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Rereading and translation ~ Help me write an article Vol.2

Thread in 'Discussion' started by PetitPrince, 17 Feb 2007.

Page 2 of 3

tepples Lockjaw developer

colour_thief said:

-the wallkick picture shows TGM style wallkicks but the pieces have SRS colours
Click to expand...

But this is the case for Frankentetris ACE, right?

tepples, 23 Apr 2007

#21
colour_thief

I hope you guys like it... I stole 2 hours of my sleep to finish the last third.

Anyhow, I corrected minor errors but left large ones in (then I'd be rewriting, not translating). I had to translate some puns... we'll see how that goes. A few things I translated quite liberally. A few things my French failed me on. My apologies for the differences, but I think I still did the job well enough. PetitPrince, please feel free to rework my translation in any way.

As for my comments above... I can understand glossing over things, but as a minimum Shimizu and especially Sega Tetris needs a mention. Feel free to ask questions about the influence of these games. I even have a copy of Shimizu Tetris! (Thank you Needle!)

Oh and a final warning before peple read it... You might want to wait until PetitPrince adds all the pretty pictures and video and animations that were in the original source.

Tetris the Grand Master - The series
What follows is the second version of an article I'm preparing for publication on tetrisconcept and grospixel (a French retrogaming website). There's lots of ways I could improve it, but it's quite a bit better than my previous (and private) attempt. Text contained in [] brackets are placeholders. I intend to work the text over.

Tetris Japan Finals
There is a famous superplay video found throughout [Internet ; the web ]. Perhaps you've seen it before?

Like many people, my initial reaction to this video was something along the lines of "WTF? Wow, fast! Oh. Japanese." and I left it at that. But behind this video there was a game of unimaginable depth: the Tetris the Grand Master series. "Come again? A deep Tetris game? What's so special about that??" you might say. Patience, young grasshopper, for the real presentation is yet to begin.

Now Presenting: The TGM Series
TGM, this is the reader; reader, I present you Tetris the Grand Master, or TGM for short. Oh. Right. It doesn't quite work that way does it... Let's try this again shall we?
TGM is a Tetris arcade game released in 1998 on Sony's Playstation-based ZN-2 hardware (the same as games like Strider 2 and Battle Arena Toshinden 2). It has had 2 arcade sequels (Tetris the Grand Master 2 The Absolute et Tetris the Grand Master 3 Terror Instinct) and most recently a release on Xbox 360 (Tetris the Grand Master ACE).

TGM, TGM2, TGM3, TGMA

The people behind TGM are a small studio called Arika. Started by several ex-Capcom employees, it's a relatively little known company. They are responsible for other games such as [Japanese text] and [more Japanese text]... More seriously, they developped the Street Fighter Ex series and are responsible for the celebrated top-quality ports of a couple manic shmups to PS2 (Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou, Esp. Galuda). They've also done many games with Clamp licences, such as Card Captor Sakura or Tsubasa Chronicles.

Ichiro Mihara... Uhh, not this one, sorry

The vice president of Arika, and also the designer behind TGM, is Ichiro Mihara. A Capcom veteran (he worked on the original Megaman), he is a diehard perfectionist. For example, he did not hesitate to cancel the PS2 port of Ketsui (another Cave shmup) when it did not meet his expectations in arcade accuracy.

Street Fighter Ex, DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou, Esp Galuda, Tsubasa Chronicles DS

