speed.
If you completed all 99 levels it would tell you to F*** OFF as you must have cheated. As it was, I was playing on an emulator, so I was able to save my progress and come back later. Which is cheating I suppose, so they were right.
Tetris 2 on the Spectrum is indeed the finest thing. I had a version for the Sam in which someone had adapted the AY music to the SAA; it's quite possibly the game I played most. Though my choice of computers didn't leave me exactly overflowing with options. Prince of Persia, anyone?
Tetris spawned a whole raft of puzzle clones as well which differed enough to ensure there were no legal problems. Columns, Puznic and even games like Atari's Klax owe alot to Tetris.
My favourite versions of Tetris are the Gameboy, but also the PD Giger Tetris on the Amiga.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjLZGgP9T_Y
And I haven't even listened to it. Strange that i have not picked up that game in many many years, but I can still recall that music with crystal clarity. Every little pitch change and warble coming through those tinny little speakers.
And I know this is going to be my mental soundtrack to today and possibly the weekend, I don't mind it one little bit.
In fact I think the first thing I am going to do when I get home tonight is go dig through my old boxes for my gameboy! Which to my knowledge, still has the Tetris cartridge in it.
Opps, too late. I'm humming it to myself already.
I for one welcome our 2 dimensional, block dropping overlords.
I had one of the Tetris Watches... My Mum had an East German pen pal and had purchased it as a Christmas Gift for their children.
My Dad pointed out sending them something with "From Russia with Love" printed on the packaging in December 89 probably wouldn't go down so well and I ended up with it!
I came across Tetris first on the Mac Plus and I became addicted. Unlike games like Civ where a full game lasts many days (or not, if you can get by without sleep), Tetris can be played for 10 minutes in the middle of some necessary but dull work (like reading academic journals).
With Tetris you can set the level of your perfection, want it faster? start at a higher level, want it to solve it in style? then only eliminate 4 rows at a time and then strive to have no more than 4 rows at any one time, want it trickier? then start with a board already incompletely filled.
It is no surprise that it finds itself installed on or available to every new iteration of hardware.
I worked at DG, and there was a copy of the Spectrum Holobyte version floating around. If you put it on the right machine, you could get the music. Oh, for the good old days of VGA graphics and tinny Russian music! Sad about the authors having to fight so hard for a share of the profits, though. The two of them deserve to be wealthy men.
Great game, my wife is still addicted.
// where's the Tetris icon?
http://xkcd.com/724/
http://www.kongregate.com/games/banthar/hell-tetris
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korobeiniki
...I used to think I liked the Spectrum version most but after lots and lots of time on the Gameboy in two-player mode I found it odd to go back to. These days, I find Hell Tetris (see above) oddly calming whether taking it seriously as a game or just exercising the physics engine for a giggle.
I remember gathering around a work machine to play Tetris. The background art on one of the levels featured a man with a striking resemblance to British F1 driver of the day.
Upon reaching that level, colleagues would call out (in their best Murray Walker voice)
And! It's! Man-sell!
At which point the keyboard had to be handed over.
..Tetrinet!
This was released at the same time I was at my UK college, and was responsible for my very first search on google, in 1999. I needed to download the .exe file and google was much better than AltaVista at getting specific file names.
Anyway, Tetrinet was great against six players on local lan - and the game mechanics was the same as normal, however as you cleared certain squares you got certain powerups. These could be distributed for each one of the other players - which meant you and your good friends could gang up on the guy you 'hate'.
It was amazing fun, and I have not really played a multiplayer version like it since.
But then that died and we then all started playing drug wars, which is another game I miss!
My friend an I also enjoy playing the Atari Arcade version of tetris - which gets stupidly hard without a decent controller. We used to drink while playing and basically gave up after a couple of hours because of a lack of ability to play. Fun times!
For me, Tetris peaked with the DX version on the Game Boy Color. The mode that learned players' styles then let you play against them when they weren't around, or let you play against yourself, was genius. It was almost certainly doing nothing cleverer than reproducing scoring odds over time, rather than actually playing a game in the background, but the feeling of it emulating a particular player's strategy was quite convincing.
I've played just about every Tetris before and since but all of the more recent versions either over-egg the graphical pudding, add unnecessary complexity, or choose bad control methods for inappropriate devices e.g. touch screens. And as for the very recent apps, where progression is more or less denied without coughing up for repeated micro-transactions, I can't imagine anything further from the game's Soviet roots.
One of my first online purchases was in 1996, buying the Tengen version for NES for $100 from some unknown person. I snailmailed the cash and got the game the same way...and was the laughingstock of the Usenet gamers group for a couple of years afterwards...is it still worth the price? To me, YES! Firing up the NES and enjoying a two-player round with the seldom-heard Tengen soundtrack RULES
I remember playing a great freeware variant called Wormtris on the Amiga, which used various bits of art from the original Worms game. Occasionally you would get worms dropping down (which were 1x1 in size), and you would have to avoid squishing worms with the blocks, as after you'd killed a certain number... er, something would happen. I can't remember exactly what happened but it would play the "Revenge!" sample and screw up the playing field somehow. It was an interesting addition as very often you had a dilemma between placing a block somewhere annoying, or squishing a worm and storing up trouble later.
There were also sheep which you could use to blow blocks up. I'm sure there was other weird power-up stuff but it's all escaped me. Anyone else play it?