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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

> this time I was fixated on how to create a three-dimensional version of Tetris.

I remember playing a 3D Tetris-like game called Blockout back in the day. Some shapes were odd and non-4-block, key mappings for rotations were mind bending.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/498/blockout/

As for the Tetris effect, at some point I played a lot of Tetris and seeing falling tetrominos when falling asleep was only the beginning of it: my brain built some heavy pattern recognition for pieces, so much so that I was basically daydreaming tetrominos everywhere, as in seeing a tetromino shape first, then realising what the thing actually was (e.g a bunch of buildings, a bunch of cars parked in a certain way, in books where rivers lined up a certain way, or words were even vaguely tetromino-shaped), or seeing stacks ("I could fit a T in there" and stuff).

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The scariest version of that mental Tetris Effect I ever got was from Katamari Damacy. I'd be driving along a road, and start judging items like mailboxes and signs as to whether my car was big enough to roll them up if I drove into them.

https://xkcd.com/161/

Not the same thing but ..

Our housing complex had a large entrance gate for cars and a smaller gate used by pedestrians (and two wheelers mostly just because they fit and people are lazy to wait for the security guard to open the large gate which used to be closed by default)

I used to drive a two wheeler regularly. Enter and exit through the smaller gate (3-4 feet wide).

One day I took my car to office. While coming back home, I almost ... mentally ... drove through the small gate and crashed. Some part of my brain took over at last moment and steered my car away from turning into that smaller entrance. Phew.

When I was in 6th grade I got really into Rubik's Cubes/twisty puzzles, and was playing with them all the time.

I remember at one point I'd see a traffic light change and my brain would get confused cause somehow it translated what I was seeing into a physically impossible move on a Rubik's Cube.

A few weeks after starting playing Breath of the Wild on the Switch when it first came out, I remember looking out my apartment window down the street at store I needed to go to and thinking "Oh, that won't take much time at all, I can just glide down most of the way there" and only a moment later remembering that the paraglider wasn't something I had in real life.

Yes, the main keys were Q/A, W/S, E/D for rotations around the major axes, arrows for moving in the XY plane (assuming the Z axis is "down") and SPACE was a force drop I think?

You can learn a lot of Group Theory trying to make a mental model of how the rotations work, since you get not just equations like QQQ = A but also (from memory so maybe wrong) something like QWQ = D. Shapes with symmetry axes generate subgroups, some (like the I block) even commutative ones. So technically you could live with only three of the rotation keys if you're the kind of person who rotates left three times when you want to rotate right.

And of course, the 3D versions of the S/Z pieces can screw up your game even worse than the 2D ones.

> You can learn a lot of Group Theory trying to make a mental model of how the rotations work

I didn't have a clue what group theory was back then (I was 10yo or something), but I clearly remember discovering these. Pretty sure it ended up become formative for my surprisingly quick group theory understanding in later maths class.

One of the earliest "too soon?" jokes I saw on the internet was a 2002 or so animated GIF of a game of Tetris being played around and between the World Trade Center towers: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/172830-september-11th-2001-a...

Can be played here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Blockout_1989

There is a version for XWindow. Has been for many years: xbl.

Ubuntu doesn't seem to have a package in any default repository.

I played that a lot, too! Usually with the simplest block set, which was just 3D versions of the usual Tetris blocks. After that, playing “normal” 2D tetris suddenly became harder, because there are some rotations that cannot be done when you have only one axis! In 3D, you can flip an S into a Z, but in 2D, you can’t!

> In 3D, you can flip an S into a Z, but in 2D, you can’t!

Haha I did that a lot! the sequence became hardwired in muscle memory, like when you learn to solve a Rubik's cube and moving this to that becomes second nature.

My 3D Tetris of choice is Tetrisphere; partly because it was the first game that really got me into Tetris.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrisphere

I had a nintendo64 and had 6 games for it. Mario64, zelda64, majora's mask, kart64, goldeneye, and tetrisphere. If it were possible to wear out a n64 cart i would have worn out tetrisphere. Several generations later I still had the 64 hooked up with tetrisphere still stuffed into it. It wasn't until the xbox one that I finally packed it away and switched to emulation.

Welltris was the 3d-ish variant all my cohorts played. although it's really fairly 2D in truth.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2121/welltris/

I've never experienced this with Tetris, but there was a stretch of time, decades ago, where when I was driving through cities I'd see the various sections of the landscape tinged with the green, blue, and yellow matching SimCity zoning colors.

One more who loved that game.

Friend and I used to get stoned and one of us would do translation and the other rotation. I forget who controlled the drop.

Achieving fluent hive-mind sufficient to beat higher levels in flow state was quite a thing.

Did not know about Blockout! Came here to post a link to a 3D Tetris I played a lot way back, can be seen in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pjG2R14VCU

OMG Blockout. I can hear the intro in my head now! If I remember correctly, it was on a very early PC (8086?) and would actually run too fast on later PCs. Pretty impressive game for the time.

Blockout was the first game we had on our 286. So many memories. Thanks.

Frac was the one I had as a kid: https://archive.org/details/Frac_1020

Loved me some Frac!

I remember playing this as well. Fuck, life is so short.

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