Speaking of Tetris music, it’s a shame that Marcel Donné’s excellent 26-minute arrangement of the C64 Tetris song is still unavailable to hear anywhere outside a purchase of the full Project Sidologie (not to say that the entire collection isn’t worth having).
Also,
Accidentally came across a cool photo of this:
And looked up a video:
with this romhack (it minimizes the flashing when scoring a Tetris 'cause the flash is just one the gray color and there’s less gray here)(also I just think the hack’s bg looks neat):
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/7594/
Woah you got the Barbosa Martinez edition.
Palmer Luckey’s War Crimes Tetris for the Jake Paul Edition Game Boy Color FPGA is surprisingly good if you can find it in a place that doesn’t send him money.
I will take this as an opportunity to mention Romino’s Adventure, a now free to play puzzle platformer built around the tetris blocks that I keep intending to get around to eventually.
After messing with Tetris GB and the Rosy Retrospection hack, realized I liked the full-screen display for the playfield in GB Tetris, and that I could get the same effect in NES Tetris by using the “Overscan” “Per-game” settings in Mesen to cut the top and bottom borders (48/33 top/bottom overscan with Nostalgic hack, 47/33 w/o):
Anyway it looks bigger now on my screen. ^ _^
I am a bit of a Tetris boy. I would describe my skills as, “I could probably get last in a national tournament–maybe better!”
My main Tetris these days is the Arduoboy Tetris that was way to expensive and isn’t available anymore. It is NOT the same as the credit-card-sized Tetris you can get at WalMart and other participating retailers, which is has color and holds but no ghosting, and iirc doesn’t let you start at maxed out drop speed.
I really, really like the Arduoboy Tetris. It’s a tiny OLED, so it’s very clear black and white, it’s exremely convenient to pick up and play, the ghosting and speed and turning are all proper, but it doesn’t have holds which is a little annoying, because it makes my default playing style drift away from the Tetris Company standard.
The last console Tetris I played a lot was Tetris 99. I don’t really play it much anymore, but it’s wonderful. I love it. It should be on the list. Obviously, the battle royale play is the main attraction, but it also has a good solo Tetris mode.
I have Puyo Puyo Tetris on Switch, but never play it. I think in the competitive online scene they use Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 for Windows, because it’s the newest Tetris you can play on the open internet.
For, like, five years my default Tetris was Cultris 2 on Windows. I think it’s still out there. It tweaks basically every rule to encourage competitive play with trash-sending. I never even played it competitively, except against the computer. It was just a good free version of Tetris that got me to focus more on comboing. Though I’m still mostly just an all Tetrises and T-spin player who doesn’t think that tactically.
I don’t feel like doing the long version of this rant now, but I absolutely hate the state of “competitive Tetris” online right now.
Namely, I hate that NES Tetris became the standard, simply because the Classic Tetris World Championship (which is really just a US event), was organized by gen X.
Like, they built it from scratch, so they can do whatever they want (The Ecstasy of Order is a fantastic documentary about this). But because they’re the only tournament that put effort into promoting themselves, now we have gen alpha learning bizarre tapping techniques on NES controls, when they could…just play a better version of Tetris.
The Summoning Salt video on this has probably made this problem even worse.
The constraints of NES Tetris have nothing to do with the actual skill and game of Tetris. They’re just technological constraints of a single bad version of the game. I know there’s a special kind of fun to “doing the impossible” by breaking it, but…we really need, like, a high profile tournament using an actually good version of the game.
Also they have to kinda hide that it’s NES Tetris because Nintendo still owns that version and the Tetris Company is embarrassed by that.
don’t they actually (discretely) use a romhack of NES tetris for those competitions?
I think they just use vanilla NES Tetris and crop everything except the playfield for the viewers.
nah it’s a modified version
To clarify a bit on what u/mobuco answered in this thread, it’s not actually a new cartridge – it’s an add-on that requires an original, legit NES Tetris cartridge to work. The add-on only contains data for a new content patch and leaves the original game intact when it is disconnected. ~Kitaru, Reddit
edit: more details on the tech setup in the linked video
Went looking for a modern Tetris solution I could like and since I don’t seem to care much for the aesthetics of any purpose-built modern Tetris games it came down to romhacks for NES or GB Tetris. ^_ ^
So the obvious answer was the Rosy Retrospection romhack for GB Tetris recommended by @razorbeamz in the OP. : D I really liked how that one plays but found the bright BG color was scorching my silly old eyeballs after a while. Only took me another day to realize I could just change that BG color in Mesen to something more toned down, and now I can play. Yay! My modern Tetris. : )
Unfortunately there’s no comparable romhack for NES Tetris; closest I could find was two that have hard drop
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4973/
but they also have their own problems. Here they are patched onto each other (which causes a further problem but hey, efficient screenshotting!):
I still can’t decide between modernized GB and “classic” NES (w/ Nostalgic romhack for toned-down flash) so I guess I’ll just be alternating between the two in my occasional Tetris play. ; )
You might like Tetrachroma. It’s not a Brand Name Tetris, but an indie Tetris spin-off which adds color matching mechanics. However, you can turn all of that off by playing its Monochrome modes, and it’s my favorite casual Tetris experience on PC right now and I vastly prefer it to TGM4 (which was a tremendous disappointment)
Thanks! I do like the pixel look. It’s got some flashing FX in it though, and these days I avoid those 'cause I’ve had migraine problems from flashing FX after going for years with too little sleep in bad lighting. ; D
This also fits a new pet peeve I discovered I have while trying out TGM4 over the weekend: most Tetris games now have a tiny playfield set inside huge borders. Like, NES Tetris did that, but I bet it was done there for performance reasons. ; P And anyway in Mesen I can cut the top and bottom borders and make the playfield part correspondingly larger on my screen. ^ _^
(TGM4 also keeps the tiny playfield stuck on the left or right side of the screen even with no CPU opponent, sheesh. = P ; D)
(Also I’m infuriatingly straight-laced and avoid direct knock-offs unless the IP owner has said they’re okay with fan games, which I don’t think is the case with Tetris.)
