Radica Games, the company behind the "Big Screen Tetris" handheld LCD game, has introduced a new game: Tetris fliptop. I saw it today for $10 at Wal-Mart. The back cover carries the "Authentic Tetris Game" logo and the "Elorg, a Tetris Holding company" credit worded like the one from Tetris DS. The left, down, and right buttons are marked with the ordinary sideways-pointing triangles, but the up button is marked with a symbol that looks like a fast-forward symbol rotated clockwise by 90 degrees. Might this be the new official symbol for hard drop? v? Approximation of hard drop symbol used in Tetris fliptop, a rotated fast-forward chevron ? Approximation of hard drop symbol used in another game's manual, a "downwards arrow to bar" from the tab key The music is the same monophonic Korobeiniki ringtone from Big Screen Tetris. J, L, and T spawn flat side down like in SRS and TOD M4's system. But I couldn't check out the kicks because too much plastic packaging was in the way. It has an interesting form of hold piece. A button placed where Y would be on a Super NES or Nintendo DS or where ? would be on a PlayStation swaps the falling piece with the next piece.
Fliptop Tetris Details * All NEW Swibel Flip-Top lid! * New style and design * Over 50MM fans world wide! * Play anytime, anywhere * 3 classic games: o Classic o Speed o Ultra * Smooth auto-open lid * Light for night or indoor play Ages 8 and up Availability: Now Batteries: 2-AAA (included) could be worth the $10 if it had a rechargeable battery. as addictive as tetris is you could end up spending more on batteries for the life of the unit. edit: lol at praising the lid twice.
have you played it? when i bought it a few months ago, to my disappointment it didn't follow srs correctly. the i's were way messed up as well as a couple of other things.
/me wonders how Radica manages to get away with repeatedly and blatantly breaking the guidelines time after time.
do you mean this one? "We choose partners that we think can move the IP forward, in other words make Tetris a better game. So we have two kinds of licenses: ones that makes us money, and one that helps move Tetris forward" ( http://tinyurl.com/2vcrco )
That's exactly the quote, thanks. In theory, as Henk describes, the guidelines are a minimum standard that even the shittiest money grabbing tetris must obey. In practice it isn't strictly policed. (I mean seriously how do you miss a mistake with I rotations of all the pieces?) In practice the guidelines only serve to provide awkward rules for inspired developers to work around. (I think even TDS qualifies for this if you look closely enough.)
Saving money on batteries is no secret. There are only two kick tables in SRS: one for 3-wide tetrominoes and one for 4-wide tetrominoes. A mistake in J will also show up in L, S, Z, and especially T. A mistake in I will show up only in I. Given that even Tetris Worlds shipped with some asymmetries in its I table, it must be harder to check corner-case behavior of I than to check that of other tetrominoes. "Ages 8 and up" heh. My little cousin plays TDS and LJ and he's 7. But is "hold to next" isomorphic in theory to standard hold piece?
also, afaik, this guideline is there to pinpoint the intellectual property in written form. that way it is much easier to attac competitors releasing some sort of block stacking game that is "too close" to tetris....
If I have to guess, srs requires ROM/RAM space to store the rotation table. And that device seems very limited when it comes to ROM/RAM
do you know if it's possible to swap indefinitely until you find a good place to put the piece you originally held, or if you hold a piece do you have to place it following the piece you swapped it with? maybe caffeine can answer this since he's played the game a little. the latter would seem slightly more challenging than using TDS-style hold.
let's see here. i have to admit, the little flip mechanism's pretty cool. buttons are better than the other ones radica has been trying to get away with, but still aren't satisfactory for serious button pressing. oh man, the batteries are dead lol. looks like i left the light switch on. let me go find some batteries. by chance i had some aaa's laying around. the mode selection is good enough. marathon, 25 lines, 40 lines (both race), 2 minute, 3 minute, and 5 minute ultra. DAS isn't terrible. as tepples mentioned, hold piece swaps to in front of the original next piece. rotate left rotates clockwise and rotate right rotates counter clockwise. how stupid. (the manual actually dictates the left and right to "rotate left" and "rotate right" respectively-- but in reality it in fact swapped the two button's functions.) i's always rotate leftward, as if you were playing traditional tetris.
The SRS kick table is 5 offsets * 2 rotation directions * 4 ending orientations * 2 piecewidths * 2 coordinates per offset * 4 bits per coordinate = 80 bytes. Maybe I should add SRS to Tetramino for NES and prove that an 8-bit can handle it.
So it rotates the opposite way to conventional games? That would cause some serious Tetlag I suspect.