For the rest of the story, I'll give the floor to Needle, a member of the TetrisConcept forum and a veritable fountain of TGM knowledge (reading Japanese, Mihara's Blog, and 2chan certainly helps with that).
Back in the late nineties, there was a popular TV variety show called Gotsu E Kanji, in which the show hosts occasionally played Tetris against each other on air. Arika was originally internally developing a versus-oriented home console game inspired by that show, with lots of items, PaRappa the Rapper-like characters, and bells & whistles. When they talked with the show's hosts however, they stated that they'd like more of a vanilla game since the beauty of the game lies in its simplicity. In the end, the show folded without Arika's game materializing.
About half an year later, there was some incident that irked Mihara (specifics are not mentioned), which made him decide to develop a game for the arcades. The "simplicity" quote by the TV show host still stuck with him, which influenced his design of the overall game, while the versus parts were carried over from the unreleased console game.
TGM was therefore born from a television show, a certain culture of players and the mantra of "simplicity". From it's game show roots it took... umm... nothing. Bad example, sorry. From its player culture it took the spirit of competition. And from the mantra of simplicity, well... Tetris has a pure and simple premise. All Mihara did was add a few subtle changes to the basic game. And like the game of Go, it is possible for simple rules to give birth to complex and deep gameplay.

A game of Go

Easy to learn, hard to master
Let us review the progression of a game of "normal" Tetris, such as on the Game Boy, for example. It happens like this: the player receives a piece (tetromino, tetramino, piece, mino, @#*$& piece, noooo not that one, etc...) which he must place in the game space in such a way that he fill lines.
When a line is completely filled with blocks, it clears.
As you clear more and more lines, the pieces start falling faster. Here comes a distinction with TGM: in Game Boy Tetris, for example, the maximum speed is fixed at 1 unit every every 20th of a second (aka once unit every 3 frames, with the Game Boy screen running at a refresh rate of approximately 60Hz). In TGM, the pieces never stop falling faster and faster. Put another way, the gravity increases until piece begin to fall instantly (20 units each frame). And this, it changes everything.

Why? Because this gravity significantly constrains the palyer's piece placement options, radically changing the way pieces are stacked. It takes more than to simply avoid making holes. You must maintain a vaguely pyramid like shape so that pieces can flow to the sides of the screen. In fact, everything is tuned for high speed play.

This is how it's all dressed up: the stack of placed pieces is darker than the active piece. A white line contours the shape of your stack to provide a good impression of its structure. A unique sound is tied to each of the 7 pieces and is played in advance so that you know what is coming next. Similarly, each piece has their own colour. It might seem like small details, but these features add up to allowing the player to know the state of the game in the blink of an eye.

The gameplay also has features dedicated to facilitating high speed play. After a piece is placed, there is a brief pause before it locks in place. This is essential at high speed, for without this pieces would lock on top of each other rapidly before you have time to do anything with them. Not cool.
Another new element is the IRS (Initial Rotation System). It allows you to pre-rotate pieces before they enter the screen. It might seem like this is useless or nearly useless. But at high speed, it it indispensible. These pictures will explain it better than words ever could:

The first animation is a simple demontration of how IRS works. In the second animation, the player wants to place his piece to the left. Not quite up to the challenge, the "stump" [ member ] of the piece blocks the way putting him in an embarrassing situation. In the third, the player has properly handled the beast, and now it glides over and into the hole perfectly. (any dubious interpretation of the preceding passage is entirely your imagination ).
Aside from these gameplay additions, certain existing elements had to be changed for high speed play.

Notably, the piece randomizer. Theoretically speaking, each Tetris piece is given out completely at random. This is all well and good, but it permits the existence of the sequence of doom (<insert evil laugh here>). What is this? Simply put, it's a streak of S and Z pieces, without others. It's a sequence that forces the player to lose. Well, in practice, you rarely get this exact scenario. But the point still stands: it's really shitty when you get too many of the same piece in a row. To prevent this problem, you need a good piece generator. In a nutshell, here's how TGM's works. We don't truly know if really works like this, but statistically, it gives a similar distribution of pieces (yes, people have done statistical analysis on this... says something about the passion of the players eh? ).

The randomizer maintains a history of the 4 most recent given pieces.
Every time it needs to generate a piece, it will impartially choose one of the 7 pieces.
The randomizer checks if this chosen piece is found in the history. If it isn't, this piece is given. If it is, it picks one of the 7 pieces randomly again. If after 4 attempts, it still does not succeed at finding a piece outside the history, it settles for this recently given piece.
The advantage of this generator is that by and large you get an even distribution of pieces. Put another way, the player never feels cheated by the machine (by repeatedly providing the same unwanted pieces), but is still surprised by the unpredictable piece sequence.

