guess arika knows how fast these vids get around on the net. they've plugged their new xbox360 release of tgm ace in the two last videos. this is a very fast game. i clocked the last level to be around 165ppm. that's around 2.75 pieces per second. for non japanese speaking viewers, or just people who can't navigate: http://www.arika.co.jp/ click the left column entry under "bbs." scroll down until you see the videos entitled "TGM."
TGM is fantastic. Why do you waste your time with garbage like Elements and Worlds? I'm honestly surprised to find someone take those games seriously.
played worlds because it was on xbox live. online multiplayer is appealing in itself, and it's something rare upon authentic tetris games. currently playing elements because it's fast. it's actually faster than tgm3 in that-- once tweaked-- there are no frame animation restrictions; although, i haven't pushed it to its limits yet. right now my record on 40-line is 44 seconds. that's about 135 pieces per minute. could go a lot faster, though. once i'm able to get a record i'm satisfied with, i'll post a video to show you what i mean.
Elements is shameful though... All highscores save to the same list, no matter what mode you play. Contrary to popular belief, the videos on Arika's site are not world records. The TGM2 videos especially aren't even close. Were you to see a record play in motion, I doubt you'd complain that the series is too slow. (Though I'll admit that the original TGM is a little slow once you're good with instant gravity.) There's actually a lot of subtle enhancements in the TGM series that have strangely been absent from other Tetris games. I summarized some here, but that's rather dry and only covers the original game. Consider this: It is possible to play TGM entirely blindfolded if you've got the skill. Your claim about the multiplayer is totally warranted, however. But! If you were unaware, TGM:ACE is actually focusing on it. Sadly, when we asked Mihara (the father of TGM) about the possibility of a worldwide release, he said something to the effect of "I'd love to but it's hard enough for me to get a license for Japan." So barring some sort of miracle, we're not going to see a worldwide release. So yeah... How much TGM have you actually played? I get the impression you've only look at the videos for the pretty fast moving pictures. It's goes much much deeper than raw speed. Are you open minded enough to give the game a real shot?
haven't played too much tgm. i don't think i ever completed the game, but you're right about the videos not being world records. i was able to locate these sites: http://www13.plala.or.jp/TETRiS_TGM/index.html http://www.din.or.jp/~koryan/tetris/index_cj.htm they both give a great deal of information on the series, which is interesting. by the way, thanks for the additional information. very interesting, but it's really too bad about the licensing difficulties.
I hear those words "Frame animation restrictions" from time to time in discussions about Tetris in English; What does it mean? Maybe that the frame rate is locked to go no higher than 60 fps?
it means that the game puts little animations in where the tetrominoes drop or where the lines clear. the animations take a number of frames away from actual input frames (frames where the player can input commands), and that slows down gameplay. in short, a player has to wait for the animation to finish before he can continue playing. edit: but you mean about the wiki entry, i see. um, for that example, i meant to say that the tetrominoes couldn't drop any faster because then they'd have to drop more than once per 1 frame (yes, at 60fps), which interestingly happens in later games, but not in nes or gameboy versions. as for the z, s, and t triples-- very, very interesting. i played tetris worlds online for a long time, and i never came about such a situation. i plan to check it out whenever i get a chance.
I see what you mean. Yeah, the TGM series does have small pockets of non-controllable time while: 1)Completed lines are clearing, and 2)After a piece has locked down but before the next piece shows up. The developers of TGM have tuned the game though so that both of them keeps getting shorter after the game reaches 20G (Infinite fall speed). In later levels, line-clearing animations will just disappear. In addition to that, the following also shortens after 20G: 3)The controllable time from landing to lockdown 4)The time required to hold the joystick sidewards before the active piece zips in that direction at a speed of 1 grid square per frame So all aspects of play keeps getting faster in TGM. So I'm understanding that in Tetris Worlds, while #3 is long (and resets easily), there is no #2. Is this correct? edit: I'd also like to note that during #2, the player needs to wait for the next piece to show up but it IS possible for the player during that time to hold down the rotation/hold buttons to invoke initial rotation/hold, and to 'begin charging' the fast horizontal movement (#4) before the piece shows up. (Speaking of which, how does sideways movement work in Worlds?)
good questions. i would've thought you'd know (finding those triple quirks), but i can't really test worlds since i got rid of my xbox. i might find the cd rom around here somewhere. from memory anyway: 1 for sure, and maybe a couple of frames for 2. 3 nearly always infinite, but there exists situations where a lockdown must occur. horizontal movement works as one would expect.
