EA relaunches Tetris on iOS with a $30/year subscription (really) | Hacker News Reader

EA relaunches Tetris on iOS with a $30/year subscription (really)

joystiq.com

68 pointsevo_917 comments

Anyone who hasn't seen "From russia with love," the BBC documentary about tetris, I encourage you to seek it out. It covers the birth of tetris in the soviet union's academy of sciences, and then the fascinating story of its inexorable spread throughout the burgeoning worldwide videogame industry.

There were many fights over the licensing in different territories, culminating with various westerners having to go cap in hand to the kremlin to beg for the rights. It was one of the first soviet-made products to be licensed for sale outside the Iron Curtain, and was a significant turning point in the Perestroika movement.

It includes interviews with all the key people including the original tetris developer, the atari and nintendo execs who fought for the rights, and even the kremlin technocrat who held their fate in his hands. It deals with software intellectual property issues, young upstart tech entrepreneurs, contractual trickery and all sorts of HN type things. It'd make a great movie.

I second this recommendation. It's fascinating story, and very interesting to see the inspiration behind the game. It's also pretty amusing how all the computer scientists in the academy got totally hooked on it. In soviet russia game plays you!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6600940307313929454

In light of this distressing news, allow me to cheer you up with a video of Harry "SuPa" Hong, the Tetris world record holder, maxing out the point score of the NES port of that game to 999,999, starting from the highest selectable difficulty level of 19. It is effectively a "perfect" Tetris game. He eventually stops at level 29 because at that point the blocks fall to the bottom faster than the fastest human reaction times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99R-fKRr73I

It is startling what an engaging experience watching that video is. If you have ever played tetris even for a minute, your knuckles will be white and your brain will be swimming in adrenaline. It's like watching someone juggling knives.

The video is very good but I have to disagree with your last paragraph. The videos with people hard-dropping every piece and winning the invisible tetris during the credits are more impressive imo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo

You're right, that one is more impressive, but as I understand it that version of tetris has more forgiving physics than the NES version, and he's using a more ergonomic controller, so I think there's a pleasing purity about maxing out the famicom edition.

Also to be honest that second guy comes across as terrifyingly superhuman. The NES one actually looks like something I might actually be able to eventually do with practice, and is therefore more engaging to watch.

The physics are more forgiving to make up for the fact that gravity (and as a side effect, vision) can become much less forgiving. At that point, the game's much closer to DDR or Rock Band, except with a much less readable note chart (the well + next 3 pieces). You have to think about where each one belongs and have your move ready before the piece drops; instead of just one piece you have a small amount of time to work with.

The new Tetris versions also use a friendlier and not-so-random number generator. Basically, it generates a random permutation of the seven different pieces, deals those, and then generates a new permutation. This makes the game much more predicable. You can see the player make clever use of the hold area in anticipation of this cycle and that's pretty entertaining to watch.

> He eventually stops at level 29 because at that point the blocks fall to the bottom faster than the fastest human reaction times.

As I remember, it's not a human limitation; the blocks fall to the bottom faster than the NES game checks for controller input. Even playing the game frame-by-frame on an emulator, you can't move the tetronimo from the center to the edges of the screen in time. It takes up to 5 clicks of the d-pad left or right, so you need at least 10 frames of time for the 5 on-off cycles.

Newer Tetris games deliberately work around this limitation. When the dropping tetronimo collides with something, you're always given at least a half-second to continue moving and rotating the piece before it locks into place. http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Infinity

That's one of many surprisingly detailed rules regarding movement and rotation that newer Tetris games always follow, to create a consistent game and experience across multiple platforms and versions. See http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline

This reminded me of "God Mode" (http://qntm.org/godmode).

It doesn't sound like you need to pay $30 to keep playing (in fact the base game is now cheaper than before), you're just paying to access continuously released extra features. Just another example of the industry's move toward more and more DLC.

An example of creative juices flowing in the wrong department of a gaming company.

What are the rules for this type of subscription based gameplay? If you add a feature and I use for it one month, does the feature disappear unless I pay again next month? Are all of these types of features service based, so that I'm getting more out of it each month?

looks like $1 iOS games with free newly released content is no more. Now we have to pay for each new set of 10 levels that I can finish in 1 sit. How does Tetris' gameplay style warrant new content to justify a 30$ game purchase anyway?

There is a song that uses the concept of Tetris, and the folk tune used in the game, in order to tell the "complete history in the soviet union". Besides being "meta", it's also clever and kinda catchy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWTFG3J1CP8

This is a fantastic piece of work, and I should point out that the film is potentially even better than the song, which is itself brilliant. I imagine the people who put it together have gone on to extremely successful careers if they didn't have them already, winning for it as they did multiple international awards.

you must be shitting me... only words i can say

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