The second point I want to discuss is the rotation system of the pieces. Have you ever asked yourself how a Tetris piece rotates? Well, in reality, the term "rotation system" encompasses other gameplay elements as well. It would perhaps be best to rephrase the question as "how can the player interact with the pieces"... but the previous term is sexier so I'll keep it.

The rotations themselves are not that important, it's what's around the pieces at the time that is. What happens when a piece, up against a wall, is rotated? An elegant general solution to this problem is wallkicks. Here, I'll demonstrate it with picture:

The first picture depicts a piece up against the wall (though it could just as well have been blocked by other pieces). The second picture shows how the piece wants to rotate. Certainly, having a piece encassed in the wall is not what the player wants to happen here. One solution would be to simply make rotation impossible in this scenario, but this would limit the game too much. The solution TGM adopts is shown in the third picture: the piece is simply rotate as it wants, but one space to the right. If one space to the right still overlapped another piece, TGM would then try to place it one space to the left.

Failing all 3 of those options, then it would simply fail to rotate (lest things get ridiculous >_<).

TGM's rotation system has plenty of restrictions, without being overly restricting. Err, well, that sounds like an oxymoron. But it's true! Certain restrictions on rotation prevent the player from placing pieces wherever he likes (especially in 20G), which forces the player to not overthink things.

TGM is a game that is nervous, fast paced, and completely dedicated to the talent of the player. Mihara focused on the quintessential essence of Tetris (placing pieces correctly) and through his game, challenged players to new heights. This is why the game is limited to fewer than 999 pieces, and timed: at this level of skill, survival is assumed. The real task is to prove your talent through more tetrises and a faster time to 999. This aspect of competition is emphasized wih a grading sytem (9 to 1, then S1 to S9, then finally Gm) which permitsa general way of classifying the player skill.

Even if it's a game that favours a certain type of elite super human that can surpass 88 miles per hour, it doesn't exclude the rest of us: it's still just Tetris! You don't need to be a beast to enjoy playing the game, and without great difficulty a novice can discover the subtleties of the game for himself (though obviously, at 100 Yen a pop, it's a little different than 1 or 2 Euros per game).

Appendix : The Depressing State of Tetris Today Redux
Since the expiration of the original Tetris contracts in 1996, The Tetris Company (TTC), fonded by Henk Rogers, has since aquired complete rights to the game. Every game bearing the Tetris name must be approved by the company. Everything is standardized in a confidential document (revised periodically) which is called the Tetris Guidelines.

TTC's vision of Tetris is quite a bit different than that of Mihara's. Whereas Mihara approached the game methodically and polished the gameplay to satisfy hardcore gamers, TTC likes to keep things aimed squarely at casual players, with "cool" features of dubious lasting appeal.

To illustrate things more clearly, I will take the most striking difference from TGM: le feature of Infinity. Recall above the dilemma of high speed play: if there isn't a brief delay before locking when a piece is placed, high speed play becomes impossible. Well. In TGM, this "locking delay" resets every time the piece drops lower. In games strictly following TTC's rules, this delay is reset by any movement or rotation. Combined with different wallkick rules that allow rotation in almost any circumstance, you can effectively place pieces as slowly as you want at all times, regardless of the gravity.

Rogers defends himself by saying that abusing this feature will simply waste time that a skillful player could put to better use. And in multiplayer games, this is absolutely true: Tetris DS's online mode is a killer experience (to be avoided during exam time). The problem is that the single player modes aren't penalizing the player for wasting time, which in turn makes them a waste of time. To take another example from Tetris DS, any player can reach 99,999,999 if they have the patience. No talent is required.

