Well, I got my time down to 7'55. I think will quickly see another minute or two shave off the leaderboard, but it's going to be slow going after that...
The manual for Tetris Blast (USA version of Bombliss) had a chart with explosion sizes for each number of lines. The manual for Tetris Zone had a scoring chart. I was referring to the grade point system, the requirements for COOLs (especially the section COOL, which appears to have been disguised on purpose), the requirements for the invisible roll, and the requirements for an exam. Do the Ti instruction cards explain those?
None of those actually need to be explained. "Play fast, and get many tetrises" is pretty much the only advice you need. If you play fast, you make the section cools, if you play fast and get many tetrises, then you will also get many grade points. This is exactly what makes the TGM series so elegant. There are no gimmicks, no weird exploitable scoring mechanisms like T-spins, or some secret way of playing like ST-stacking, just plain old, play fast and get many tetrises. It even tells you when you're doing well and when you're not.
Ack. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that hates this mode. Seriously, though, I think everyone pretty much said the gist of what I think about this mode - its incredibly frustrating, and a lot of it is based on luck due to the blocks at the beginning. I guess maybe I'm being too conservative and not taking any chances with the "stack a piece on top of the climber" idea - instead I'm making lines from the top down if there's holes in my field. Maybe thats why my time is so horrible... (17'19"36 as first score submitted - near the bottom of the leaderboard of like 40 people) Anyways, yeah. I'm just hoping that less than 1000 people will finish this round. (I already figure this round will be my weakest round)
I've just been doing a little experimenting to see if I can figure out what is happening with these accidental killings. You can generally place an O or even a vertical I on top of the climber without crushing him and he will pop out to the side, but if the side is blocked by other pieces or the wall then he can be crushed, so it matters what is to sides of your pieces. When he is climbing up to the next level, it seems that he is effectively still on the lower level, so if you place a horizontal I or anything one-square tall on top of the square he is climbing up, that means death if there is no where for him to pop left/right/down. It looks really crazy, but he can pop down through a piece that has already been placed if it's only one block thick and he has not finished climbing up before you place the next piece on top, which is sort of annoying but also a life saver. Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is to be careful about stacking pieces on the climber while he's climbing.
Yeah, this all seems right to me. I've been trying to get the timing for the earliest instant you can drop a tile on him after he climbs into muscle memory. It seems to be sometime while he is straightening his back. In the higher levels, dropping things on him becomes tricker, because the tetrominoes fall too quickly for you to wait and place them while he is standing still. I got my time down to 7:09. This mode has some weird rules and is not really very tetris like, but it does have its own charm.
Now given I've only done 1 real run so far (it hit in the 9's), I think this is what I know about the little man... 1) if you put 2 blocks on him, and he has no where to go, and no lines are cleared he dies. 2) *I think* (haven't fully confirmed this) if you drop 1 block on him, and there's blocks 2 high on the sides, and you don't clear lines, he dies (not sure about this though, but it would explain the t) 3) when he's climbing, and there's a plateu at the top (meaning a level area at the top), he doesn't walk across it the first time he climbs to the top, UNLESS there's another block going down or up, instead, he will get to the top, turn around, and walk back down, thus forcing you to wait for him to come back to the top. The easiest thing to do to prevent this, is to put a block to his left before he goes to far down. 4) Tetris skills dont really seem to matter much until level 5+ Not 100% positive on any of this, but just things I've been poking around with.. I'll keep trying to confirm and maybe do up some diagrams for the wiki...
Most of that sounds right to me, but not this. I have definitely had the one-block part of the t work fine, even when there is no room on the other side. I'm not sure what can cause it to kill the guy.
