Teens Are Rewriting What Is Possible In the World of Competitive Tetris (polygon.com) 27
An anonymous reader writes: When the Classic Tetris World Championship (CTWC) debuted in 2010, the kill screen was the game's final, unbeatable boss. Players pushed to get the highest score possible before level 29, at which point the game's pieces started falling at double speed. It seemed humanly impossible to keep up with the falling shapes, which would pile up on players' screens and spell death for their game. But in the past four years, what once seemed an impossibility has become the norm in competitive classic Tetris. In the 1989 NES version of Tetris, which is still standard at competitive tournaments, players make it well into level 30 and beyond. This new generation of talent, made up of mostly teenagers, has not only breathed new life into a 30-year-old game, but also completely upended expectations of what's possible within it.
From the beginning, competitive players of classic Tetris tried to push the game past what its developers imagined possible. The first frontier of competitive Tetris was the maxout, when the score was pushed past 999,999 and the game would no longer show an accurate score. Because playing in level 29 and beyond was out of the question, players aimed to break 1 million before the game would inevitably beat them. This meant maintaining "maxout pace" where players would complete enough "Tetrises" (when a player drops a straight I-block vertically, clearing four lines simultaneously and earning more points than single line clears) before the kill screen.
In 2010, players organized the first CTWC, largely in response to the world's first indisputable maxout, accomplished by Harry Hong (other players like Thor Aackerlund and Jonas Neubauer claimed to have maxed out as well, but the proof wasn't definitive). The desire to find out who the best Tetris player in the world was on, and soon, Neubauer began building a very strong case for himself. In the final match of this 2010 tournament, Neubauer, who went on to win seven of the first eight world championships, beat Hong, the only player to interrupt Neubauer's reign by beating him in 2014. Over the first eight years of CTWC, maxing out before level 29 shifted from being an impossible frontier to a badge of honor for the game's elite. It was still a notable accomplishment until the scene began to shift in 2018, when Joseph Saelee, a then-16-year-old from Visalia, California, began dismantling records and set the stage for a new generation's influence on the game. "In March 2018, only five months after picking up the game, Saelee maxed out for the first time," reports Polygon. "As The New Yorker reported, he set records for most lines cleared in one game and fastest time to 300,000 points. Then he started to achieve what other experienced players had deemed impossible. He survived past the game's kill screen, becoming the first player to make it to level 31 and 32 -- then 33 through 35."
From the beginning, competitive players of classic Tetris tried to push the game past what its developers imagined possible. The first frontier of competitive Tetris was the maxout, when the score was pushed past 999,999 and the game would no longer show an accurate score. Because playing in level 29 and beyond was out of the question, players aimed to break 1 million before the game would inevitably beat them. This meant maintaining "maxout pace" where players would complete enough "Tetrises" (when a player drops a straight I-block vertically, clearing four lines simultaneously and earning more points than single line clears) before the kill screen.
In 2010, players organized the first CTWC, largely in response to the world's first indisputable maxout, accomplished by Harry Hong (other players like Thor Aackerlund and Jonas Neubauer claimed to have maxed out as well, but the proof wasn't definitive). The desire to find out who the best Tetris player in the world was on, and soon, Neubauer began building a very strong case for himself. In the final match of this 2010 tournament, Neubauer, who went on to win seven of the first eight world championships, beat Hong, the only player to interrupt Neubauer's reign by beating him in 2014. Over the first eight years of CTWC, maxing out before level 29 shifted from being an impossible frontier to a badge of honor for the game's elite. It was still a notable accomplishment until the scene began to shift in 2018, when Joseph Saelee, a then-16-year-old from Visalia, California, began dismantling records and set the stage for a new generation's influence on the game. "In March 2018, only five months after picking up the game, Saelee maxed out for the first time," reports Polygon. "As The New Yorker reported, he set records for most lines cleared in one game and fastest time to 300,000 points. Then he started to achieve what other experienced players had deemed impossible. He survived past the game's kill screen, becoming the first player to make it to level 31 and 32 -- then 33 through 35."