So. Mihara and the TTC have very different visions of Tetris. The frustrating thing is this: as time goes on the Tetris Guidelines are becoming more restrictive. The early rules were no doubt more reasonable (stuff like "the game area must be 10 by 20 blocks, plus 2 invisible spaces where the pieces spawn"), but the rules have gradually expanded to the point where they are chocking the TGM series to death. The current rules make TTC's rotation rules and infinity feature mandatory (the official name for that is SRS, or Super Rotation System... oh the irony). It has neutered TGM's high speed challenge. TGM has lost its balls.

For a little more history, the guidelines first started affecting the series with TGM3 (2005). But at that time it was only mandatory for games to include SRS, not focus on it. TGM3 worked around this by letting the player choose between TGM and SRS rotation systems, the latter of which is much less popular among players. In contrast, by the time TGM ACE was released, Mihara was forced to only include TGM rotation later with a Xbox Live update, and even then it was missing many of the features players had come to expect from the classic rotation system. As a result of this, player largely kept to TGM3 and even made their own game. Which brings me to my next appendix.

Appendix : fan games
Heboris

One must never underestimate the internet, especially the super-active 2ch community, one of the most popular Japanese forums. The most pimped up clone is Heboris. It started as a solo project to clone TGM2. But as a result of being written in TGS2000 (YaneuraoGameScript 2000), an easily moddable environment (you could load the script up in Notepad, if you liked). So over time the 2ch community shared modifications adding new features to the game. Currently, it is possible to simulate TGM2, TGM3, TGM ACE, DTET (another unofficial, but popular Tetris game), and Tetris DS with a high degree of accuracy, and more features are always being added. The only problem with this game is that it's a little trick to set up. You must first download the old official Heboris, and then apply the latest unofficial patch on it.

Lockjaw

Lockjaw is developped by Damien tepples Yerrick, another member of TetrisConcept and a longtime participant in the homebrew scene. Whereas Heboris aims to clone popular games, Lockjaw's apeal comes from it's unique game modes and especially its ridiculous customizability. It is, in fact, an excellent tool for training under a diverse range of conditions. Though, without a nice skin, it's quite unsightly. It's the foobar2000 of Tetris fan games.

Conclusion
Here we are at the end of the article. I hope you are at least getting the urge to dust off your old Game Boy, or better, giving TGM a try! Do not hesitate to ask any questions, on either the grospixel or tetrisconcept forum.
Click to expand...

colour_thief, 23 Apr 2007

#22
PetitPrince

Yay !

Shiny english version.

Colour_Thief > Merci !

PetitPrince, 23 Apr 2007

#23
PetitPrince

colour_thief said:

-Mihara is vice president, not president
-the wallkick picture shows TGM style wallkicks but the pieces have SRS colours
-the randomizer rolls up to 4 times in TGM and 6 times in TGM2/TGM3, not uniformly 4 rolls
Click to expand...

Corrected

-the wallkick picture shows TGM style wallkicks but the pieces have SRS colours
Click to expand...

Stupid me >_<. Corrected.

-the randomizer is known to be correct, except for TGM3 where the statistics are known to match, and TGMA where it is known to be the SRS random generator, and Sakura modes where it's a custom sequence
Click to expand...

Ok. But I want to keep in the article the fact that you did a statistical attack on TGM randomzer .

-it sounds like you want to credit TGM as spawning from a competitive VS Tetris show, when it's actually the result of a culture of hardcore Sega's arcade Tetris players (single player, mostly)
[..]
-Tetris with Card Captor Sakura sort of counts as a TGM game and should at least be mentioned
-there is no mention so far of Sega's Tetris, Flashpoint and Bloxeed. these games have shaped the series immensely
-Shimizu Tetris (a fan game) should get a mention for birthing 20G

Regarding the last 2 points... When you boil it down to it's essence, the only original elements of the TGM series are the randomizer, IRS and the wallkicks (and some VS/Sakura gimmicks ). Though obviously the refined arrangement of previous elements contributes greatly to its success. Shirase, for example, took screen rising from Bloxeed and [] blocks from early Tetris games. Sakura borrows Flashpoint's formula. I'd have to check Bloxeed, but I think it had a similar VS style.
Click to expand...