What I do like about the Field Climber in the different modes that you have put your brain into. In the later levels for example, it is dig dig dig to get the climber out of the hole, then bam, switch to building steps so that he can climb. Then inevitably for me it is "crap! I didn't mean to put that piece there" and it then on to trying to clear out space again to get the access to the climber. It's pretty interesting for me actually. Not knowing the precise conditions for squashing the climber (or how he moves) adds a to it too, since you might try out a move not knowing its exact outcome. It may result worse than expected and cause you to switch from climbing back to digging.
Yeah I noticed something like that too, but it should be mentioned that the plateau has to be completely flat. Even if it's four blocks long, and there's a step at the end, he'll go to the end and climb it. Sometimes it's more practical to place a step at the end to make sure he keeps going. Also, more often than not, you'll be able to place a block behind him immediately after he reaches the top. He tends to turn around immediately if you provide a step behind him. Just a bit of an update with pushing him onto the falling tetromino, the only use for this that I've been able to use consistently is if he's climbing up perfect stairs (ie- one block wide steps) and you sorta slide an I-block or something to squish him against the wall of the next step, he pops up onto the block you're controlling. It can replace dropping it on top of him, like when he's climbing the last step, you can speed it up by sliding one into him and pushing him to the goal. I think the advantage of using this over dropping it on him is that, first of all, you still have a window where you can abort the move if he does something unwanted, like getting trapped on the step below. Also, it's very situational, but you could potentially slide him onto your tetromino, and then slide that block over to another staircase (or maybe even into a flag?). I haven't tested it much, so I don't even know if there's a limit to how much you can move him on the tetromino before he falls off or something. Also, in case anyone didn't know, if you have a flag diagonal to a step (ie- not directly above or beside a block, but diagonaly adjacent to it), the climber will not grab it on the way up, but if he goes down the step, he will.
Maybe this is something obvious that everyone but me realized, but the items you get when you pick up flags that appear to do nothing if you use them right away will actually wipe out your stack back to that flag if you wait and use them later. It can be useful if you accidentally box your climber in after picking up a flag.
It's all the pieces above where your climber picked up the flag, as far as I can tell. I'd basically been ignoring them, because they didn't seem to be doing anything when I tried to use them right when I picked up a flag -- guess I'd never had any extra blocks above that level before -- but it's a pretty handy take-back if you screw up a few rows later. Makes me wish they put a flag at the start of every level just in case you box him in near the start, but then I guess it would be too easy to clear all the starting garbage if they did that. Someone managed a 6:43:78 already. Looks like the median time is around 13 minutes. Longest time is 45 minutes -- the patience some people have! So far there's 113 scores in North America and 62 in Europe, so it's looking like Europe might not even post 1000 results this round unless people have lots of time to kill over x-mas. I'm almost bored enough to get back on wi-fi and give this another go -- wonder how long it will take me to regret it.
Actually, I just double-checked, and I think you are right that it removes the blocks to wherever the climber is, because you can even knock him below where you picked up the flag and remove the blocks above him.
actually, you can point the wiimote at the screen to remove a certain portion of the stack. is this if you don't point the wiimote at the screen?
This sounds very useful, except that once you start collecting flags you're usually home free. It's still nice for when you screw up, though. Also, here's why I hate this mode: I just had a game where I was on fire, shattering my records in the early stages. I hit stage 6 with 2'07"xx on the clock. I thought for sure I'd be able to break 8 minutes, at the very least. But no...as soon as I saw stage 6, I knew I was screwed. There were at least four places where I'd need to drop Is to have any chance of digging out the climber. (In my futile attempt to salvage the run, I ended up squishing him...but it would've taken me at least two minutes to clear the stage regardless.) So much of this game -- at least when you're talking about high-level time attacks -- comes down to luck. In each of the last five levels you could either get a very friendly layout that the climber can practically walk right out of, or you could get a mess of skyscrapers that'll take five or six bags to deal with. It's all just one big coin flip. The best part is that when you inevitably get screwed by chance, it happens near the end of the game, and you have to start all over. This kind of thing happens in shadow mode (round 3) also, but at least one round of shadow mode only takes about a minute.
