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Futilitris

twinbeard.com

93 pointsjmduke30 comments

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Just playing this game me bad flashbacks to this: http://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html

And I thought Hell Tetris [1] was bad enough.

[1]: http://www.kongregate.com/games/banthar/hell-tetris

Also http://xkcd.com/888/

This is not a game, it's interactive art posing as a game.

The intention is not to provide an itch to scratch, but to lead the player towards contemplating compulsion itself.

Brilliant.

I am having a very difficult time dealing with the fact that playing this game feels exactly the same as the programming I normally find myself doing; like, I spent a lot of time last night improving the design of my website backend code, and today while playing Futilitris the state of my mind and what I'm experiencing as I slowly decrease my aspect ratio feels pretty much identical :/. (Uhh... I hadn't actually read the quote at the top yet; I'm now having a really horrible existential moment...)

Well, I mean, that depends on your definition of game: http://www.gamedefinitions.com/.

If you weren't aware, the guy who made this also made the very awesome Frog Fractions and recently funded its successor on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/475057068/frog-fraction...

I really appreciated that the sound + music began to echo after several zooms... the vast, hopeless chamber effect really hammered home the futility.

There's something scary in this experience. You're conditioned by years of Tetris to expect that sweet gratification, but it never comes. All your errors will haunt you forever, and you will never get any reward for your achievements.

See, I found myself realizing that my mistakes didn't matter. In the long run, you cannot see the mistakes.

My favorite comment: Jari, 2012-10-31 02:21:17 Hey I think I found a bug with your game. I managed to complete it. Turns out life isn’t futile – it’s just a matter of thinking outside the box and pursuing your definition of life’s goals, not those imposed by someone else. Here’s a screenshot of the end screen. [EDIT: NSFW] http://i.imgur.com/rGg77.png

I suppose it isn't that much more futile than normal tetris...

A metaphor for life: impossible to win, impossible to lose. Just a game.

Makes me wonder if there's an "easter egg" hidden somewhere.

This is the same guy that did Frog Fractions, which if you haven't played it, is one of the most surprising games ever made about amphibians and scientific notation. http://twinbeard.com/frog-fractions

The pedant in me has to point out that the tetromino sequence is generated randomly, which is not the correct way to do it.

http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator

Well, I enjoyed it, but good tetris mechanics make it an exercise in how long until you get bored. Does at least make me remember the joy of finishing all the wonders in the New Tetris for n64 though.

Well...that was one of the darkest puzzlers I've ever played.

Does it stop expanding when you get to the pixel level?

According to the comments, it just goes gray and never stops. http://i.imgur.com/PQ9Ve.png

It strikes me that this might be incredibly useful in inducing a feeling of frustration in subjects of psychological studies.

I got to a .1 aspect ratio and then decided I'd had enough and it was time to end the game.

Turns out that the board expands upwards too.

Truly futile.

Interesting concept and new take on Tetris. I liked it a lot. Keep it good work!

Wonderfully dark, the music (March Slav by Tchaikovsky) only makes it better..

Oh this is brilliant, really puts a perspective :)

Anti claustrophobic.

Ehhh... I've played a lot of pointless games before. Can't say that this one was particularly inspiring, although it tricked me for about 10 minutes thinking that there was something worthwhile to play here.

It needs 'something', other than that: Brilliant!

It's 2014. Stop using Flash.

This game is from 2011.

Even today, HTML5 games won't function properly across all modern browsers without using Flash via soundmanager2.js as a crutch to get around unacceptably poor audio tag implementations.

In particular, the audio tag implementation in Safari makes pure HTML5 games range from annoying to unplayable, because there is a completely unavoidable 500 +/- 1000 ms delay between calling play() and the audio actually playing through the speakers.

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