I have Pokémon Shock Tetris for my Nintendo Pokémon Mini handheld LCD games console. How can I help complete the wiki entry for this version? http://tetrisconcept.net/wiki/Tetris_(Pokémon_Mini) Read more about it here: http://www.pokemon-mini.net/games/pokemon-shock-tetris/ http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/Pokémon_Shock_Tetris http://www.pokezam.com/games/mini/tetris/ Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw8XdKb_1NE See this old thread: http://tetrisconcept.net/forum/showthread.html?t=1123 Cheers, matt
Anything is helpful. I started filling in some simple things I caught from the video like the number of previews, if Hold is present, and so on. The player in the video didn't use a Hard Drop (and it looked like the soft drop was non-locking), but maybe you could fill in whether it is present or not. If you can make a short list of game modes, any scoring details, how to catch pokémon, -- anything of that sort -- that would be a great start. If you know other details like how to increase the level or when pentominoes start showing up, those would also be good things to have in full article. Also, does the game include the full set of pentominoes, or only a certain subset? I totally forgot about this game. I might look into getting it emulated at some point.
It's emulatable with minimon. 1 Player Modes are 1. Standard - Play Tetris Endlessly. Like every other classic standard mode, it gets faster with lines cleared. 2. 20 Lines - Clear 20 Lines as fast as possible. Like 40 lines... only.... 20. 3. Pyramid - An interesting mode I've not seen in another game. It's a time attack to get a Tetris, a triple, a double and a single. They don't have to be in order. Vs. Modes are the same. In the single player standard mode, you can play with pieces made of 4 blocks (So the standard ISZLJTO pieces. This mode is called Rookie), or you can play with a mix of 4 and 5 blocks. They have two modes with a mix, one called Normal, one called Super. These cannot be used in Vs. I've never figured out the difference between Normal and Super because I don't play them much. 5 block pieces are dumb. As far as I can tell, soft drop DOES lock, but it locks when the softdrop would make the current piece collide with the stack, rather than just make contact with the stack. It does have hard drop on up. DAS and Soft Drop seem to both be 1G. <3 <3 Edit: Just checked on the emulator. DAS and Soft Drop are indeed 1G. The gimmick of this game is that you can turn an L into a J or an S into a Z by shaking the system. It makes it very easy to last forever in this game, even without hold. It has 4 states for S, Z, and I, but spawn the pieces flat side up like ARS. I'm not sure about the kick table, but it's not move reset. I'm not sure if it has lock delay, or if the piece locks when gravity would make the piece have contact with the stack. I think it has lock delay, because I don't remember the high speeds being too tough, but I'd have to play a game where it gets fast again. I never paid too much attention. I do think it has what Tepples called "active ARE" which is a period of time where you can move the piece, but gravity doesn't affect it for a short while. The whole game plays a lot like Tetris DX, actually. Which automatically means I've always loved it. It has really complete rankings, and honestly catching Pokemon is pretty decent reward for getting Tetrises. I have no idea on the randomizer, but it's probably cruel like NES Tetris. With the shake gimmick, this doesn't matter. It's a really solid game! I've always been curious about the Vs. Modes (in all Pokemon mini games, not just this one), but I only have one Pokemon Mini, and it's not an easy thing to find someone else with, let alone this game. I'll investigate some things and make another post perhaps.
Wow. Yeah, that's definitely a good start. Cool, now we can start building an article bigger than those stubs on the other wikis. NES cruel? It's the second game to use a light implementation of a History randomizer. Droughts can happen, but it does a pretty good job of limiting direct repetition.
Okay. So that shows what I know about randomizers. I played a really long game last night, and figured a little bit more out. The game goes up a level every eight lines cleared. It has eightway movement on half the controller! You can soft drop while holding left and right, but you can't hard drop while holding left and right. I actually think that's a pretty cool idea. When you're soft dropping, left/right movement of the piece stops. I got to level 76 and cleared 603 lines. The speed curve seems VERY slow, and I got the feeling it was still getting faster at like level 35. The max gravity of the game is 1G (verified in emulator by playing frame by frame), unless it gets faster passed level 76. If I had to guess, I'd say it reaches 1G at level 50. It definitely has lock delay since it didn't feel like it was locking like NES Tetris when it was at it 1G speed. It probably has step, not entry reset. I wasn't too scientific in these tests though, as minimon doesn't have frame advance mapped to a hotkey which makes finding exact values like the gravity at level one and lock delay very tedious and error prone. And without savestates, I can't get to a speed, make a savestate then go back. I have actually wanted to make games for this tiny console ever since I got it, but am still finishing up another kind of assembly game at the moment. Point being, at some point I may be able to just disassemble it and find everything out.
Every rom dump of an official Pokemon Mini game is 512 KB. A cursory hex editor check reveals that the japanese version uses about 447 KB of this space. I'd assume most of that is graphics. I have a harder time finding unused space in the European version, so I don't have a good number for that. I can't tell how much is code and how much is graphics, because I don't know how Pokemon Mini graphics are stored. It may be 1bpp (black and white) or 2bpp (black, white, transparent, and alternating for a shade of gray). Edit: Okay, just found a much better debugger. The emulator I was using was years old. I can probably figure out some more timings now.
