Im in ur tetris
destroyin yr invisibul blox.
Interesting how the player builds his structures with the gap on the right. Everyone seems to. Why not on the left?
Perhaps lefties leave the gap on the left.
Because it's easier to tap the long pieces (which will get stuck faster) to the right? Or possibly it's a political thing?
Because it's easier to tap the long pieces (which will get stuck faster) to the right?
Is it? I thought that might be it, but you actually have to move the balance of pieces to the left if the gap's going to be on the right.
Ben beat me to my question: what say you, lefties?
That was undeniably and ridiculously impressive, but if you're going to get that good at a video game, why Tetris? Why not something awesome, like Castlevania?
Final thought: if I was that good, and beat a game that hard, I'd want more than some shitty fireworks at the end. (Unless the Japanese characters said something like, "Fuck yeah! You are a god among men.")
Is the order of blocks in Tetris the same every time you play, or are they randomized? If they're the same, and this represents nothing more than a freakishly detailed memorization of the moves, consider me in awe of the dedication but otherwise largely unimpressed. (Not that I could do it, just that I don't care.) If the order is random and the player is analyzing the pattern of blocks and responding that quickly, consider me absolutely astounded.
You do, but most pieces you don't have to move as far as you do the long bars?
Ben beat me to my question: what say you, lefties?
Right is... right.
12: no on one, yes on two. Considering you astounded.
12 - The game did have a "next piece" preview thingie at the top.
The game did have a "next piece" preview thingie at the top.
Still: my eyes weren't fast enough to watch that and what was going on below. Maybe on a full arcade screen he could use peripheral vision like some kind of mutant ability.
That version seemed to allow him to sequester the long bars (the "hold" box on the upper left, beside the "next" box), so he could pull it out whenever he was in a pinch. Also, I think he could see the coming three blocks at once.
It no way diminishes his mad skills. Just saying that he didn't have to memorize the piece order.
Oh, wait, Mini is right, there's a "hold" and he can see the next three pieces, which I've never seen before. Well, shit, then I can do this.
"Next piece" previewing isn't the same as knowing what all the next pieces will be.
15/17: yeah, I was taking that all into account--I'd still call that analyzing on the fly. I was asking if the order of the blocks for the entire game was possibly rearranged. If they're not, which it sounds like they're not, then HOLY FUCKING SHIT.
You know, the fact that there's a hold option almost makes it more impressive—if he were using it, that means that he was juggling another piece of strategy.
19 - Even invisible? I think not.
I wonder if maybe he is blind, like the Pinball Wizard? That would explain why he able to do the invisible part so well--he's not used to seeing any of the pieces.
Kidding, people, kidding. Ben's right that "hold" makes things even more complicated. The three-piece preview is a big help, however.
Three-piece preview is a big help, and I don't even know what hold would do. But it's worth remembering that (without a hold option), you will eventually always lose at Tetris.
you will eventually always lose at Tetris.
This kid didn't. He plays by sense of smell.
I wonder if people who read right-to-left leave the gap on the left.
It used to be that being excellent at snooker was evidence of a youth misspent in a particular way that this seems to be analogous to.
I have played a damn lot of Tetris in my time, from the original Gameboy release through the terrible Tetrisphere and Tetris Virtual 3D Whatever through the incredible Tetris 64 release, and the preview & hold features were built in pretty early. Those are a given. What this guy is doing is next to godliness.
Actually, you'll always lose at Tetris even with the hold option.
Any time, except possibly, right now, when I'm so high on various pharmaceuticals. Mostly alcohol, actually. I don't need to explain myself to you.
30: like Arabs or Persians will ever get their shit together enough to master Tetris.
I appreciate you making the distinction, you failed racist.
Chinese people leave the gap at the bottom.
37: I enjoyed the NYT's comments today on your pleasure-worshiping culture. The Iranian Republic: married sex is hot sex!
Blah, blah. Who's watching the VMAs?
Scrolling through the article I misread "hijab" as "handjob". I thought you all should know.
44 - You say lame but I think there's a role for "Iranians: They're Just Like Us!" articles. I was talking with some of my co-workers the other day and they think Iran is full of backwards, uneducated, bloodthirsty crazies.
I didn't think it was much of a "just like us" article. "Much like the New Soviet Man..."
I don't know all that much about Persia, but god, what a mismatch between people that seem essentially fun-loving and a ridiculously oppressive theocracy.
