Fantastic stuff. With me not having a computer at the moment, and a DS lite together with Tetris got stolen, I want Jagoris back up!
the bashing might have something to do with the topic. that is to say, the reason TZ is looking bad right now (or at least should be) is that all of those damn exciting features you just mentioned are present, and have been present, in jagoris. for years. and if you want to argue that a 40 line mode is super super significant, imagine for a second how difficult that would be to implement.
i was thinking tz sounds great because it's an official game, and will attract a huge player base, which means we should be seeing some really great competition, and thereafter replayability.
thats the thing: tz is "official". its a good tetris, alltheway. but it is - compared with lockjaw or jagoris - somehow mediocre. i do not know the story behind jagoris, but it seems to me that there was some kind of supression from the bigcompany. now my argument is: ok, they have the intellectual properties (to my (low) understanding, done by manifesting the rules with "The Tetris Guideline" - the game concept and rules have to be written explicitly in text form - maybe the only reason that guideline exist?) and they have the brand name, thats totally ok, its the way it is these days. BUT: with them sitting on these stuff, i expect them to make the most out of it, make it BETTER than clones by one-men-teams. @caffeine: but you are right, lets stop this senseless rants/bashing. i was just a bit dissappointed as i saw tetris zone to be "just" a beginner friendly, normal tetris. i was just expecting a new evolution of tetris ala tetris worlds with tons of new gameplay features.
Err sorry i've said that TZ is looking bad ? i'm not bashing this game in particular. But i admit i already used to be badly critic about TDS leaderboard. Yep ! "Huge player base", "Great competition" on a word : community. Of course we are waiting to this new tetris official game to be good, as any game. But here we should particularly care about what have permitted to caffeine and this website to to be widely know as far as Japan. What will certainly again put him on top of this potential community. I mean, kbr420, come here ask us to buy that game (it is legitimate of course) and to take the leaderboard control and show to everybody who are the "experts" (in a not very respectul way for "current" MAC user and us finally btw).... OK no problem, but can they start to give us the means to ? If i'd be on caffeine position Replay would be my top wish priority. Not obliged to pass through youtube to show your performance but directly accessible to any game owner. Benefit for this website and community ? But It is funny to see how something that should consistantly link, grow and maintain a community, is implemented (when it is) with a poor security level, strongly weaken it after a decent distribution (sales) score have reached. Demotivating the potential basis of great players. honestly who wants to motivate on a broken game ? This enforce the idea that Tetris is just a casual business game that is always redistributed with just a "new visual shape". Sorry i still badly speculate but still no answer from the game designer. but again i'm not bashing TZ game design or game mode in particular.
Yeah, I think Jago is just frustrated that online Tetris has never been done "right" in an official Tetris game. Leaderboards without replays? Non-existant cheater prevention? Not only did Jagoris generally kick ass with only 1 developer, it had both those things. Replays that were wasted on our mediocre skill, and cheater prevention that was surely wasted on the audience of perhaps 5 people who ever played the game more than once. It's really not that hard to do these things... I've heard stories about the sort of bugs that have appeared in TZ, several which remain in the final product. Subjective game design criticism aside, if these stories are true then the programmer is nothing short of completely incompetent. It's just Tetris, buddy. If you're a programmer who can't code Tetris you fail at life. It's pretty gross that one self-taught man in his spare time can out perform a trained professional who is paid to work 8 hours a day. In conclusion they can keep milking Tetris like a mere cash cow all they like for all I care. I'm sure TZ will be ludicrously profitable, as most versions of Tetris are. Just don't expect me to get excited over their shoddy craftmanship.
i do care. i am really disappointed if a company suppresses much superior tetris games (tgm for playstation if i remember right) just to push their own broken, slow and non-innovative tetris games. also, they suppress independent developers, even those who do not intend to make money with their freeware games. what do they fear? do they fear that people are playing BETTER clones instead their not that good official games? poor guys. they have no guts. come on - start making better tetris'es, so much better that no single freeware programmer can keep up. then they may get my respect back again.