Well the thing is that I'm familiar only with the rotation/compensation rules of the Worlds rules (also known as the Tetris Company's 2002 Tetris Guidelines), as a Worlds mode exists in TGM3. But I haven't played the Tetris Worlds game itself, so I'm not familiar with the finer details of that particular implementation. And as for horizontal movement, I asked "how it works" since TGM's horizontal movement works in a certain way: If you move the stick sideways, the piece will move in that direction by 1 grid square, in the immediate moment the horizontal input was recognized. So far so good. But in TGM, if you keep the stick held even after that initial 1-grid move, the piece will start moving quickly and continuously in that direction at a speed of 1 grid square per frame, until it hits the wall or the terrain. It's kind of like how a key repeat occurs on a computer keyboard: you push a key down first to produce the character once, then following a short delay, the character starts repeating quickly and continuously. So for finer controls, you move the stick in and out enough times to reach the destination. But when you just want to quickly slam it to the edge, you hold the stick and the game will move it for you, near-instantaneously. (This becomes vital when playing in instant gravity) The input repeating does not occur in the original Game Boy Tetris, where keeping the d-pad held will not do anything beyond the initial 1-grid move, and the player has to quickly release and push the d-pad repeatedly in order to move the piece to the edge. Still some other implementations do not have the 'charging' aspect and will start repeating the horizontal input immediately, but at a slower pace. This level of detail (how key-repeating is handled) was what I was interested in the last post. Sorry for the lack of elaboration.
familiar with the repeat/delay function, yes. i've played pc clones that use this type of setting (top players usually set a small "hold down key" delay and then far left or right in 1 frame. for worlds, i cannot tell you the frame measure, but i do know it doesn't go 1 per frame. it delays maybe a split second after holding and then it moves quickly to the side. not sure how quickly, though. i've read about tetris co.'s document "what is tetris," which outline mechanisms, tetromino fall speeds, etc. you have a copy of the 2002 guidelines?
The Tetris Guidelines are documents presumed to be developed by Henk Rogers and the Tetris Company, made in order to standardize Tetris on a single set of implementation rules. It has its existence only spoken of by several developers, and is probably locked away deep in the bowels of the Tetris Company to be accessible only to licensee companies who paid whatever amounts of money to make and sell a Tetris game. Apart from analyzing what the licensee developers said, We can only examine and deduce the guidelines from the implementations of the compliant games. From TGM series creator Ichiro Mihara's statements, we know that there exists a 2002 version and a 2005 version to the guidelines, the former of which Tetris Worlds and TGM3 are compliant with, and the latter which TGM ACE is "almost" (Mihara's words) compliant with. The 2005 version seems to be stricter and in more detail. What is almost certainly governed by both guidelines: - Block rotation/compensation rules - Piece colors (The I piece is cyan while the T piece is purple, as opposed to I red and T cyan) - Initial stance of pieces (L/J/T enter play with their flat sides facing down, not up) - Lockdown behavior (Rotating a piece will reset its internal lockdown countdown) - Behavior of the up button (The piece both immediately drops to the bottom and locks down, as opposed to just dropping and not locking down) - Behavior of the down button (The piece falls quickly and will not lock down, as opposed to falling quickly and then locking down) - Existence of the hold function - Number of piece previews (This seems to be a variable between 3 and 5, as the number fluctuates a bit even in compliant games) - Default button layout (left button rotates clockwise, right button rotates counterclockwise) - Use of Roger Dean's Tetris logo What was possibly either changed or newly defined in the 2005 guidelines: - Use of Russian classical music (The developer of TGM ACE stated that their usage was mandatory) - The initial piece height (Pieces must start falling from an location higher than the top of the well, instead of the top of the well) - Sound effects playing upon rotation, horizontal movement, lockdown and line clearing - Counting of levels using lines cleared (and not by pieces dropped + lines cleared) The key repeat/delay behavior is something uncertain among this, as both TGM3 and TGM ACE behaves in the way I described and apparently not as it does in Tetris Worlds. Either the key repeat behavior is not defined in the guidelines, or it could be possible that it's defined but Mihara argued his way to break the guidelines in TGMA (hence making TGMA "almost" compliant.)