True, but I think the message of "hey, there's a large educated secular middle-class" is a good one.
Wasn't the existence of a large educated secular middle class the reason they gave for why there wouldn't be an insurgency in Iraq?
How does one wear a handjob?
Spattered on the shirttail.
Wait, is the shirttail only in the back?
I think the lesson to be learned is that invading an unstable country with a large educated secular middle class will cause that large educated secular middle class to flee and then the country's really fucked.
54: Good point. That was the reasoning my friend gave for why the invasion was such a good idea that Bush was forced to make up nonsensical reasons to get the public on the right side of the issue.
8: Perhaps lefties leave the gap on the left.
I'm a lefty and I leave my gaps on the right. My best guess--which I formulated before reading Ogged's 30--is that it's a reading left to right thing.
43 -
Blah. Except for that Chris Brown kid, who is obviously some kind of robot from the future.
There's no way a hold option and multiple next piece preview is harder than the one piece, no hold version of old. Steeper learning curve, though.
And each piece is a unique color, so you don't have to look at the shape.
Now that I've browsed, I think this video is a fraud. I've seen a few different types or categories of extreme Tetris victories, and all of them seems to have been produced or uploaded by the single Arika company—whose logo is printed awfully largely over the final videos. And, frankly, I don't believe that anyone, anyone, would or could take the time to memorize the sequence of pieces and then go on to win at such a high skill level that a single mistake would ruin the game. And I certainly don't believe anyone's playing that without making a mistake.
63 - You haven't seen The King Of Kong, have you? There most certainly are people like that out there.
Well, he does make a couple of mistakes, which I think add to the verisimilitude. It's hard to spot them because of the speed, but there are four or so occasions where he has to clear fewer than four lines because of a misplaced piece. And I don't think the hypothetical high-skill Tetris player would be memorizing sequences: he'd develop the ability to visualize the state of the field of play without looking at it, focusing instead on the upcoming pieces.
Yeah, it looks real to me. The mistakes increase as things get faster, just as you'd expect them to. And as foolishmortal said, memorizing the pieces doesn't come into it.
And didn't you have any crazy-adept Tetris playing friends in college? This is insanely skilled, but entirely along the continuum of stuff I've seen in person.
Note that the player doesn't need to know the state of the lower blocks, only the "frontier" along the top. Assuming the player fills evenly and doesn't leave a bit hanging, which this one seems to do, there are only about 3^9, or around 20,000 possible "frontiers" onto which the player must place a new piece. I'm sure if you break it down into compositional elements it's dramatically fewer. See Wikipedia on the Psychology of Chess.
Looks real to me. His hands seem to sync with the action, in addition to what foolish and foxy said.
I am the crazy-adept Tetris playing friend from college. There were several semesters in which we'd find someone to find someone to buy us beer so that we could get drunk while we played Tetris all night long. I am very good at this game on every platform, and I'm totally suspicious of video, and I think there's good reason to believe that what few mistakes the player makes are in execution of an otherwise fraudulent program.
What's your evidence, Smashman, other than the fact that no one could possibly be better than you?
The other day I saw this series of Super Mario World videos, in which an obsessive fan has made homebrew levels that are winnable without moving Mario. Mario stands still, and the universe revolves around him. Seriously, they're fantastic. Harold Lloyd would be proud.
It's perfectly fair to be suspicious of video -- I would easily believe that there are edits or speed fudging, or both. But I was thrown by your "memorize the sequence of pieces" line of objection, which seems out of left field to me. And there were, honestly, lots of mistakes in there (which I'm sure you can see, if I can, since I was never all that fabulously adept at Tetris), just not mistakes that he doesn't recover from.
That's all the evidence I need, Ogged. Otherwise: I find it hard to believe that this is this method, this school, to beating Tetris out there, and there is only one video provider putting this material on Youtube. It's a radically new technique, but there seem to be several different videos showing players using it to varying degrees of (extreme) success, but in every case: Arika videos.
"hard to believe that there is this method"
Arika also put strong-man drugs in Barry Bonds' Gatorade without ever telling him. Fact.
What method? The wait for the skinny piece method?
I'm inclined to agree with Armsmasher. However, I've only been good at black and white Gameboy and PC versions of Tetris.
JESUS OGGED, TELL EVERYONE THE SECRET WHY DON'T YOU!!!!
