Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Techniques

I played with a level 5x, and I looked at his playing style graph, and it was the biggest roundest ball I've seen. Such a nice balance of T-Spin, Tetris, Back to Back, and Combo. Although I beat him a few times, it was never in late game at 1v1. If he didn't make a mistake then I was pretty much dead. I tried to figure out his style, but I didn't quite grasp it.

I find that if I'm to improve, I need to implement more Back to Back and T-Spin strategy without rising too high. I don't know if this is the best direction since currently I usually take these steps:

- Fill up with two spaces on the far right.
- When someone is about to attack me, I'll make a 6-11 combo.
- From there I'll try to fit in T-Spins, Tetrises, and if I need to get back down, I'll try to implement combos.

I think that some of the short combos I make to remove garbage could possibly be replaced with T-Spins. I'll work on that later.

One more thing; I reached level 23 today!

Monday, May 24, 2010

Tetris Friends, Marathon, TOJ

Welcome to my new blog where I chat about a game where you push colorful blocks of four down a screen to make horizontal lines disappear!

I'll be discussing my strategy and happenings within the Tetris realm! First off I'll state that I hate tetrisfriends.com for not allowing alternate key configuration. I'll play the facebook version though. Currently my standings on TFF are:

Marathon: 712733 (new score today!)
Sprint: 1:08:58 (4-24-10)
Ultra: 30176

For some odd reason, only Sprint records the date in which you achieved the score. Regardless, the gameplay is all around nice, though DAS could be quicker and more repsonsive. Ultra and Sprint are well designed games and have a purpose, though I find Marathon somewhat purposeless.

In Marathon, any decent player can reach the end of level 15, but it's all about how you manage to get there. To get the maximum amount of points you have to try to set your line count to the next level to a low number, and score a Tetris in that time frame... or something along those lines. I forget the tricks. All I manage is to get as many back to back T-spin doubles as possible, which in my recent Marathon play, I got to level 10, and then my back to back got messed up, so I resorted to back to back Tetri(?) until that messed up around level 15. By then I resort to anything that helps me get down or an occasional T-Spin setup. It closely guarantees a 700k+ score which is ideal for me. But I can only wonder how people manage to get 900k+.

Top 10 Facebook Friends (Patrick should really be above me since he got around 720k. He's also the only other friend who has me beat in Sprint and Ultra)


Tetris Friends isn't the only version of Tetris. I've played a little Tetris DS as well, but what I'm really into currently is Tetris Online Japan. At the moment, I have 2 default stat points on the preview slots, 3 in DAS, 1 in soft drop speed, 1 in line clear delay, and 1 in lock delay.


My current level is 22


Eh... if you couldn't guess, my avatar is a Sableye with a Geodude head. Long story.

And here is my style chart or whatever you want to call it.


The blue is LPM or Lines per Minute, and the green is APM or Attacks per minute. The orange is tetris average, REN is combo average, and the other two are self-explanatory.

I've been struggling to get my T-Spin rate up, but for some reason it's stuck at around one. I could get a dozen T-Spins and it still wouldn't change. So that's one thing that I'm curious about. One aspect of TOJ that I think is unique is that it really harnesses the power of combos. Not many Tetris renditions can properly implement combo well, but I think TOJ made it perfect. I'm not entirely sure how it works. I find that a balanced chart does lead to a well rounded healthy Tetris player.