I guess I praised a little too much Mihara on those point. I'll see how to put the "top of evolution" side of TGM in the text.

PetitPrince, 23 Apr 2007

#24
Rosti LFC

Typo:

Like many people, my initial reaction to this video was something along the lines of WTF? Wow, thats fast! This japanese guiy is crazy.
Click to expand...

BLOG|YOUTUBE

Rosti LFC, 23 Apr 2007

#25
caffeine

and "Why? Because this gravity significantly constrains the palyer's..."

caffeine, 23 Apr 2007

#26
Rosti LFC

Other than that, the article is fantastic.

BLOG|YOUTUBE

Rosti LFC, 23 Apr 2007

#27
colour_thief

Yeah, sorry guys. I was working on this during breaks at work, where I have access to a spellchecker, and finished it at home where I don't. Please share any mistakes you find. Grammar nazys would be especially apreciated.

he fill lines -> he fills lines

Ill demonstrate it with picture -> Ill demonstrate it with pictures

the piece is simply rotate -> the piece is simply rotated

still overlapped another piece -> still overlaps another piece

which permitsa -> which permits a

fonded by Henk Rogers -> founded by Henk Rogers

a little trick -> a little tricky

or better, -> or better yet,

colour_thief, 23 Apr 2007

#28
PetitPrince

PetitPrince said:

I guess I praised a little too much Mihara on those point. I'll see how to put the "top of evolution" side of TGM in the text.
Click to expand...

Okay, rewrote the part.

Mme si Needle semble laisser entendre que TGM soit le fruit d'un mission tl, il ne faut pas oublier que TGM s'est beaucoup inspir de prcdent Tetris, notamment ceux de Sega (leur Tetris, Flashpoint, Bloxeed), et mme d'un jeu de fan ("Shimizu Tetris", un clone obscur sur X68000 qui a pour la premire fois integr la possibilit de jouer en 20G). Mais l'impulsion de dpart provient quand mme d'un jeu tl, d'un mode deux joueurs et d'un mot d'ordre "simplicit".

Du jeu tl on en a tir euh... rien. Mauvais exemple, dsol. Les jingles peut-tre ? Du mode deux joueurs on en a tir l'esprit de comptition. Et du mot d'ordre, et bien... Tetris est terriblement simple. Ce qui Mihara a fait, cest ajouter deux ou trois autres choses trs simple au jeu de base. Et comme au Go, il est possible d'avoir un jeu diablement technique tout en tant terriblement simple.
Click to expand...

Even if Needle seems to suggest that TGM was born from a TV Show, one musn't forget that TGM was heavely influenced by previous Tetris, notably those developped by Sega (their own Tetris, Flashpoint, Bloxeed) and a fan game ("Shimizu Tetris", a pretty obscure clone for X68000 that for the first time featured a 20G like gameplay). But the original impulse still comes from a television show, a certain culture of players and the mantra of "simplicity".

From it's game show roots it took... umm... nothing. Bad example, sorry. Perhaps the jingles ? From its player culture it took the spirit of competition. And from the mantra of simplicity, well... Tetris has a pure and simple premise. All Mihara did was add a few subtle changes to the basic game. And like the game of Go, it is possible for simple rules to give birth to complex and deep gameplay.
Click to expand...

Also added Tetris with Card Captor Sakura, modified some titles, added some italics.

Anything else I should say/modifiy ? (I thought of an interview of some of you guys but then I realized that my article was long enough)

PetitPrince, 2 May 2007

#29
K

yosh Petit Prince.

Whn do you want to release your article ?

i'm on it as most as i can (not easy to get time for me).