then how could you know, if you've never played tetris worlds nor do you have a copy of the rotation compensation rules, that t, z, and s can clear triples?
I got the rotation compensation rules from here: http://www.din.or.jp/~koryan/ Koryan, one of the top TGM players in Japan, figured out the compensation implementation of the World rules through repeated experimentation. He did it using Tetris Advance for the GBA, which also uses the World rules. http://www.din.or.jp/~koryan/tmp/w_t-spin_j.gif http://www.din.or.jp/~koryan/tmp/w_t-spin_z.gif http://www.din.or.jp/~koryan/tmp/w_t-spin_t.gif Going from left to right, the game checks the rotated shape against the terrain. If the rotated shape collides with the terrain, the game chooses the next candidate and checks again. If it goes through all candidates and there still was a collision, the piece would refuse to rotate. The example given in the Wikipedia notes uses the fifth compensation candidate from L0 to L1 of the Z piece. http://www.din.or.jp/~koryan/tmp/gba-tw_spins-i.gif He stopped halfway through analyzing the rotation of the I piece, as there was an inconsistency in the compensation behavior between different rotation directions. In all other pieces, rotating pieces in the other direction yielded symmetrical compensation results. But the I in Tetris Advance did not. He considers this a bug in Tetris Advance, and states (albeit from his memory) that the compensation in TGM3 acted in a symmetrical manner.
Also, I do have a Worlds-compliant implementation running on my cell phone; In my experiments at least the Z and T did snap in. In fact the game's scoring chart had a special score listed for "T-spin triples", which got me interested in this whole weirdo triple thing in the first place.
Incorrect, the delay is so long that most people will repeatedly press the d-pad. But there is still an auto-move. Needle, do you play TGM? Or read Japanese? It seems you too follow Mihara's blog. I might have some people you'll want to meet....
Oh. Missed that one. Guess I was too impatient to notice... I play TGM and read Mihara's blog, in fact I'm Japanese and live in Japan
Wow. How good are you? I can get GM in about 11 minutes in the original TGM. I haven't passed the lvl 500 barrier in TGM2 deathmode yet, and I can get to the master mode invisible challenge with S9 but I fail miserably. I've only owned TGM2 for a month though, so give me time. I don't have the opportunity to play these in the arcades like you do, so I have to catch up. I'm part of a small community of GM class players outside Japan. We've been struggling by, using machine translation to read Japanese websites (Mihara's blog, 2ch, etc). Maybe you remember a while back when Mihara said he was asked by a guy from France about an international TGMA release. That was us. If you don't mind, I have a few questions: 1. What is the full story of GTET? How did it influence TGM2? And could you share the latest version if you have it? 2. Why was the delay between TGM2 and TGM3 so long? 3. Why was neither TGM nor TGM2 ported to a game console? Sorry I have so many questions. These have all been addressed before in various places, but machine translation has not given comprehensible answers. If you know any answers us western TGM players would be very grateful to hear them.
Double post, but I thought I'd answer some of Needle's questions to be fair. Yes, this is accurrate. As a bonus, here is another correction: I know this is false for the original TGM (obviously). In TGM2's death mode, this time is 0 only lvl 200-300 (if I remember correctly). After this it increases (but other timers decrease to keep the game moving faster). I believe Heboris drops it to 0 permanently, though I'd have to double check that. I have the exact frame counts for all the timings. I also have a 100% accurate reverse engineered piece randomizer. Our small western TGM community knows every gameplay-relevent technical detail about the first 2 games, extracted directly from the program ROMs. We may be small, but we're hardcore.
