Tetris 99 is my life now.

King of Posters
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Quit my job. Bought some diapers. Got my IV all rigged up. This is my good bye thread Select Button.

I don’t really know what to say about this game, other than that it is Very Good, and I just bought a Switch solely to play it.

Okay, I also got Zelda and Mario Has a Hat. But I would have probably waited, like, a year longer to buy a Swtich to play those games, as opposed to rushing out immediately to buy one, because my brother told me that there is a popular competitive Tetris game on it.

And–what?–it’s a battle royale game?

And–what?–IT’S DEVELOPED BY ARIKA??

And–what?–it’s free to play (with an online subscription that is just $20/year)???

And–what?–there are no instructions on how to play it, so people are still figuring out the actual rules???

Between this and Breath of the Wild apparently being some kind of massive open world crafting game, it’s like Nintendo has been raiding my brain for ideas. “What if we made a competitive Tetris with no clear rule set?” It’s so good.

So yeah: y’all Tetrisheads should play this. I don’t think we can actually play each other or nothin’, since it’s a battle royale, but…oh man it’s really good. Someone tell glitch to come home.

Also, apparently more modes are coming: https://www.nintendoenthusiast.com/2019/02/15/tetris-99-modes-datamined/

Anyway, this can be a thread for tips and tricks, I guess. There’s a Reddit post I can’t find right now that breaks down the ruleset, so maybe I can post that when I find it? Yeah.

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Also I want to brag and say that my ranks for my first three games were 44, 10, and 1. And after that I’ve been consistently in the top 10, but never got #1 again (only played for an hour though, because it’s past midnight on a work night).

The fun thing for me about an actual popular competitive Tetris is that, compared to the general population, I’m pretty damn good, but compared to Tetris psychos I’m, like, bottom rung.

So with a game like this I get the ego boost of playing dummies.

Also, since this is an official Tetris Company game (made by Arika!!!), it’s got the official rule set which is so damn empowering. I love holding and being able to spin block forever (most of the time). Great for getting out of jams and recovering. And I got literally 9 Tetrises in a row without really trying one game.

The big question for me now is what controller I should be using. I guess I’ll buy the pro controller or whatever? The pack-in ones are a little mushy for how fast I need to go.

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I would play but the block graphics are too bad

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i won on my first game,
im a tetris genius

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aka Real Tetris Hours

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do not do this, most still have the awful d-pads which make it super easy to hit accidental diagonals (and hard drop)

if you want to get real at Tetris 99 you need the touch screen to choose your target manually, so what you might want is the Hori d-pad joycon

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Yeah, I did some research after writing this post and found a deluge of hate for that controller in this context. It looks like 8bitdo has a Bluetooth adaoter that allows for the use of PS4 and some Xbox 1 controllers. So I’ll probably at least try that. Some dude on YT has a really conplicated set up that allows him to run mouse/keyboard, but if I don’t have 180 degree turns anyway, I think a controller is fine.

I’ll check out the Hori joycon. The joycons themselves aren’t too bad (the separate buttons instead of a d-pad is actually perfect for Tetris).

I just find the buttons a little mushy, and the shoulder buttons aren’t all that comfortable.

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Is there a strategy you use for targeting? Right now I just ride the whole game on KO, because in the early game I don’t need to defend against attackers, and in the later game I want to be autotargeting the weakest players anyway to just get them off the board. I remember that Reddit ruleset post saying that getting kills is good for some reason, and it’s satisfying to hear someone go down.

Right now, I can’t imagine actually picking someone late game. Still feels chaotic to me, even if I’m in great shape.

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i am not great or anything but i have been absorbing some tactics!

KOs are essential as each one gets you 1 badge + all the badges of the person you KO’d, and you’ll get a bonus to attack (and defense) power at certain tiers of badges up to +100%.

if you leave your targeting on KO, you’ll automatically target people who are close to the top of their well. this is what you want to be doing, but any decent player will do this as well. if you use auto targeting, you will be competing with everyone else for the last hit, leaving it essentially up to chance.

also for this reason, unless you’re a tetris god, you want to keep your well low to avoid being targeted like this. thus you don’t need to rush in the early game when pressure and gravity are low, and would do well to scan the field for targets that look like easy pickings but not super close to KO, since those will already have been targeted by other players using the KO targeting. then you focus on that person and dump a whole bunch on them, hopefully getting you the KO with little competition.

you can do manual targeting on a controller with the left stick, but obv just tapping them on the touch screen is way faster.

also, if you’re being targeted by multiple people, say 3+, you should switch to auto target Attackers. this will split your attacks to everyone targeting you, but also gives you bonus garbage based on how many folks are attacking you. this is essential to your defense, since you’ll be clearing incoming attacks better as well.