K, 9 May 2007

#30
PetitPrince

Release Candidate 3

(last update 14.05.07)

Blog version french / english

Standalone version

English, zipped

I rewrote the conclusion, corrected some typos here and there. If no one got any objections, we can upload the standalone version somewhere in TC's server and start spreading this to the world

PetitPrince, 12 May 2007

#31
tepples Lockjaw developer

Omission:

Not once do you mention Alexey Pajitnov, inventor of the Soviet Mind Game.

Typo:

-Mihara and the TTC

+Mihara and TTC

(TTC is The Tetris Company.)

Typo:

-But as a result of being written in TGS2000 (YaneuraoGameScript 2000)

+But as a result of being written in YGS2000 (YaneuraoGameScript 2000)

Typo:

-Lockjaw is developped by Damien tepples Yerrick

+Lockjaw is developed by Damian tepples Yerrick

Damien is the bad guy in The Omen.

"Though, without a nice skin, it's quite unsightly."

Citation needed. You think Gus is ugly?

"My little dream: that Tetris would be considered as an electronic sport, in the same that Street Fighter, Starcraft or Counter-Strike are ! "

Mr. Pajitnov also wants Tetris to become a sport.

tepples, 12 May 2007

#32
colour_thief

tepples said:

Omission:
Not once do you mention Alexey Pajitnov, inventor of the Soviet Mind Game.

"Though, without a nice skin, it's quite unsightly."
Citation needed. You think Gus is ugly?
Click to expand...

Alexey doesn't exactly have anything to do with TGM. At all. Props where props are due, but he's beyond the scope of the article.

Also, cite this:

I think Lockjack is ugly without a nice skin.

colour_thief, 12 May 2007

#33
tepples Lockjaw developer

colour_thief said:

Alexey doesn't exactly have anything to do with TGM. At all.
Click to expand...

Not even as a member of the guideline committee (as Mr. Rogers pointed out in "Tetris from the Top")?

tepples, 12 May 2007

#34
colour_thief

TGM was brought up during an interview with him in Game Developer Magazine, where he displayed extreme ignorance of the series. His comment was something lame like "I figured it out! The pieces don't glue instantly to the bottom!"

I suspect he's a member of a committee on paper only. I doubt he is involved in any meaningful way... Mr. Rogers just wants to fake his involvement for good PR as Alexey is a universally loved nice guy. I'd bet he's done nothing to shape the Tetris standards recently, if ever, and much prefers to work on original projects.

colour_thief, 12 May 2007

#35
PetitPrince

tepples said:

Citation needed. You think Gus is ugly?
Click to expand...

"Not quite 2007-ish", I think .

PetitPrince, 12 May 2007

#36
Rich Nagel

tepples said:

Typo:
-Lockjaw is developped by Damien tepples Yerrick
+Lockjaw is developed by Damian tepples Yerrick
Damien is the bad guy in The Omen.
Click to expand...

<LOL>! Hehe, the truth reveals itself, now we know why LJ is so addicting... pure, evil, mind control <LOL>!

www.richnagel.net
...for all yer stuff.

Rich Nagel, 12 May 2007

#37
colour_thief

Ok, I re-read the article and caught some tiny mistakes:

Colour_thief

I prefer colour_thief, if that's ok.

Sonys Playstation-based ZN-2 hardware

I think it's Capcom's ZN-2 hardware. Though obviously the Playstation chips are from Sony... I'd suggest rewriting it "Sony Playstation-based ZN-2 hardware".

Similarly, each piece has their own colour.

Similarly, each piece has its own colour.

le feature of Infinity

the feature of Infinity

they are chocking the TGM series

they are choking the TGM series

But as a result of being written in YGS2000 (YaneuraoGameScript 2000), an easily moddable environment (you could load the script up in Notepad, if you liked).

Incomplete sentence. Needs revising.

