A question for NES Tetris players

Thread in 'Discussion' started by Blitz, 15 Mar 2017.

  1. Would the game have been better if you could get full DAS charge by pressing left or right during ARE?
    I think it would be an improvement but I still want to hear what people who have played the game for longer than me thinks about this.
     
  2. Objectively speaking, this would obviously be an improvement.

    But it would take away a huge layer of the game that is unique to this version of Tetris, and probably the main reason this game remains as competitive as it is on the higher levels. Mastering the DAS is an entire metagame in itself.
     
  3. Whoops, never posted this, just had it sitting in a tab.

    It's certainly a refinement to give some form of charging during entry delay, and an instantaneous one probably makes the most sense since entry delay is not guaranteed to be longer than DAS start-up (although on average it might be). The game is probably still plenty difficult enough if you eliminate some of the abstract counter management in favor of an intuitive rule like this. It shifts the focus more so onto core puzzle decision-making rather than the execution aspect (although execution-based technical moves and recoveries would still exist in the form of spins and synchro-like manipulations).

    The one thing that gives me pause is that, for better or worse, that abstract momentum management does affect a player's decisions (i.e., requires change in approach in recovery situations). How a player responds to these situations in the existing game can be interesting. But, it would be hard for me to say that that inherently makes the game "better." If one were to follow-up with an new version of the game in the same spirit, I feel it would be better choose the simpler and more intuitive rule.

    The rest of DAS tech is fine albeit quirky, but if you were trying to make something with a cleaner design then you wouldn't really want to punish players heavily for being unaware of these obscure inner workings. Before we laid out the exact rules behind it, some of the core players found frustration in not being precisely certain whether the next piece would be charged or not when they held a direction during entry delay. Some of the max-out players like Harry and Jonas had a fairly complete understanding of how to ensure full DAS charge (including topping off the counter by abusing the wall, surprisingly enough), but not everyone is going to be able to grasp that and play to their full potential unless the behavior is described to them. And it's not like TGM or something, where everything is unquestionably purposefully designed and the game has explicit instructions in the attract sequence that tell you how to leverage all the tools they've built in.
     
  4. It would be interesting to see a variant of Tetris that imposed the same restriction of movements (and the strategy derived from those) as NES Tetris does, but in a more intuitive manner that would be easier to pick up an understand by someone who has never heard of it before.

    I think 20G stacking in TGM is a very apt comparison. Although very different in practice, this is a system that both introduces new challenges to execution, as well as adding more aspects to consider in the descision making of the puzzle game. I think this helps make both games some of the best games to go to for single player score attack.
    This is actually a pretty difficult thing to add to a game of Tetris without compromising the core elements of the puzzle. Almost every other addition you typically see made to the Tetris rules usually does the opposite - as in giving the player more abilities, effectively loosening the puzzle aspect when just playing for survival, but usually countering the effect with more tight requirements in terms of speed or scoring mechanics.
     

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