I'd be interested to know whether this guy gets the Tetris effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo According to the video description, he's the best Tetris player in the world, and I can believe it: the end of the video is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
No, you stop having the Tetris effect after a while. My theory is that you experience the effect only as long as your brain is busy figuring out / internalizing how Tetris works. After you have learned to recognize all the patterns instantly, the game becomes all about precise fingers motion control. The Tetris effect is gone at this point.
[Or at least it's how it worked for me; I never tried console Tetris, but I play different PC versions since '91 regularly. I can usually play level 9 tint (it's linux tetris clone) till I get bored.]
Truth. That's exactly what it is. Personally, I only remember seeing falling blocks in my head, never looking at buildings at fitting them together, as referenced by the Wikipedia article.
You're so old school, by the way. Haha. Nobody around my age (21) ever regularly played on anything other than a TI graphing calculator. There was a great viral effect to this, in that when you downloaded the game from someone else's calculator, you inherited the high scores on their game as well. It's funny to think about some current high school freshman playing tetris on his calculator and thinking, 'Who the hell is this Towle guy? What an asshole.'
And on top of that, the ubiquitousness of the versions of tetris on those calculators allowed for true player-to-player comparison. Sure, there was way more than one version available, but you might be surprised how few would ever use play non-standard. Let's see just how ubiquitous they were/are! (Hopefully someone responds with scores that make logical sense by comparison. Otherwise I'm going to look more ridiculous than absurd.)
Can anyone beat ~42k on the TI-86 version? Or ~498k on the TI-89 version? Or have inherited high scores in that range? (Note: a good, experienced player on those versions would have high scores around in the low 30-thousands and 300-thousands, respectively. I was obsessed, wouldn't beat my own scores for months before having an "in the zone" game, pushing them significantly higher each time.)
The best Tetris version I've played is the one on my HP48GX. I like it so much that I think I've spend more time playing Tetris on my calculator than doing other things with it ;-)
I've shown the video to a few people, and they sometimes completely miss what's going on at the end. When I tell them, I usually have to pick their jaws up off the ground.
I wonder if it is just good game mechanics or the way that guy processes things in his brain but he always gets tetris on the right side and not the left.
In tetris, only the l and the o pieces spawn exactly in the center. All the other pieces spawn slightly to the left. Therefore, on average, you need to make slightly less moves if you stack on the left side than if you stack right.
First: In Tetris nuking 4 rows at once gives you a greater score than nuking 1 row 4 times. (Same goes for 2 and 3 rows). As the guy learned the game he would have gone for optimizing his score rather than number of lines nuked. As he got better the habit would have stuck even though it wasn't strictly necessary to play it that way. The way to nuke 4 rows at once is to build up everything in 4 or more rows minus the slot that a 4x1 can fit into vertically (the longest piece in Tetris).
Second: Leaving a gap on the right or left rather than somewhere in the middle is the easiest way to accomplish this. If you can't see that, I'm sorry for you.
-1 ?! The "I'm sorry for you" was meant to be humorous, not snarky or condescending. Honestly, sorry about that. Short answer - he just chose the right-hand side arbitrarily is my guess, it has nothing to do with game mechanics. Wasn't meant to be a snark, seriously I'm not like that! :)
