Tetris' Rotation System is Wonderfully Broken

despite being a timeless gaming icon i have to admit that i didn't care about tetris in the slightest until one day the almighty youtube algorithm creased my feet with this video a 1989 tetris expert plays tetris effect for the first time the entire video is wonderfully interesting and you should absolutely watch it if you haven't but i was specifically intrigued by this part now if you don't know what tetris effect is that means a couple things one that means that you have missed out on seeing my favorite video game trailer of the past three years which you should definitely check out after this video um but basically a tetris game has one of the best trailers sure i thought but my curiosity was peaked so i gave the trailer a watch anyway and two minutes and 58 seconds later i was on the verge of tears to this day it's one of the most moving trailers i've ever seen i was dead set on playing tetris effect as soon as i could and a couple of months after the game's launch i got to do just that and as my eyes and ears were blessed with the game's dreamlike shapes and its beautiful soundtrack my first thought was wow i am really bad at this game and my second thought was wow tetris rotation system is kind of really broken [Music] but it hasn't always been the case i don't think it will come as a surprise to too many people that tetris games don't always work under the exact same rules to keep things fresh and i'm not just talking about huge gameplay changes like tetris battle guidance magic spells or tetris 99's hordes of murderous players even the basic mechanics that some might take for granted haven't always been present many but not all older versions of tetris feature a much nastier randomizer only lets you see one piece in advance don't let you hold pieces don't let you drop pieces instantly and don't show you where your pieces are going to land because different developers handled different versions of tetris and there was no standardized way to create tetris games they all featured some slight differences regarding the rules and controls for example in sega's arcade version of tetris there was only one rotation button which rotated your pieces counter clockwise but when nintendo released its game boy version in 1989 they added a second rotation button letting you rotate your pieces both ways so back in the late 80s if you were a japanese player who got really good at tetris on the arcade and then moved on to the game boy version a lot of your skills wouldn't carry over the tetris company which owns and licenses tetris did not like these kinds of differences they wanted every single tetris game to work under the same basic rules and controls so in 1996 they came up with a solution [Music] this is a tetris guideline it's essentially an instruction manual for how to make a tetris game anyone who wants to make an official version of tetris must adhere to the guideline and the tetris company will reject the game prototype if they don't think it's going to move the tetris brand forward or make enough money since it's confidential and gets updated every year we don't know the exact contents of its most recent iteration but we can at least have an idea of what it looks like because the 2009 edition of the guideline was leaked in its entirety and it covers everything from what the default control should be to which colors the block should have to how your pieces are rotated and this is what i want to focus on if you're at least moderately familiar with tetris it may be easy to imagine how its rotation system works you have a button to rotate a piece clockwise and another one to rotate it counterclockwise and if there is any kind of obstacle the way your piece will not rotate simple and that's how a lot of older tetris games work until the tetris company decided it also didn't like that they wanted a rotation system that was more welcoming to new players one that didn't prevent them from rotating a piece every time there was something in the way so they created a new standardized version of the rotation system meant to be used in every guideline tetra scheme the super rotation system or srs for short [Music] first implemented in tetris worlds the srs adds a whole bunch of new rules to decide whether a block can be rotated and where it should go if it can every block can land in one of five predetermined positions after a rotation every time the player attempts to rotate a block the game checks if it's going to collide with an obstacle if nothing is in the way then great rotate away but if the rotation is impossible then the game performs the same test for the second position if that rotation is impossible then the game performs the same test for the third position and then the fourth and then the fifth the rotation will fail entirely if and only if all five tests fail this aspect of the srs is commonly referred to as a kick and i suppose that's because it seems like the obstacles are kicking your blocks into place while the srs allows for more flexibility in how and when you can rotate your blocks it comes with a lot of very bizarre quirks your blocks can now go in places that look completely unreachable and move in ways that seemingly make no sense with the srs in mind it becomes much easier to explain how the sequence i showed at the beginning of this video is even possible let's break it down [Music] the ip spawns facing north we spin it clockwise to make it face east test one is performed and succeeds nothing's in the way after letting the piece fall for a second or two we're presented with our first dilemma let's see what happens if we try to spin the piece clockwise test one is performed and fails test two is performed and also fails so does test three and four and five all five tests have failed no rotation now let's see what happens if we try to spin the piece counterclockwise test one is performed and fails and two and three and four but five now we're starting to go places the piece is now facing north again by now i think you get the gist of it so i'll speed things up a bit we move the piece to the left all five tests fail if we try to spin the piece counterclockwise and test four succeeds if we try to spin clockwise and finally we are back to our first situation all five tests fell if we spin clockwise and test 5 succeeds if we try to spin counterclockwise from there all we have to do is repeat the same steps with one less rotation to make each time until the board is cleared and like i said this is far from the only example of the srs's weirdness and anyone even remotely familiar with high-level modern tetris will know that i haven't addressed the elephant in the room as the years rolled by the srs and the guideline added a ton of changes that ended up turning tetris into a very different game and at the center of it all lies one of tetris's best known moves in older tetris games the most powerful move at your disposal was more often than not well the tetris which you can