Take a look: http://www.neave.com/games/nblox/ " 2009 Tetris Holding, LLC. Tetris N-Blox developed by Paul Neave. Tetris, N-Blox and the Tetris trade dress are owned by Tetris Holding, LLC."
So maybe I missed something, but this make me somewhat happy. Considering this game doesn't follow the guideline, but is "endorsed" by TTC.
THis was picked due to 2 reasons. 1) popularity 2) similarity to gameboy tetris type a. It's definitely more oldschool than blockstar was. I hate it's controls, but you can just "play it like gameboy tetris" (which had no hard drop) reasonably. Okay, just played it some more... was the original really this bad? GB rotation (left preferring), with sega initial spawns. this means I pieces are much easier to move to the left than the right. gravity lock (when gravity forces a piece into a block, it locks instead). Uses keyboard typematic rate for auto-shift. Ignores input during line clear delay. Attempts to use gameboy scoring system. Speed seems to max out at level 10, at less than 1/2 G. CANNOT rotate while moving, because rotation during movement cancels auto-repeat for movement. ouch. This makes it worse than GB tetris.
This has happened before, but with BlockStar. I wanted to be an optimistic and think that perhaps there was some slim chance this could result in non-guideline but more polished and streamlined rulesets would be accepted. This recent adoption of a less polished game has clearly demonstrated that this is not the case. The precedent set here is that guideline breaks are only acceptable when it means that the current audience of a previously existing third-party game can be easily imported to an "official" site. Rather than seek progress through the refinement of their own games, they seem to be content in annexing other populated games. BlockStar? Hangame? N-Blox? The Tetris Company seems to have taken a fancy to imperialism.
What implications does this have for blockbox? I think Deniax has asked and got a reply of "hurr durrr, you're too small."
I find this perfectly consistent with the handling of Sega-style games (TGM and SEGA AGES): they can break the guideline because their "classic" modes are grandfathered in. But this does mean past misuse of a mark by a developer isn't an absolute bar to getting annexed. I wonder how imperialism can fit into free software like Emacs or KSirtet or Gnometris.
Actually it went like this: Deniax: "Can I get a Tetris licence for the Dutch region?" TTC: "Sorry, but there are already games for the English region" Clearly, they didn't even read and just replied with a canned response, as Deniax didn't ask for an English region licence.
that does suck, but i can't say that it matters much as it's faster to tap a piece to the wall anyway. i don't mind the memoryless randomizer. in fact i like it in games that don't reach 20G. but apparently the randomizer alone isn't enough to make the game challenging. level 10 gravity is tough but playable for average players, and easy for more experienced players. it really needs to get faster than that. i'd be interested in playing a mode that had time-based speed increases rather than level-based, and of course the gravity needs to eventually get fast enough to kill anybody (after 30 minutes?). faster players could score more points before each gravity increase. players would have plenty of room to improve their scores as they got faster. you shouldn't have to reschedule your life to find time to better your score, as you do in N-blox.
oh dear, this is the most detailed description about the blockstar game i could find today. it seems not on any wiki except a mention in the tetrisfriends article. there's definitely something inside one acquired by the tetris company, basically from this idea, i think it's worth a page in tetris wiki, like n-blox. but information about it seems vanished from the internet. fortunately a video of demonstrating a score cheat is still there...
I'll see what I can scrounge up from memory or old Facebook messages. I recall that when Facebook Tetris Friends brought back a "Block Star" mode, some players complained that the game was much more difficult than before as the gravity was allowed to continue increasing beyond the old cap. Some of my old message history also indicate something about it feeling like lock delay was more strict in later levels as well, but I can't recall the details. It seems like they may have re-imported the old leaderboard database, but a lot of those scores would have been very difficult to chase with gravity above 1G and no wallkicks/floorkicks to help. However, there was one point in time where a version update accidentally enabled SRS kicks in the Block Star mode; this allowed the game to be endlessly marathoned until another update corrected the regression. Another minor difference I found reference to in old posts on this forum is that the pre-acquisition had blue L and orange J, while the post-acquisition version changed them to conform with the Guideline color scheme.