I think that's what the OMG 1080p + 5.1 surround sound is supposed to do with games like Tetris Evolution. In all honesty, I'll judge that game on it's own merits. But those features are worthless to me.
jago, i wasn't saying that your intention with the topic was to bash TZ, and it sucks that what should be a thread devoted to your awesome game has turned into that. i was just trying to explain the connection. that TZ looks bad when compared to jagoris. or any of the good clones for that matter. in line with the discussion, how absurd is it that there is no official pc online vs game? and as far as i can tell, heboris is superior to TZ in every imaginable way. except for the highscore board--but heboris has replays so that doesn't really matter. and--heboris is free. and developed in peoples spare time. sprint was recently added as a playable mode btw. it doesn't take a genius to see that the perfect tetris game would be the heboris feature set, in browser ala jagoris (with a download capable version--or not if you want to make money with ads) and online as well as hotseat vs play. that's it. that's the goddamn formula. so it pisses me off when i see the powers that be doing anything that isn't that. it leaves a very few possible options for these people in my mind. it's either political bullshit (as if an alternate simplified TZ style menu is soooo difficult to implement) or it's just total and complete incompetence. so TZ can go ahead and be successful, and as ct said, it will be, but i would remind everyone that the neave game is happily played by everyone in the goddamn world--have a little dignity and recognize that you know the difference between tetris; and crap.
But!! They pioneered gaming with their cellphone-based asynchronous VS. That's a neat feature and all, but tetrinet (the first successful online VS tetris?) has been around for what, a decade? And still it has no official competition. I think even tetrinet had replays too...
i have a feeling what i'm about to bring up might sound like "fighting words," so let me say that i have great respect for jag and his game, as well as anyone else who takes it upon himself to develop tetris in any way possible. when i played jagoris, i thought it was excellently designed. there's no denying that. do you really all have macs? how can you critisize tz without having played it? you really need to play the game before making these criticisms. for all you know you could really enjoy it. i could be wrong-- you could totally hate the game. it's different. i've played it a little bit, and gameplay-wise, it's different from other tetris games i've played. i haven't played it nearly enough to know if i recommend or criticize it yet, but i do know i had fun playing it. so what am i saying? well, jagoris was made to be just like tgm. let's not ignore that, okay? when you say you made it from scratch, you didn't. you took all your design information from another game exactly and entirely (gameplay-wise). where you do deserve credit is your implementation. the replay function and online leaderboard, security, and everything else surrounding the gameplay is great. but don't forget that tz didn't just try to copy, they made something new and different (hopefully good). and i think that deserves some merit. whether it's better or not, we'll find out. security and replays are great ideas, and people have been recommending this sort of stuff already, but don't criticize the gameplay when you yourself haven't even designed your own gameplay. or at least, wait until you've played the thing. that's all i'm saying
Compare The Tennis Guideline published by The Tennis Company, which players and umpires at the U.S. Open of Tennis must follow. The only difference here is that USTA doesn't have a trademark on Tennis. In such an analogy, "TGM style" and "TW style" become analogous to "hard court" and "grass court".
lol nice find tepples Umm... You realise of course that the entire sum of originality in TZ is the haphazard annexing of TGM features? And I don't have a Mac but I don't need one to read a feature list. For the record, we were also disapointed with TGMA for security holes and a lack of replays. And as I said, various bugs that have persisted into the retail product have been explained to me, and they are cause for disgust.
http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_146.phtml i would say jagoris is fair use. its non-profit and it doesnt affect official tetris games, as it uses other gameplay and is oriented towards pro-gamers, not casual gamers as with guideline games. or am i wrong?
precedent shows tris and ris extentions are a no-no. tetris zone didn't feel anything at all like tgm to me. then again, i haven't really played it that much.
"Fair use", all too often, means "we can afford more lawyers than you". So I look for slam-dunks, such as not copying anything protected in the first place. Luckily, the rules of a game, apart from any computer program implementing them, appear to constitute a method of operation, and per 17 USC 102(b), methods of operation are not subject to U.S. copyright. U.S. case law includes CA v. Altai, which defines a method for separating copyrighted elements from uncopyrightable elements in a program; and Lotus v. Borland, which defines the extent to which menus constitute a method of operation. Also see the U.S. Copyright Office's games flyer. Trademarks are easier to work around. I agree that avoiding "tris", ?? (tet), or ?? (ris, liss, lith) in the name of a product is a good idea, and the ultimate extension of that is choosing a name that shares 0 letters with the established brand, such as COCA-COLA vs. newcomer PEPSI. Can anyone fill me in on foreign counterparts?
caffeine, tetris "gameplay" is defined by ARE, DAS, locktime, lineclear, gravity, and your goal. jagoris, or heboris, or even LJ could be altered very very easily to play exactly like TZ or exactly like any other tetris game for that matter. i think taking a look at the selection menu in heboris is a very significant experience. now if you think the choices that TZ made for those values (which would not include goal, because those are all worlds/deluxe redux) are super interesting, i guess that's something. i'm not sure it's an answer to why your game sucks--ok, i take that back, why your game lacks seriously desirable and seemingly necessary features, but it's something. and i have played TZ.
