Hey, my name's Adar and like many others, I imagine - I got hooked on TGM because of AGDQ. I play TGM2 daily nowadays and I can clear normal mode fairly often (I still royally suck but I've only been at it for a week or two). I tried T.A Death mode and realized just how unsustainable my stacking tactics are in high gravity situations. I get demolished nearly-instantly (The best I got was to level 90). I told myself I should probably learn how to stack in low gravity normal mode before I move on to Death/Master modes, but I now feel like that's shooting myself in the foot.. You simply can't transition that way gracefully, because your mind will tend to want to do things that you simply can't or otherwise really shouldn't do.. So how do I avoid this pitfall and still make progress? I feel like I get a little bit better after playing T.A Death but I really can't tell. It's such a huge jump from normal/master modes that it feels like there should be something in the middle. So I figured I should probably set up nullpomino on a difficulty that's somewhere in the middle that wouldn't foster bad habits like normal mode and would't absolutely demolish me like T.A Death... do you guys have any idea how to configure it that way? I love playing TGM specifically because of those arcade-y sounds and blipblops and the awesome tetris rules it's abiding by, so I'm not too excited about switching to a different game.. but if that means that in the long run I get to enjoy TGM more than I do now then that's what I'm going to do. I hope this thread isn't breaking any rules.. I felt the topic was distinguished enough but maybe I'm wrong. P.S - You guys are awesome! I don't know how many times I watched Kevin's GM stream and AGDQ and I'm looking forward to watching the mysterious "TGM Crew" in SGDQ in a couple of weeks!
While I thnk you're correct that habits from stacking at sub-20G could probably be an issue when you start learning 20G stacking, I'd still probably recommend getting good at "regular Tetris" before trying to tackle death mode. If only to get a better intuitive feel for the pieces and where they go. I wouldn't start getting into Death Mode until you're able to regularly clear at least level 400 on Master. Other in here might disagree, but really I guess it depends on your general experience in Tetris. I think the best thing you can do to start out is reading this guide throroughly, so you're familiar with all of the concepts you need to know: http://kitaru.1101b.com/TGMGUIDE/ There's a billion threads like this on the forum so look around. There's also a good thread where colorthief goes through a Death GM game piece by piece, explaining the thought behind all of his placements. It's very informative, but I can't seem to find it using the search feature.
Maybe try to play with the 20G code (8 times down and then C-B-A), that is what helped me a lot. Still you will need a lot of games played before you stop trying moves, which will not work. Reading helps, but you cannot recall that knowledge within a half second without a lot of training.
Might as well start on Death mode Will probably take a while to get past level 100 for the first time anyway
Thanks for your input guys. For some reason I wasn't aware of the 'strategy' subform. Will definitely read more. Sumez, I went through kitaru's TGM guide which was fantastic.
I'm using OSX (don't have a PC atm) and no matter what I do I can't get TGM1 to run in MAME... so it's TGM2+ for me. I'm getting better though. I spoke too quickly and I feel like I came off a bit too eager. I'm gonna just keep playing and make a fucking pyramid.
Try to keep on focusing on keeping your first seven left columns clean, just dropping all the pieces you don't know what to do with on the right
I naturally tend to stack high and clean on the left for some reason, so that'll be pretty easy to try out. Thanks for the tip
