Tag Archives: Alexey Pajitnov

A Kinder, Gentler Tetris? How!?

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[Image courtesy of Eurogamer.]

If there was a Mount Rushmore of puzzle games, Tetris would have to be up there. It made the Game Boy one of the most successful mobile platforms in gaming history. It has been played on every continent AND aboard the International Space Station.

Everyone has played Tetris at one time or another. In fact, it’s so ubiquitous that you’ve probably not only played the original, but some variation on the classic version as well.

And there is no shortage of options on that list. Heck, Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov himself created several famous variations on Tetris, like Hatris (stacking similar hats to clear them from the board), Faces…tris III (where you create famous faces Tetris-style), and Welltris (where pieces fall down all four sides of a cube, and the bottom part is the communal playspace).

[A game of Welltris in progress.]

So what else is out there in the world of Tetris?

There is four-player Tetris (Familiss), Tetris with bombs (Super Tetris), Tetris in a cylinder (V-Tetris), color-specific Tetris (Tetris 2), 3-D Tetris, 3-D Tetris in a sphere (Tetrisphere), speed Tetris (20G or Tetris: The Grand Master), Tetris with earthquakes and meteors (Tetris Elements) and many many more.

As you can see, many of these variations are designed around making the classic game harder. One that we’ve discussed in the past, a 4-directional Tetris variation called Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät, was a personal favorite for a long time.

But easily the most diabolical version was created eleven years ago, and it was aptly named.

Hatetris.

Hatetris is designed to give you the worst possible piece on every turn.

hatetris 1

After figuring out what to do with multiple S pieces, Hatetris throws me a curveball with an I piece.

hatetris 2

Then once I’ve placed the I piece, they flip the script on me with a Z piece. Diabolical.

For the record, after about 30 minutes of play, my record was 3 lines.

hatetris 3

That is brutal.

And after the year or so that many of us have had, who needs brutal?

lovetris 2

Thankfully, the spiritual opposition to Hatetris has appeared for everyone to enjoy. It is, of course, called Lovetris, and it is designed to drop the exact piece you need to clear a line.

lovetris 3

Now, I know what you’re thinking. After a few easy ones, doesn’t it lose its flavor?

On the contrary! It actually offers some new challenges if you approach it from a different direction.

The designer warns that setting up a tetris — eliminating four lines with a single piece — can be difficult when the game is geared toward clearing single lines. That’s one possible challenge for you to solve.

Another that I quite enjoyed was trying to arrange the pieces so I cleared the board entirely. Can you arrange the pieces so that, once you’re done, you’re left with a clean slate to try over with?

A third option is to purposely drop five or six pieces in a row randomly — or even in a tower in the center of the screen — and then work with the program to dig your way out of your predicament.

lovetris

[Even with the AI’s help, this is a doozy to clear.]

Amazing that it took 37 years for someone to come up with this.

So what do you think, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? Will you be trying out Lovetris, or enduring Hatetris for a spell, or trying out one of these many variants? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

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Forget 3-D Chess and Try 4-Directional Tetris!

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[Image courtesy of Eurogamer.]

Tetris is the ultimate puzzle game. If you somehow haven’t played it, you’ve at least heard of it. The brainchild of Alexey Pajitnov conquered the world, not only making Nintendo’s Game Boy a bestselling video game platform, but turning millions of puzzlers into gamers and gamers into puzzlers as well.

Those iconic little Tetromino shapes are instantly recognizable, and the music can still induce panic and nervousness in players decades after the first time they heard those infamous notes.

And it serves as a brilliant template for ambitious game designers and puzzlers to add their own twists to the Tetris formula.

The basic concept is simple: try to arrange the constantly falling Tetromino blocks so that they make complete lines in the play area. If they do, that line disappears.

Of course, just because the concept is simple, that doesn’t mean the game is. As your play area fills up with Tetrominos, the music speeds up, amping up the tension. And as you progress through different levels, the pieces fall faster and faster. You need quick reflexes and ice in your veins to handle the higher difficulty levels.

Thankfully, you only need to worry about the blocks falling from one direction.

But a new variation on Tetris quadruples the gameplay area in a very devious way.

Say hello to Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät, Stephen Lavelle’s take on Tetris. In Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät, Tetromino blocks appear in the center of the play area, and you control where the piece is placed in each of the four directions.

No, the blocks do not fall automatically, nor is there a time limit that forces you to place the blocks quickly. Yes, you can spin each piece before placing it.

But each block goes into all four play areas simultaneously, and in the same position on the opposing sides.

schwerk1

As you can see, the straight piece lands flat in the east and west grid spaces, but standing upright in the north and south grid spaces. You have to work along each axis to find the best case scenario for all four of your play areas.

Yes, you’re trying to complete lines in four different directions at the same time. The T-shaped Tetromino will land in four different arrangements (flat, on one side of the T-bar, on the other side of the T-bar, and on the long end of the T-bar) with a single keystroke.

schwerk2

It’s mind-blowing how challenging this makes the game, but it’s challenging in a good way.

I mean, in a regular game of Tetris, you need several dozen completed lines to conclude a level and feel like a champion. In Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät, you feel like a genius if you can get two completed lines in each of the four play areas before the game is over!

Just as addictive as the original, yet offering a totally new twist on the familiar style of puzzling, I foresee a lot of office hours being lost to this engaging four-directional experiment in space efficiency.

You can try Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät for yourself here, and check out all of Stephen’s games here. (He also has a YouTube channel featuring some of his creations.)

