Sega Tetris: Take It To The Limit

Thread in 'Discussion' started by Muf, 14 Sep 2009.

  1. Muf

    Muf

    For a while now, colour_thief has been insisting that somebody buy this video off Yahoo Auctions Japan and digitise it. It's a video tape, commercially produced and sold in 1989, of a complete counterstop max-out of Sega Tetris for System-16. When it recently surfaced again, I picked it up for about $20 and sent it to my German friend scharfis_brain to capture it, as he has multiple professional/prosumer VHS decks and I knew he'd be able to squeeze every drop of quality out of such an old video tape.
    He deserves all the credit really, as he's used multiple recordings (after all, analogue captures differ slightly every single time), and used various restoration techniques to stabilise, denoise, and polish the video to a shine. I simply applied some colour correction to match the colour of emulator screenshots as closely as possible, and encoded it.

    And after long nagging from colour_thief and Alfredo McEdo and intense procrastination on my part, I can present to you the final product.

    It's on YouTube in 3 parts (due to the 10 minute limit):
    Sega Tetris: Take It To The Limit on YouTube

    And the high quality 60fps version:
    Mirror 1 (France) - Mirror 2 (US) - Watch Live in your browser (powerful CPU recommended)
     
  2. This was really, truly, awesome. I love the aggressive triple rotations and the deliberate stepping. And I'm damn impressed at all the moves that get used considering there are no wallkicks and only 1 rotation direction. T-spins are really hardcore in Sega Tetris.
     
  3. I took the liberty to upload the 60 fps video to my website for people to watch. If you want it removed, just make some noice and I'll take it down. :)

    I had to extract the raw video and reencode the audio to AAC format and mux it back together, or the audio wouldn't be compatible for streaming. The fixed file is uploading at this very moment.

    Should be up soon, the link will be: http://143.homelinux.com/live.php?id=178

    Please excuse my poor design if you have a small display, but it's optimized for HD media, so it only makes sense to require a minimum width of 1300 pixels or so.

    EDIT: It's up, with sound. :)
     
  4. Zaphod77

    Zaphod77 Resident Misinformer

    Cool. BTW, Sega Ages Tetris Collection has a complete max out replay not from the poweron pattern (score, lines, and level maxed)
     
    Last edited: 15 Sep 2009
  5. Edo

    Edo a.k.a. FSY

    Muf, thanks again to both you and your friend for digitising this; it really is an historic recording, and to not have it preserved would just be criminal.

    As for the gameplay itself, whilst it may not be overly impressive by today's standards, you have to take into account the fact that this video was produced back in 1989, only shortly after the game was released in the arcades; it would have been as astounding back in its day as jin8's Ti Master GM was when it was made public.
    The triple rotations are beautiful as ever, and something else that my keen eye noticed at 9:41 in the first part was a rapid I rotation; it looks like the player "piano'ed" all three rotation buttons to ensure the I was vertical when it hit the wall. For those that are unaware, SEGA Tetris had 3 rotation buttons which all rotated counter-clockwise, and utilising all 3 in ingenious ways such as this was one of the tricks to making the high gravity more manageable.

    Watching these videos really has inspired me to pick up SEGA Tetris again, and go for a full max-out, and I do hope others are similarly inspired. It also sort of makes me wish that Arika had included another special code in TGM that could be entered at the title screen to make the B button rotate counter-clockwise :)
     
  6. Nice vid.

    I've often wondered why was the decision made to only give the game one rotation? Using 3 CC inputs for CW rotation seems like unnecessary evolutionary patchwork for an input that could have easily been implemented from the beginning.
     
  7. I'd say that you can rotate CCW 3 times with those controls faster than you can do it 2 times with a single button, so it's not too too bad. TGM-style controls are even faster, but the Sega-style is still faster than the typical CW-CCW 2 button control format.
     

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