And I've mildly reworked your new conclusion to de-frogulate some phrasing and spelling:

Here we are at the end of the article. I will conclude with these words: More than a "simple Tetris", the TGM series is a brilliant example of the importance of gameplay in a videogame. Even if a game's basic concept is good, adding new elements can either make it boring (the infinity behaviour) or, on the other hand, raise it to new heights (20G gameplay). It is surprising that TTC hasn't yet developed a serious, competitive Tetris, because the concept has huge potential. Granted, there's TGM for single player competition and Tetris DS for multiplayer competition. But the first one is distributed only in Japan while the second one lacks a proper infrastructure. My dream: that Tetris becomes an electronic sport, commanding the same respect as Street Fighter, Starcraft or Counter-Strike !

The series developed a devoted following in Japan. Just look at all the players who bore a "TGM-" tag in their name after Tetris DS was released or, more simply, how precise and thorough the Heboris Unofficial Expansion is now. For the Western world, the gathering point is Tetrisconcept (you don't mind if I make a little plug, do you ? ) which was created by caffeine et kept alive by a bunch of heavily intoxicated tetriholic (myself included, hehe ). Do not hesitate to ask them any questions that come to mind !

I hope my little presentation helped you discover a new side of Tetris (a little more than "that game with blocks that fall") and, perhaps, even gave you an urge to try a competitive Tetris game. Or at least, the urge to dust off your old Game Boy .
Click to expand...

With these changes I'd say it's good for release. My only major criticism is that Sega Tetris gets only mentioned in passing. It's a tetris (predating GB tetris) that introduced lock time and ARE. This allowed the gravity to get really fast and the pieces to scrape the bottom just like TGM. More than that, it also featured a slow-fast-slow-fast gravity curve that is similar to Master Mode and unlike other games. Arcade players were hooked to this flavour of Tetris, continuing to prefer the Sega style even after the release of the Game Boy and other versions. They'd play to max out the score... the lines... everything. And when they had completely conquered the game like this, they started making unofficial challenges. The '>' secret grade challenge from TGM actually comes from this Sega Tetris culture: Players tried to build that shape as a training challenge. Is that not awesome? The game failed to measure their skill improvement (max score/lines is always just max score/lines) and yet they continued on, addicted and devoted to improving their tetris skills. Shimizu Tetris is a clone for X68000 that was released around that time period and culture of players. It's customizability made it possible to take the tetris concept to unexplored extremes. Popular settings were 20G, and also a screen width of 4. Reducing the screen width to 4 gives you a game very similar to Big Mode in TGM. Mihara has explicitly stated he took 20G from Shimizu Tetris, so it's likely that it inspired Big Mode as well. TGM VS, even if is was originally developed for a game show, uses mechanics that were established in Bloxeed. The PSX Sakura game and Sakura mode in TGM3 are modern takes of the Flashpoint concept. Truly, the debt to Sega Tetris games and culture is huge. What else do I know... Um... I think I remember something about TAP grading being influenced by an obscure TGM training program called GTET, but I'm afraid I don't know much about this. I do have GTET, though it's really old and only really works on Japanese Windows 95.

Anyhow, don't feel obligated to include all this information... I just felt like sharing. It's interesting information to people who are already interested, but might(?) bore casual readers. It's your article so make it how you like it best!

colour_thief, 14 May 2007

#38
tepples Lockjaw developer

colour_thief said:

Shimizu Tetris is a clone for X68000 that was released around that time period and culture of players. It's customizability made it possible to take the tetris concept to unexplored extremes.
Click to expand...

As far as I can tell, the game's title was Tetris Semipro-68K. Might it be called the LJ of its day?

tepples, 14 May 2007

#39
colour_thief

Yes, that was its formal name. But the coder was named Shimizu, and it was colloquially called Shimizu Tetris, I believe. I... Think Google agreed with that too, when we were tracking it down (though written in Japanese, obviously).

And Shimizu Tetris was borne out of a passion for a specific tetris series (Sega Tetris games), with the goal of bringing the arcade experience to home computers. If I remember things correctly, you could play the Flashpoint levels and everything. I think Heboris would be the most equivalent these days.

colour_thief, 14 May 2007

#40

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