Pajitnov and Henk: http://games.kikizo.com/features/tetris_iv_dec07_p1.asp Just Pajitnov: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?optio ... mitstart=0
From the Kikizo interview, about making someone else's game: In other words, Mr. Pajitnov has seen a cloner in action. Perhaps realizing this is part of what led him to skip the discussion of the licensing. And he goes on to talk about how Hexic is an incremental improvement over Bejeweled. About language: Everything can be done with 0 and 1, but I don't see anyone coding the next hot puzzle game directly in machine code, except as one of the first stages of porting Binutils and GCC to a new system. There isn't any language that doesn't force the learner "to memorize thousands of symbols". Each word in any spoken language is an arbitrary symbol for something. Even Toki Pona, which claims to have only 120 distinct words, has set compounds with set meanings that need to be memorized; for instance jan pona literally decomposes into "person + good" but means "friend". About TOJ: So does this mean that Tetris Online (U) will have the same 7+1 bag and the same Korean business model as Tetris Online (J)? From the next-gen.biz interview: This goes some of the way toward explaining infinity and bag.
More importantly, does this mean that us European players are going to be forced to wait or cheat the system with proxies to actually get to play it?
Or at very least allow for unranked international play. Ideally i think 3 leader boards, one for us, one for japan, and one international would be great.
He's making 2 claims here so I'll address them seperately. The first is that time pressure somehow lessens puzzles. I argue that it does just the opposite. I see what he's generally getting at... A beginner jumping right into TAP Death mode will not learn much and will not learn quickly at all. There will simply be no sophisticated decision making taking place. However, experts in just about anything learn to see solutions quickly. Even for "real" puzzles in the physical world. For such players, slowing the game down does not add "more puzzle." As any Death M will tell you, high speed in the TGM style really makes you re-evaluate the strength of various moves and board positions. Slow placements are no longer viable. Quite simply, you have to learn a whole new bag of tricks to succeed. Time attack in general is like a puzzle within a puzzle, a new layer that makes the game even deeper. His second claim is that handcrafted puzzles (with necessarily have complete knowledge) are deep, and that puzzles with random, incomplete knowledge are not. There is a lot to be said for handcrafted puzzles; they are quite good. But it's not like Tetris, even in its most basic form, has no knowledge at all. People don't build expecting every piece to be either S or Z, because, well, even when things are purely random it's far more likely to get a broader distribution of pieces. Modern randomizers amplify this, giving the player even greater foresight into likely upcoming sequences. Piece previews, which have also increased compared to early tetris games, add to this as well. Hell, in chess you never know what your opponent will do, and yet the game remains extremely deep. The fact that players can do stuff like prove you can play indefinitely shows that it's even possible for games with incomplete knowledge to be showing too much information. With a properly balanced game however, even a game with incomplete information can be "deep and complicated" as he put it. As a side note, I'd like to point out that some arcade-style puzzle games do use handcrafted patterns instead of a randomizer. Some examples I can think of include Magical Drop, Star Sweep, and Polarium. Generally, this is done when the general game concept is solid but pure randomness would create extremely difficult situations for the player. The "level design" ends up being much deeper than randomness ever could be. For an example close to home, Sakura mode in TGM3 uses a 256-piece loop instead of a randomizer, and challenges the player to clear certain screen patterns. The piece sequence shows clear signs of being carefully handcrafted to make various decisions interesting. However, the end result is something that, while an interesting diversion, is ultimately less "deep and complicated" than the main game modes which feature randomness. I think I could have just quoted this, rolled my eyes, and left it at that. It seems he doesn't understand that a friendly game with "infinite" replay value is actually very finite because the player will grow bored of the game when it ceases to be challenging. The best puzzle games will always have considerable room for player growth.
From what I gather from what I've learned so far as far as Tetris is concerned, they want to standardize Tetris to some degree, so I'm sure somewhere down the line, everyone will be playing by the same rules. Not sure as to how far down the line that is though. I've actually talked to them about this. If anything, it's a matter of time before improvements to what we have now will be implemented, assumingly. What my suggestion was, starting small, that we divide the US into three sections (similar to how Initial D arcade stage is divided up in rankings), being the US west, east, and central. And from there, you can then branch out into broader areas for rankings, such as the mentioned Japan, and the rest of the world.
From a gameplay standpoint, why divide at all? I mean, TDS has one ranked mode - worldwide - and it works fine. I take it the reasons have more to do with running the business operations (especially one that concerns the users' money) in various different countries.
To the point where players can intimidate lesser players merely by using a kana nickname. Voice chat also tends to work better when all the players in a session speak the same language.
Just remove identifiable names and chat/messaging entirely then... at least, that's what's going to happen with Smash Bros. Brawl, right?