C'mon, Ogged, those pieces are flying too fast for even hyperstimulatd Japanese kids to process. Everyone does the skinny piece on the side. There's not any other way to play the game, except, apparently, lightning fast.
78 gets it right. Especially #6.q
Maybe I'm unusual, but when I've played for lines rather than score, I haven't bothered trying to keep the line open on a side for Tetris.
Your objection is the speed? Dude, I can play almost that fast, but not for any longer than twenty or thirty seconds before I screw something up; it doesn't surprise me at all that someone could sustain it with practice.
The one objection I would entertain is that it's a demo AI that gives more skinny pieces than it typically would. I've often gone a long time without getting one (IYKWIM).
Yeah, I had this "how convenient" feeling as I watched the distribution of the pieces the first time. This was overwhelmed eventually by the sentiment expressed in comment 2. The other odd thing was that the game let him play over the credits. Is that common in arcades?
The Mario videos are impressive, but diverge from standard Super Mario World "physics" in a few rather key ways. Or maybe "materials science" is a better word; I'm willing to bet that all the terrains are edited to have the properties of ice level ground, or an even slicker version of same, but some of those surfaces as normally "constructed" wouldn't act that way. The music cubes certainly don't propel you six Mario-lengths horizontally over normal grass when you bonk into them, that's for sure, at least not in the SNES version.
Huh. I'd never been good enough to see one of those heard of that.
84: I don't doubt that you're hasty at play, Ogged. And I'd also believe this video were it homegrown. Surely the first kid to go to invisible Tetris would throw up a video without the benefit of this one company?
Of what do you suspect this company, Arm-man?
OT: How long should one expect a "houseguest" (a friend of a roommate's; an acquaintance of mine) to stay? He says "a few days".
I don't want to be a bastard, but our house is already maxed out at four people, let alone five.
Beyond cheating, that is. Cui bono?
94: E-mail me your address. I'm sure he has a good kidney, and I accept money order or paypal. No personal checks.
FWIW, my well-reasoned comment aside, Beauty Contest's Arika argument is persuasive.
Of what do you suspect this company, Arm-man?
Of being the sole arbiter of xtreme Tetris play, which strikes me as dubious.
92: Depends on the strength of the friendship. Whether it is yours or your roommate's is only relevant to later reparations.
Here's a message board with a post by a guy who's played against the guy in the clip.
Smasher, have you played Grand Master Tetris? It seems like game play varies slightly in ways that may make something like this possible, in that there seems to be more time to maneuver pieces along the ground after they hit the "Instant Gravity" stage.
Maybe, Ogged, maybe. But man, I just looked over that endgame sequence again, and I think that I just cannot believe it. I do believe I have good reason to think this is supremely odd, but in any case, I'm not buying.
Skimming some of the threads at that site makes me more inclined to change my inclination and think this video is legitimate. But no hold, single piece preview does look more difficult.
Plus, you can rotate pieces ahead of time in the instant gravity stage.
You and SCMT can hook up and not accept greatness together.
Initial Rotation (IRS)Initial rotation is a feature which allows players to have pieces appear in an already rotated state. This is crucial to play in 20G, where rotating the pieces before they hit the ground is impossible. Players can use initial rotation by holding down the rotation button after the previous piece has locked down - but before the next piece enters the well. A short metallic sound can be heard when initial rotation is invoked
[edit] Temporary Landing (TLS)
Temporary Landing (sometimes known as a "ghost" piece in other Tetris variants) is an assistance feature for players to prevent mistakes in early levels. A transparent image of the current piece is displayed at the location it would occupy if allowed to fall from its current location. This feature is removed at level 100, most likely as part of the increase in difficulty as the game progresses.
[edit] Randomization algorithm
TGM keeps a history of the last 4 pieces in memory and is biased against giving one of these pieces when selecting the next piece. If the selection of a random piece yields a piece in the history, the game tries again up to a maximum of 4 random selections. After 4 attempts it will ignore the history and give the last selection. The history is initialized as 4 Z pieces.
100: No. I'm just getting that this is a somewhat different game.
You and SCMT can hook up and not accept greatness together.
We're here, aren't we?
Why is it that convention restricts the type of games one can bet on? You see professional poker players, but where is the man who made his millions at Street Fighter 2? I find this anti-geek bias deeply offensive. It has crushed my high school dreams of becoming a go-hustler.
