Bastard Tetris Hates You

Press the Buttons has a post up about a Linux version of Tetris called Bastard Tetris. The name is well founded, as the game evaluates what shape you need the least and sends that as your next piece. From the Bastet site: "Have you ever thought Tetris(R) was evil because it wouldn't send you that straight "I" brick you needed in order to clear four rows at the same time? Well Tetris(R) probably isn't evil, but Bastet certainly is. >:-) Bastet stands for "bastard tetris", and is a simple ncurses-based Tetris(R) clone for Linux. Unlike normal Tetris(R), however, Bastet does not choose your next brick at random. Instead, Bastet uses a special algorithm designed to choose the worst brick possible. As you can imagine, playing Bastet can be a very frustrating experience!" Sounds like the sailing puzzle in Puzzle Pirates.

So how long before someone changes the source

[Tim_F]

and tries repackaging this as something legit? What a great prank that would be!

Me too

[interiot]

I think a lot of people have thought of this, since Tetris seems to evil. I actually started implementing this, but gave up as soon as I asked myself who was going to alpha-test it. If the author in this article actually tested this enough to work most of the bugs out, then apparently he's more of a masochist than I am...

Pufftris

[funny-jack]

Does anyone else here remember Pufftris? It was a Tetris clone where the playing field swung back and forth. At first it was just really slight, but as time (or it may have been # of rows) went on, it swung more and more wildly, in all three dimensions. I think that was my favorite Tetris clone. The sad thing is that the only versions I can find won't run on anything other than straight old-school DOS. Nobody here happens to know of a more modern OS-updated version, per chance, do you?

Re:Ltris has this too

[cowens]

Well, I just downloaded both of them. My best game out of 6 was 8 lines in bastet. I got 35 lines in my first game of Ltris with "Expert Mode" turned on (and I made a lot of silly errors). I would say Bastet has a significantly more evil algorhythm. In particular it seemed as if Ltris wasn't choosing a hard block for the next block; it looks like it chooses a hard block for the block after the next one. So the pattern goes: random block, hard block, random block, hard block, ad infinitum. This is much easier than Bastet, but still much harder than normal tetris-style games.

Wasn't there already a Bastard Tetris?

[Simvan]

I remember back in the early 90's there was a version of Tetris for the MAC that would basically berrate you and taunt you and drop the occasional obscenity while you were playing. I remember because of the constant struggle to get to play it in my high school computer lab without the teacher running it hearing what was going on. Just wondering if I'm crazy of if anyone else remembers that...

Re:hmm

[nunchux]

Any game where the goal is to shuffle around parts desperately until you fail in the end, and where 'winning' is just a matter of how long you survived, has a whiff of evil about it.

Aren't you describing just about every arcade and console game from 1970 to 1985?

I know it wasn't technically the first game to have an ending, but one thing that made Super Mario Brothers (and Nintendo games in general) so revolutionary was that there was an actual goal. Before that, most games just fed you the same set of levels over and over again until you "died" or unplugged the machine.

Re:Not exactly a new idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Not bad but I can top that by a year.
Unfortunately I demoed the thing to a few folks at assembly 95 and it didn't take took long until one of them managed to defeat the algorithm:) He built a tall tower on one edge and a "roof" that extended to almost the other edge and then added the following pieces under it. (the "AI" simply tested each piece by "dropping" them from the top at each position)