Tiebreaker needed... (Score:2)
So we go to our tibreaker: Who got their points in the fastest time?
turn off max outs so it goes into hex deplays (Score:2)
turn off max outs so it goes into hex deplays
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turn off max outs so it goes into hex deplays
No it doesn't, it starts using the characters after '9' for the first digit of the number - not the same thing at all.
It's a total coincidence that 'A' comes after '9' in the Tetris character set.
Re: turn off max outs so it goes into hex deplays (Score:2)
It seems unlikely to be a total coincidence that the first non number is the first letter alphabetically.
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Typical millennials, competing to do something of no use to anyone better than everyone else.
... off my lawn, grumble grumble grumble...
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Yeah not like us Gen X's and our.... ... obsession with becoming the god of LAN Quake. ... or my fathers weird obsession with trying to own the greatest 1950s necktie collection in the world. ... or my grandfathers weird obsession with Vax mainframes (RIP you glorious old nerd)
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Yeah not like us Gen X's and our.... ... obsession with becoming the god of LAN Quake. ... or my fathers weird obsession with trying to own the greatest 1950s necktie collection in the world. ... or my grandfathers weird obsession with Vax mainframes (RIP you glorious old nerd)
I loved the VAX computers--wrote software for them from 1978 to 2005. However, my son is more into swords than neckties and my gransdons have just graduated from high school so I'm not sure how much they are into computer gaming, but their aunt (my daughter) works for a computer gaming company, so they are likely familiar with the industry.
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The crazy thing is how they're doing it (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nope, no luck in bullet hell (Score:3)
Look up some vids about Battle Garrega. There are people who do nothing but play that one game. There's a special version of Retroarch called
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Look up some vids about Battle Garrega. There are people who do nothing but play that one game.
I hadn't seen that one. That's just stupid levels of bullets.
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This reminds me of bullet hell shooters [tvtropes.org].
Nah, it's more like Super Mario speedrunning. Where the entire game is timed down to individual video frames.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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The next level is to move eyes closer to the screen - before it becomes possible to wire Tetris directly to the brain. It could also be beneficial to lock most of the body in place to enable better focus and to avoid unnecessary energy use.
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Re:The crazy thing is how they're doing it (Score:5, Informative)
Original hardware polls input at 60FPS, and uses the value immediately after it's polled.
NES games *not* running at 60FPS is unusual.
In theory, a NES game could poll the the joypad hundreds of times per frame if it wanted to.
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I wonder if the original hardware was able to respond fast enough to make these techniques worthwhile.
Yes.
Re:The crazy thing is how they're doing it (Score:5, Informative)
New NES Tetris Technique: Faster Than Hypertapping!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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New NES Tetris Technique: Faster Than Hypertapping!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Dude!!! I saw that same video not too long ago!!!!
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Multiplayer uses DAS with instant hard-drop and can achieve insane speeds.
On Jstris, the current top multiplayer site some of the top players are almost 7 pps (pieces per second).
As an example of a sub-15 second 40L:
https://jstris.jezevec10.com/replay/55347607 [jezevec10.com]
(note: that's real time, not speeded up)
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It's amazing seeing how many top tier players play. There's one guy on youtube (Mario kaizo fame) who has his SNES gamepad half on a table and half off. Left side half off so he can hold the controller and use his thumb on the D-pad, right side half on to give him some support since he presses those buttons with his index and middle fingers as his thumb is too slow to move between them when doing some of the more trickier moves.
Wrong reward (Score:2)
I watch the CTWC games, it's really cool to see (Score:2)
Hypertapping had just become the new way to play Tetris: the best DAS players had fallen out of the top spots, and new superstar had risen as an almost unbeatable challenger: barely able to play up into level 30 or 31, he could still go further.
Then, Cheez showed up in the tournaments with a really weird grip. He was hypertapping still, but everyone who saw it noticed it was weird.
Sometime after that, Cheez debuted "rolling", a way to hit the controller buttons even faster than hypertapping. By the next tou