perform by clearing four lines at once with an eyepiece oh man look how high his field is oh boom oh my god until t spins entered the chat and things were never the same again because t spins can be worth more points than tetris's the specifics change depending on which version of tetris you're playing but two conditions must usually be meant to perform a t spin first the last move you performed must be a rotation with a t piece the second condition is slightly more complex imagine your t piece is in a three by three grid like this and that its corners are labeled a b c and d sides a and b must be occupied in addition either side c or d or both must be occupied also if the fifth rotation test is performed and succeeds the rotation will be counted as a t spin even if the second condition hasn't been met this explanation was a bit technical but in practice it's not that complicated most t-spin setups look like this it's a plus with an extra space in one of the four corners and you spin your t-block into it the end after spending some time learning basic setups i slowly started incorporating t-spins into my playstyle and at first it was pretty awkward i tried to turn everything into a t-spin setup sometimes it would work most of the time it didn't and every time my playing field became an absolute mess but after enough practice and enough game overs i started realizing that it's unwise to force t spins into your games and that you're better off playing in ways that make t spin opportunities more likely to appear that is when i began to change i didn't need to turn everything into a t-spin setup anymore hell i didn't even need to create the setups i just started seeing chances all over the place while playing the game in reality all i was doing was spinning virtual blocks into virtual holes but in my mind it felt like i had opened some kind of third eye in a certain way i will never be the same person again because i can't unsee teaspoon setups and i can't unlearn how to play tetris either no matter how much time i spend away from the game i've lost count of how many times i completely stopped playing for months only to start shattering my personal bests left and right upon returning to the game it happened again while recording footage for this very video and it just keeps on getting crazier because i actually kind of lied viewers who paid careful attention throughout this video may have noticed that one of my statements sounded somewhat off t-spins can be worth more points than tetris that was not a mistake i said that instead of r worth more points because there are actually six types of t-spins the more lines you clear with your t-spin the more points you earn zero lines is just a t-spin one line is a t-spin single two lines is a t-spin double and three lines is a t spin triple there's also the mini t spin which is a slightly easier version of the t spin that has more lenient requirements but doesn't score as many points and the mini t spin single which is a mini t spin that clears one line so when i said that t spins can be worth more points than tetris's what i meant was that t spins can score anywhere from 100 points which is as much as a single line clear to 16 1600 points which is twice as much as a tetris all while requiring you to clear less lines than a tetris [Music] [Applause] t-spin triples look like a really sweet deal until you see what it takes to pull one off yeah a lot of guides start talking about bases and overhangs and crazy things like that which just confuses the hell out of me so here's my explanation instead it's an f and then you rotate your t piece once to fit it in the top part and a second time to fit it in the bottom part bam just make sure you have enough space to slide in your t piece and that this wall is not one block high otherwise your block will get kicked to the wrong spot you really shouldn't try to do too many t-spin triples anyway because if you don't know what you're doing it'll leave your playing field in shambles and cause you to game over or lose the match it's very much a high risk high reward move and yes i know you can score even more points if you clear the entire board and that you can start massive combos with four watts but let's not get into that regular teaspoon doubles and occasional teaspoon triples along with a lot of tetris's are pretty much the extent of my modern tetra skills i think i'm fairly decent at modern tetris but i'm not even close to be a true master watch actual experts play and it'll look like a completely different game [Music] most experts play at unbelievably high speeds the current world record for the 40 line speed run is 14.915 seconds that means placing more than six pieces per second they print t spin after t spin after l spin oh gee i see that else been triple they find solutions to seemingly unescapable predicaments they played tetris 99 to the beat of the music and still managed to win it's like the srs has become second nature for them nice if classic tetris tournaments where you are trying to get a higher score than your opponents can be compared to a methodical chess game multiplayer matches of modern tetris where your opponent receives garbage lines every time you clear your own can be compared to a dragon ball z fight where everything can end in the blink of an eye actually make it a pretty healthy combo here you can learn a variety of openings and setups and strategies to make as many teaspoons and sometimes even perfect clears as fast as possible letting you rain hell on your enemies with teaspoon death towers and a lot of them have insane names that i love so so much names like dt cannon dragon cut copy doom rank godspin grim grotto imperial cross king crim mochi zanger special triple triple and last but not least triple donation double attack and if none of what i've shown you has convinced you that this rotation system is absolutely bonkers here is one more oddity for you gstress is a ridiculously customizable version of tetris that you can play right in your browser and it features a bunch of user-created maps that players are meant to clear as fast as possible and one of them is an elevator you can make an elevator in tetris and all this insanity comes from the simple action of rotating blocks there are a lot of arguments to be made against the srs about how the pieces given to you aren't completely random anymore about how the kick table is unintuitive about how early srs games literally let you spin pieces forever and i really do mean forever but i still feel like the srs has its place in this world it's freestyle tetris you can just start an endless game put on some music and start stacking while all your troubles and anxiety fade into the background tetris's rotation system is broken and know what i unabashedly love it words and all [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Superclass

Views: 492,826

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Id: dgt1kWq2_7c

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021