After 35 years, it’s cool to see there are still new ways to make Tetris feel fresh again.

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The Healing Power of Tetris

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Despite the wealth of data out there — and all the “brain-boosting” apps and products claiming they’ll keep your brain in fighting trim — the verdict is still out on whether puzzle-solving can prevent or positively impact Alzheimer’s, dementia, or other age-related mental issues.

But that doesn’t mean that puzzles and puzzle games can’t help in other ways.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have been treating people suffering from traumatic flashbacks — a form of accident-induced post-traumatic stress disorder — by having them play Tetris.

 Originally, the researchers tested this concept by showing unpleasant videos to test subjects and having them play Tetris for twenty minutes afterward. Their research showed that people who played the game — versus a control group that wrote about how they spend their time — suffered from fewer unpleasant and intrusive flashbacks or memories over the following week.

Apparently, the act of playing the game interferes with how people form the visual component of flashbacks. The gameplay doesn’t interfere with actual formation of memories, simply whether the brain will recall those unpleasant memories.

As it turns out, this might be a quality unique to Tetris or Tetris-style games. The same research team discovered that playing a quiz-style game made the flashbacks worse for those subjects than for the subjects who played no game at all after a traumatic event.

It appears that not only did Alexey Pajitnov create one of the most popular games of all-time, but that his legacy may also include helping the victims of traumatic events with their healing process. Amazing stuff.

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PuzzleNation Book Review: Tetris: The Games People Play

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Welcome to another installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

The subject of today’s book review is Box Brown’s graphic novel Tetris: The Games People Play.

[Image courtesy of Macmillan.]

Tetris was a masterpiece right out of the gate. Simple, elegant, and infinitely replayable, it would go on to become one of the most beloved video games in history. And that popularity, that universal charm, sparked a bidding war unlike anything the video game world has ever seen. With secret meetings, dubious contracts, language barriers, and the involvement of the suffocating Soviet regime, it was a recipe for sitcom-style misunderstandings on a global scale.

Tetris: The Games People Play brings the whole ridiculous story to life with immense charm and style. From the creation of Alexey Pajitnov’s delightfully addictive brainchild to the globe-spanning race that ensued as production rights went international, this is a story as convoluted and madcap as it is epic.

Although the drawings accompanying the story are relatively simple, the large cast of characters — from executives and game designers to members of the Soviet government — never feels overwhelming or confusing.

[Image courtesy of DownTheTubes.net.]

Illustrator and author Box Brown brings the story to life with the same panache and colorful style that made his visual biography of Andre the Giant such a warm, enjoyable read. The rounded edges and busy frames help sell both the silliness and chaos of the story, and the mix of yellow, black, and white shading in each illustration harkens back to the earliest days of video games.

(The yellow feels especially inspired, given how easily the story could’ve bogged down in the omnipresent gray tones of Soviet society or the bureaucratic doubletalk that typifies business negotiations.)

Most importantly, Brown never allows readers to lose sight of Alexey’s role as creator and keeper of the faith, a man who, under one of the most oppressive regimes in history, brought to life a game that continues to delight generations of fans.

As entertaining as it is insightful, Tetris: The Games People Play is a fun, fascinating read.

[Tetris: The Games People Play is available in paperback wherever books are sold.]

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Hunger Games edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, I’d like to talk about hunger and games! (No, not THOSE hunger games).

This year marked the 30th anniversary of Tetris, one of the all-time favorite video games in history, and I recently posted about the world record Tetris game played on the side of a skyscraper in Philadelphia.

But did you know that Tetris could be good for your health?

In a recent study, visually distracting and engaging games like Tetris were found to reduce the urge to snack by up to 24%!

From the article:

According to a theory called Elaborated Intrusion, our cravings are driven by visual images that often pop into our heads. With this in mind, Plymouth University psychologists Jessica Skorka-Brown, Jackie Andrade, and Jon May wondered if a visually based task, like playing a video game, could decrease the frequency of craving imagery, and with it, the cravings themselves.

Apparently, only three minutes of gameplay was needed to make an impact on food cravings!

As if we needed another reason to love those distinctive little blocks.

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It’s Follow-Up Friday: Tetris edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, we’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of Tetris! (Following up our post last year about the 29th anniversary of Tetris, of course.)

[Feel free to leave this a capella version of Tetris’s Theme A music by musician Smooth McGroove running in the background to properly set the mood.]

If crosswords are the top pen-and-paper puzzle and the Rubik’s cube is the top puzzle toy, then Tetris has to be the top puzzle game of all-time. It is instantly recognizable and completely unforgettable. (I still get a little anxious whenever I think about the music speeding up when I got too close to the top of the screen.)

It’s available for every video game console, computer, and media device, and has been for decades. Alexey Pajitnov’s incredibly addictive puzzle game baby has conquered the world, and today, we are proudly to join in the global celebration with a few of our favorite Tetris themed pictures.

We previously featured a Tetris Halloween costume in our puzzly costumes post, but these kids upped the ante with four Tetramino pieces as a team costume!

Someone even managed to render the blocks in origami form! How cool is that?

And then there’s this enterprising chef, who whipped up a Tetris-themed bento box full of blocky veggies to enjoy!

We’ve collected more Tetris images on a special board on our Pinterest page, so feel free to check them out in honor of today!

And to Alexey Pajitnov, thank you for years of puzzle pleasure. Your game has crossed borders and won the hearts of millions. You changed the puzzle landscape forever, and for the better.

In closing, here’s another famous Tetris tune performed a capella style for your enjoyment:

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!