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I’ve literally only played an hour so far (can’t wait to get home from work), but in that time I really didn’t feel too worried about keeping my well low in the early or mid game.

Right now, I’m just playing kind of lazily, so I’ll just build a standard Tetris well, save a long block, and focus on doing back-to-backs, which is pretty easy until the final 10 when I have to shift to survival mode.

We’ll see if I can get used to the multi-tasking of picking weak players, based on those screens that remain inexplicably tiny, even when there are only ten people left.

Does anybody know how matchmaking work? Right now I’m only rank 8, I think, but if it’s matchmaking by rank, I assume I’ll eventually end up playing some actually good players.

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Things I need to work on:

  • T-Spins: I don’t think they’re really that advantageous in this rule set, but I’ve never bothered to get good at setting them up or the muscle memory of executing them, and I probably should.

  • 4-Wide: I kind of know how to do this from Cultris II, but…I often avoid doing it, because I don’t trust that I’ll get an actually good combo. I don’t tend to consciously plan multiple moves ahead, though in the late game I do realize that I’m subconsciously planning ahead based on the color of upcoming blocks.

  • Turning Counter-Clockwise (lol): I can’t wait for a marathon mode to practice in, because when playing live, I always forget which button is which direction and just end up using A only, which I maintain isn’t as much of a disadvantage as people think.

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Tetris 99 online tournament incoming with a $9980 price pot! (top 999 players get 10 bucks of eShop money)

From March 8 at 5:00am PT through March 10 at 11:59pm PT players will get to participate in the Maximus Cup online event. By winning first place, players will see “Tetris Maximus” appear on the screen. By the end of the event, the top-999 players with the most Tetris Maximus wins will be notified, and will receive 999 My Nintendo Gold Points as a sweet bonus.

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Fuck. I will literally be on an international flight. I feel like if I trained up a bit I could get 999th place, lol.

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i got another win on my first match within the event time frame. then wasted 2hrs trying to get more… turns out the EU competition is just a prize draw from everyone who has at least one win.

The number of Tetris Maximus wins achieved has no influence on the chance of winning a prize.

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image
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Finally

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After starting this thread, I realized that I don’t really know how to talk about Tetris in an interesting way.

Oh, looking back, I guess I can say that I actually achieved my goals above–I now pretty much always rotate pieces the minimum amount of times needed and I build and execute T-spins all the time. I could probably do them more or build for them instead of Tetrises. I often build them at kind of stupid times and then end up killing time waiting for the T block I didn’t have prepared.

I put a little bit of time into building T-spin triples, but…they’re so rarely useful. I got bored before mastering them.

After about a two month hiatus, I’m back on my bullshit and playing Invictus (I stopped playing soon after it came out, due to life busy-ness). I’ve gotten one win in Invictus so far, which is apparently pretty good–takes a lot of people a while to get a win.

Seems like Invictus has had a good effect on the meta. Makes the main game more accessible and creates a stiffer challenge for higher level players–I think I’d prefer that they just have matches with only 30-45 players in them, rather than filling them out with AI’s, but…it works out pretty well, regardless.

Glad the community is still active–I want this to live for a long time!

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I’m actually prepping to start streaming Tetris 99. I was surprised by how few really good players are actually streaming. I’m better than many of them and pretty comparable to the top ones. The only player I consider actually super-good that plays 99 is Wumbo. That’s what I think of when I think of a Tetris Master. I would have to consciously train to approach that level. Anyway, if and when I start streaming I’m sure I’ll post in the Axe, though… Due to time differences, I will literally be streaming at the least popular times available, lol. Will probably be between 8AM-12PM EST. We’ll see if I can get a couple people watching.

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if it’s on any day but thursday or friday i’d be around to watch since i’m working. what’s your twitch channel so i can follow?

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I got #3 in a match and I feel like maybe I’ve peaked as a person

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Still working on this because it’s all new to me, and I don’t have a lot free time to work on personal projects lately.

I’m also making it harder on myself than it probably needs to be by setting up my “office” under the stairs for streaming, when the only monitor I have is a TV in my room. So…I guess I need to buy a monitor, unless there’s a way to connect to the Elgato card straight from the Switch while still keeping a picture on screen.