Last pic of the week, PS: I think I have saved an inp of the three in a raw games which lead to this 399
Awesome work cyberguile! You passed Mr. Antisocial. Will he retalliate?? And great work to everyone who's improved their record this week. Which is a lot of people.
cool video matt i added it to the video list in the wiki. when i watched it, it said you made lvl 590 in 3:55:31 (not that it matters because you've already beaten that score) so that was the way i named it. let me know if this is wrong and i can change it to 598.
you're right, of course it's 598. my eyes must be going bad from all this TDS i've been playing on the small screen. besides that, i should have checked the last few seconds before the end when you passed lvl 590
I've been playing for a couple of hours and I'm struggling to improve. I break 400 maybe 1 in 20 attempts, but top out nearly instantly every time
Remember to stop locking manually. Also, be careful when placing pieces in the center because you might double drop.
the double drop is a really good point and that seriously plagued my early death game. i am probably the only one around here who advocates locking at and beyond 400 and that leads to a lot of double dropping. the simple solution is just to stop locking and focus on your initial DAS charge. speaking of which, mind if we open up that line of discussion again? my argument has always been that "surviving" death mode is not the goal. we want to beat it! and that means time attack, and that means locking. one could (and if that one is jago/ct, one has and will continue to) argue that the training/goal curve looks like: i would suggest something along the lines of: survival to 999 is implied! or, as my world of warcraft obsessed cousin once explained to me, "the game expects you to be lvl 60." we all play tetris at a little above 2 pieces per second and what we need is not an increased survival time at 2 pieces per second, but the ability to play at 3 pieces per second. if you can't tetris at 500, you aren't really playing 500. that being said, i understand the temptation and allure of simply making GM. i don't really expect any of us to quit this survival nonsense until we get there, but i do believe we're going about advancement in an inefficient, shortsighted fashion. we want to play shirase like the official shirase vids, we don't want to play tgm1 like the old zinc forum LOst video. solution=train it till you can play it. if you're misdropping because of the speed, you aren't really playing it. as you become more experienced and train harder and longer, you will become faster. just as 20g tgm1 was at one time insurmountable, death mode and its difficulty will quickly fade away as the shirase challenge steals our lives. once again: what we need is not an increased survival time at 2 pieces per second, but the ability to play at 3 pieces per second.
I'm curious mat, do you lock past 400 in your video? (I honestly can't tell.) Your 400 section is about equal to the one in jago's 740 vid. I think jago is a little ridiculous in suggesting not locking after 300... the speed there isn't that bad once you're habituated. 400+ though, I strongly recommend not locking. The speed gains are minimal: DAS takes longer to charge than ARE, by quite a margin! When you lock, and yet need to DAS the next piece, you cause the spawned piece to sit on the bottom a few frames longer, effectively lowering your lock time. If you hesitate at all, this piece will not have time to DAS properly and will misdrop. Which all to often causes the next to misdrop as well... What you don't realise mat, is that you can do a time attack without locking. If you time your left/right at the beginning of ARE, it charges the DAS faster. What you are doing when you lock 400+, effectively, is trade time the piece sits there fully placed (relatively safe) with time the piece sits there waiting to be placed (undeniably risky). This is risk without reward. So, the main speed gain supports survival and comes from well timed DAS'ing. I'm actually a proponent of selective locking at high speeds. For example: 1. When the piece has dropped (reset it's lock counter) near the end of placement. These are slow, fat, piece placements that steal too much time, plain and simple. It feels less like speeding up, and more like preventing slowness. Not locking here actually makes it hard to keep the rhythm. 2. When you don't need DAS for the next piece. In this situation you don't need to time anything finely near the beginning of ARE so the risk is greatly reduced. When 1 & 2 occur together manual locking works especially well. It's definitely the "low hanging fruit" as it were. But I don't use it, currently. Right now, I generally play like a bit of a pussy 300-400, only locking when I am comfortable with the shape of my screen and the movement operations required. Which means I'll get to lock about 2/3 of the pieces, I'd estimate. I might lock a bit at the beginning of 400 because my mind hasn't switched modes yet. But then I strictly do not lock. Theoretically speaking, there are speed gains to be had from using both the early DAS and the manual lock techniques together. I just think that the majority of the speed gain comes from early DAS'ing, and will continue to focus on this technique until it is completely ingrained into my mind. Eventually I'd like to start applying the above locking techniques, as well as mess around with a few other experimental ideas I've got floating around. But one thing at a time. As a side note, jago (and I, I guess) have been writing Death notes and have a whack of tips in the works. I think we play more similarly to each other than to you, mat, so it should be a good read. If you have any tips to share that would be cool too. It's always nice to hear another perspective.
late locking means more pieces per time, which means more experience, which could add up in the long run. the skill would be to know when not to lock. locking could be a good habit to build if one plans to gain as much experience as possible.
You have to learn to survive Death Mode before you can beat it. I'm going to hit 500 first, then start worrying about my time. I feel increasing speed is less difficult than coping with the 20G.
There are 2 significant problems with this argument: -it assumes locking 400+ is faster than not locking (see my previous post) -it assumes quantity is more important than quality Because locking is significantly riskier with negligible speed difference from early DAS'ing, there is a much smaller window of time to decide where to place your next piece. This forces you to think faster, without actually resulting in playing faster. While "think faster" also sounds attractive, what will actually happen is you will put less thought into the piece placement, resulting in lower quality play. What I mean is that you'll equal quantity (speed/experience) with lower quality. And honestly quality of play makes all the difference in terms of improving your skill in a timely manner.
the competition is getting fierce here i better get to playing TGM soon, i have a lot of catching up to do. great game DIGITAL.
