I did say I'd ask for help. I've recently discovered this and I've been playing it for a little while. I want to know how I could possibly improve on it. When I get the chance, I'll post a video I've made. Anyways, I know the basics of stacking, Tetrises, and the sort. Getting SK/Skill is easy. Gravity gets me because of how fast it gets after a while, and I still need better reaction time when placing blocks (place time for me ranges from 0.5-1 sec). Need to practice T-Spins as well. This will probably be better when I upload the video and post it here. Farthest I've gotten is 311, rank 5 on Master. It was Items Mode though, so not that impressive. The video will probably be a Item Mode video though because it's so addictive. EDIT: Video's up, here it is.
My first advice would be to learn how to IRS, and practice doing it reliably. Sometimes it's helpful to try and IRS every piece, even if you don't need to (then just rotate it back) so that when you do need it under pressure you've got the timing. It makes a specific "schwing" sound (inb4 wayne's world) when you get it right. Other than that, really, there's not that much else to say from a technical standpoint - at the moment you seem to mostly just struggle with the speed of the game at faster/20G levels. At this stage there's not a lot you can do to really overcome that besides practising more until your brain can process the piece placements faster. And you don't need to practice T-Spins. They mean absolutely nothing in TGM. Learning some advanced wallkicks can help but to be honest I'd say that's a bit above your level right now - dealing with 20G speed should come first.
I think you first have to learn how two use at least two of the rotation buttons. Without it even IRS is worthless (at least half the time). Rotation direction matters a lot in TGM, you won't get much beyond 300 without both ever.
I second everything that has been said. Interesting choices here and there, but don't forget to skim lines as much as possible to survive. Food for thought : Imagine if you place a piece flat, without any rotation, and see if it fits somewhere or clears a line
All good advice so far. I would second the advice to use both rotation directions, I don't think I noticed you rotate clockwise at all, particularly obvious was when rotating T and L pieces 3 times counter-clockwise when a single clockwise rotation would do. Using both rotations will make IRS more useful. Try to pay attention to what the next piece is, and if possible, place your current piece so that you have a spot to play the next piece without leaving holes. Stacking flat, but not too flat helps with this. DAS is your friend. Even if you don't need to place a piece all the way to the side of the well, using DAS can make it faster and at higher speeds possible to move the pieces where you want them. If you need to move the piece one space away from the right side, it's faster to DAS all the way to the side and tap back once than to tap three times to move the piece over. The most important thing is to keep practicing. Concentrate on clean stacking while playing slowly so this becomes easier to do when playing faster. Edit: forgot a word
You remind me a lot of myself when I started playing. Lots of the same habits. I also didn't use IRS at first and only rotated one direction. I had also never done a T spin in my life. I prayed to make it to 200 every game for the slowdown. Knowing that I had to break habits that I have had for over a decade was a little bit daunting. It's still pretty fresh for me (I only started in May) so I'll explain how I broke my one rotation direction habit. First of all, IRS is great and not hard to get the hang of. So I was dicking around trying to play 20g when I clearly had no business playing it and would always end up rotating the J piece counter-clockwise just like you're doing now. The problem is that the J piece when rotated counter-clockwise (or as I remember it, left button) is only one block wide and would get stuck in all kinds of holes. So I started hitting B (middle button) every time the J piece appeared as my next piece. I slowly got the hang of it and started rotating my other pieces with it from there. It took months to fully break the habit though, I only managed to finally perfect a T-Spin coming from the right about a month ago. It's not easy but you'll get the hang of it. Start with the J.
Yeah, a good practice point to start with is to IRS every J piece clockwise and IRS every L piece counter-clockwise. You basically need to most of the time anyway under 20G conditions.
Finished Normal (selected it by mistake oops) w/o Items today. It has a...decent, time? I'm not sure since most of you guys are masters at this and I can't compare, haha Wasn't able to record input :< but I did happen to get a snapshot. If this image is too small I'll try to upscale it, but I don't think it is. Should probably figure out if you can change MAME snapshot sizes. Anyways, tried out the strategies you told me about and they worked fantastically! I wasn't exactly trying to go fast, but IRS helped me place blocks a lot faster than usual. Didn't really try DAS, but I did fine without it (but that's normal egh). Anyways, thanks for help! I'll post here again whenever I improve a bit more on Master (or TGM+).
You can also post your scores in the relevant leaderboard threads in that subforum as well (which I've been meaning to tidy up but keep forgetting to do). Always nice to see a bit of competition at the lower end of the rankings as well as the top!
