Tetris is a great game for meditation and relaxation. It's mesmerizing watching pieces drop and clear. It consistently helps you improve by consistently increasing speed.
I love tetris. I started playing it as a kid on my ps1 with my sister, a game called tetris plus. It was a variation of tetris where you have to help a professor get trough puzzles and reach the bottom. There also a classic tetris mode:
There are so many variations of tetris. Today's tetris is much different than the first versions. Most notable differences are holding blocks, piece randomizer and error leniency/spins.
You can hold 1 piece if it doesn't fit anywhere or you want to use the next piece.
Older tetris had a percentile piece radomizer, meaning you could get 3+ the same pieces in a row or not get a piece for a long time. New tetris has a 7-bag randomizer which is more fair. It basically means that every 7 pieces you get randomly shuffled one of the seven pieces so you never get more than two same pieces in a row.
I'll use tetrisfriends marathon to show examples since tetrisfriends is a great page and I've been playing there for years now and have fun with the community.
The newer spin mechanic can get pretty confusing. you can fit some pieces in places that look impossible by "spinning" it in in the right direction. Here are a few examples:
There are some crazier combination. Currently probably the most popular tetris game is puyopuyo tetris (hope to get it some day <3 ). It's a combination of two games but let's focus on the tetris part. There's a battle mechanics. The point is to make your opponent top out by sending them lines by clearing your own. You send more by doing special moves like t-spins, combo, and perfect clears. a perfect clear is when there's nothing left on the board, that's what the gif on the top is. You do it by making a setup and then trying to fit the last three pieces. Perfect clear sends 10 lines while a tetris only 4 (5 with a back to back bonus). t-spins send lines depending on how many lines you clear with them. 1 cleared sends 1 line, 2 cleared sends 4 and 3 cleared sends 6. There are countless setups to do these, here are some:
It's important to make a overhand to let the t-piece knock down.
This next one isn't very balanced since it uses 2 important pieces so it's hard to stack.
Next we have combos, combos are basically when you clear consecutive lines without stopping. There's a weird formula for how many lines it sends but it's a lot. The downside to combo is it takes time and someone can knock you out before you make the stack. The most common combo types are 2-wide, 3-wide, 4-wide and center 4-wide. Wider gap has a better chance for a higher combo but requires more skill and practice.
It's useful to have a 1 gap on the side since there are more combinations and it's easier to keep going.
The point of center 4-wide is unless you middle 4 spaces reach the top you can't get knocked out so you can keep doing your combo even if your opponent send enough lines to push your sides over the top. It's very hard to stack though, I have to admit it took me 4 tries to get this right.
I joined a tetris online tournament this year but lost in the second round. The guy who beat me got third place so that's fine. It's very important to learn how to downstack, that means clearing your board. You do this by avoiding putting pieces of spots with gaps under them. looking for the right pieces and being careful about the way you stack.
I made the gif on top by making a grid on A3 paper. The pieces are origami sonobe units combined in different ways to make the shapes. I took the pictures of each piece separately, removed background, and made each frame one by one. I used gifmaker.me to animate it. This took around 5-6 hours one day just to animate.
This was written with a wide inkpen.
I recently finished this, it took about 2 weeks. It's a filet crochet scarf. I used the 7-bag randomizer for the order of pieces. It's around 1.5 meters in length.
Also here's a video of me playing in arena against people, I cropped out the waiting in between games and added some Erik Satie.(the recording software was lagging my game a bit)
Thanks for reading. If you want to play tetris with me add me on tetris friends :3 username Iivan.
Ps. I messed up and posted this 2 hours ago and realized I put 100% power up (not used to dtube). I worked a lot on this post, planning editing and making the stuff.
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