A guy I know at my university, Eric, recently became the first non-Japanese player to achieve the grandmaster rank (level 999) in Tetris the Grandmaster 2: The Absolute Plus. Here is a video of him achieving his record score:
This "T.A. Death" mode is significantly different from "normal" Tetris. I believe Tetris DS also has a similar game mode. Basically, as you can see, each piece drops immediately to the top of your stack, and you have less than a second (specifically, 1/2 to 1/4 of a second) to move it into place. This forces you to decide where you're going to put the next piece while moving the current piece into position. In addition, you need a different strategy: you must keep the centre of your stack higher than the edges, so that you can move pieces from the centre down to the edges.
Notice that only 9 players outside of Japan have achieved the master rank (i.e. reach level 500 in under 3:25).
A few weeks ago I got an opportunity to play this game on his "arcade suitcase" -- literally a suitcase with an arcade board inside, plus 2 home-made joysticks. T.A. Death mode is a lot harder than it looks. You have to know all of the piece rotations off by heart (as in, which button rotates the piece in which direction), and you literally cannot decide where to put a piece after it has dropped. This is because at the start of the game, you have only 1/2 a second to move each piece into place. At level 400 and beyond, you have only 1/4 of a second to do this. It really takes Tetris to a completely new level.
Hopefully Eric will be able to show me and others here a live demonstration of his skills, later on ^_^.
Shit. When I was little I used to be such a Tetris Junkie. Haven't played in a couple of year but you don't need to be playing active to see how nuts that is!
Cultris is a really good Tetris clone you can play over Hamachi. It's great multiplayer, and not al the crazy tupid special blocks and shit of the Tetris spinoffs.
TL should organize a Cultris tourney. I beat all of my univ. friends pretty easily, at about 60+ drops/second. I'd love a challenge.
On February 27 2008 16:45 Bill307 wrote: A beast with cybernetic arms I know at my university, Eric, recently became the first non-Japanese player to achieve the grandmaster rank (level 999) in Tetris the Grandmaster 2: The Absolute Plus. Here is a video of him achieving his record score:
On February 27 2008 17:20 Krohm wrote: He's no Japanese player... Haha but with that being said, I'm amazed he did it. How much has been practicing?
I just asked him about that on another forum.
Edit: found a post by him on that Tetris forum:
I like to count from when I got my Astro City arcade cabinet. That's when I started giving the game the amount of attention it deserved. It was so convenient to simply flick a switch and start playing anytime. And the machine was so heavy that even my rough, forceful, unpracticed joystick technique wouldn't budge the controls. If you count from there it's about 17 months, including several months where I took breaks from playing.
I'll relay his reply to you later, but for now, I noticed that the topic I linked to in my OP was started by him on August 9th, 2006. So I would guess that he's been playing TAP Death mode on-and-off for at least 19 months.
On February 27 2008 17:29 Gyabo wrote: geez, i thought i was good at tetris from playing it on my graphing calculator
this looks like tetris at 200 apm or something
I thought I was good at Tetris, too. Then I tried this game and shouted for joy after I finally managed to clear a single line (after losing a few times first).
According to one of the posts in that Tetris topic, you need to place at least 1.75 pieces per second to play in this mode. If the average # of actions per piece is 4 (i.e. 3 movements and 1 rotation) then you would need a minimum of about 400 Tetris apm to play this.
EPT