108: Surely this is a good way to start building buzz.
I'm pretty sure there is betting on video game tournaments nowadays.
I'm sure you could be a go hustler in Japan.
We're familiar with the Star Hustler, but where are the Sinistar hustlers?
109: Well, I haven't actually played go since high school, and only then against my dad. I'm still not sure about the rules on double-takes. Anyway, I always played for nickels, but if you wanted to we could play five dollars a point, I guess.
Does anyone remember Tetris being marketed as a Russian strategy game? Did it give them an advantage during the cold war?
(Obligatory: In Soviet Russia, bloc rotates you.)
Does anyone remember Tetris being marketed as a Russian strategy game?
Yeah, sure. Invented by a Russian, no?
117: So many people working so hard at #1 that they never get around to the others! Tragedy!
How long should one expect a "houseguest" (a friend of a roommate's; an acquaintance of mine) to stay?
108: Why is it that convention restricts the type of games one can bet on? You see professional poker players, but where is the man who made his millions at Street Fighter 2? I find this anti-geek bias deeply offensive
Because two E. Hondas roll-cancelling at one another is fucking boring to watch.
It has crushed my high school dreams of becoming a go-hustler.
Try Korea.
Who's monitoring the records for Ballbuster?
120: You're not making me feel better, teo. The houseguest in-question once lived in this house's shed (when the house was inhabited by previous occupants).
Just make sure he doesn't bring a tent.
I don't know if being a Ballbuster hustler would be worth the trouble.
124: A previous denizen of the shed began a still-present escape hole (~halfway complete) to the alley. I keep weird company.
Tell him he can live in the shed as long as he wants, then start besieging it one day.
The houseguest in-question once lived in this house's shed
This guy is totally coming for the long haul. Sweet. You've got to keep us up to date.
You've got to keep us up to date.
Will do. Along with siege plans drawn up by Cryptic Ned.
I hope everyone appreciates that chance to see the word "besiege" not only in its rarely-used non-metaphorical sense, but also in a tense other than the past participle.
131: I do, and I recommend the digging of a moat before he gets there, for emphasis.
Make sure you finish besieging the shed. Otherwise it will never actually be under siege.
The fourth amendment protects against unlawful search and seigers.
I shall enlist the help of Steven Seagal. Can't be that busy these days.
He's shown himself willing to help out the little guy on occasion before.
He's shown himself willing to help out the little guy
It's cute that you call it by that name, ben.
Steven Seagal was the reason I switched from Aikido to Hapkido when I was 13. I hope he's pleased with himself.
It's cute that you call it by that name, ben.
I'm glad you aren't hurt.
In the interest of norming some homos or something, I should point out that this commenting is distracting me from my viewing of A Streetcar Named Desire, and holy shit, Marlon Brando used to be hott. No one told me! Not even FL.
You're seriously just finding that out?
re: 144
He also invented the whole leather queen look in The Wild Ones.
http://www.nrk.no/img/388023.jpeg
You're seriously just finding that out?
Yup. I feel so enwhitened.
He also had class. Or could have had, anyway.
92 :
How long should one expect a "houseguest" to stay?
I was taught that, as a guest, one should always keep in mind that "fish and houseguests stink after three days".
149: That's why my I end up keeping my houseguests in Ziploc bags in the freezer.
Steven Seagal was the reason I switched from Aikido to Hapkido when I was 13. I hope he's pleased with himself.
Good job. Hapkido is cooler.
Well, I started watching this, then I realised I didn't understand anything that was going on, and then I realised I didn't want to anyway. Very sorry - not impressed - well, yes, it 'defies belief' that anyone could even THINK of doing this!
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is actually the blog where I found this link originally, but in case it isn't, I give you:
Magic Eye/Stereogram Tetris
http://www.lutanho.net/play/magiceyetetris.html
That's awesome! I got distracted for a second after a good start and lost it.
63: It's plausible that it's not a fraud.
Back when people still played tetrinet/tetrifast, a lot of players averaged over 100 drops per minute. The last part of the video looks like it's about 180 dpm, but this is a lot easier than tetrifast. Having a three piece preview would help a lot. The hardware on arcade machines is probably better too. I remember noticing terrible lag and losing a lot of speed when playing on friends' machines because the input rate (or maybe latency, I'm not sure which) is a limiting factor, and most people don't overclock their USB ports.
