Inflight Tetris

Thread in 'Discussion' started by PetitPrince, 12 Aug 2009.

  1. I've been to Vietnam lately. I flew with Cathay Pacific. It was a while since I took a long haul flight, so I gladly discovered the pleasure of modern inflight entertainment, which include now real VOD and of course... video game !

    I was semi-aware of an inflight version of Tetris through Jago's post in his thread about his trip to Japan, so I searched for it... and found it ! But my memory of it was rather limited, so I couldn't test reproduce his bug for instance.

    Anyway, here's my review of DTI software's Inflight Tetris(R):

    It is played with the onboard wired remote controller, which roughly mimics a SNES gamepad (trivia: one time I flew with Kuwait airlines and they had for each passenger their own personal SNES emulator !). Unfortunately, the cable comes out from one end of the remote. That can disturb people who like to have the controller in the palm of the hand. I got used to it pretty quickly.
    How the button are used is a totally different story though. It is somewhat reminiscent of how a drunken old casual PC Tetris gamer would map the control on both a late night and a thight schedule. Let me show you:

    [​IMG]

    Terrible isn't it ? It would be a good attack item on multiplayer Tetris ! ^^

    Despite being a somewhat TTC Guidelines compliant game (there's 6 previews, a Infinity behavior, hold), soft drop seems to lock even though it shouldn't, thus making it next to completely useless.
    DAS is still desperately slow. Lock delay can be disabled ("Classic" as they say) but even without it I still got the impression of playing Game Boy Tetris due to the buttons mashing.
    The level up (which goes at least to level 21... after that I gave up, bored) system is weird, I got the impression that it occurred only after a fixed amount of time... but that could just be an impression.
    High score board is local and session based only (meaning that if you quit Tetris, you will lose any high score that you might have done).

    Jago already noticed it, but the preview behavior is really weird, having a different spawn rotation than the one showed on preview.

    About multiplayer: a 5 letters nickname is automatically assigned (I would have given the seat number) and pre-match chat is available though the qwerty keyboard. Apart from that it is a simple one-on-one versus with garbage for lines that are better than single.

    Sounds are decent, even thought there isn't any sound effect that warns that a piece has landed and that the lock delay timer is running. There's no music whatsoever (maybe to let people listen to the inflight radio ?).
    Graphics are OK, a bit reminiscent of Mac Color Tetris (my first Tetris <3 !).

    Bottom line: You'd better see movies (most airplanes now have a *huge* selection of film of very diverses styles, including great classics) instead of playing it. Or just hook up your Nintendo DS and play NDS_TGM or lj_ds :) .

    I also made a video of it.
     

    Attached Files:

    Last edited: 12 Aug 2009
  2. Very cool. It's like a train wreck, I can't look away lol.

    I don't know if you want to modify your annotations, but I noticed the pieces don't spawn in a random orientation. The previews and spawning orientations are different, but each is consistent within itself. The "TV Legends" Tetris game had something similar.
     
  3. petit: what drove you to vietnam ? holidays? business? very cool anyway! wish i would be there for some holidays...
     
  4. Ya - I played this as well flying Korean Air over the pacific. It drove me insane - lagged and sleep deprived I could do nothing else but struggle against these ruinous controls. Eventually I cursed TTC, and gave up. I don't even care whether they're responsible for it or not, I still blame them for the scourge of shit tetris.


    ....but i'm looking forward to playing it again today
     
  5. Okay, modified.
    Holiday ! I have family over there.
     
  6. When I played it the DAS was totally slippery and hard to control, but not useless, and it had the same dumb control scheme, but I got to own someone on the flight back so it was all good.
     
  7. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwww, Blockles-ish setup!

    So glad I didn't play this piece of crap (that I saw on someone's screen) while I was flying back home from the Philippines.
     

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