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ketritt's Tetris (GB)
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| [January 18, 2008 06:25:34 PM]
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Sorry, I misunderstood the assignment and didn't realize we had to have two game playing sessions in our logs.
GAMEPLAY
This time around, I was actually a little bit more into the game and personally invested in it. I started out bored, but decided to up the ante and set it on a little bit more difficult level. For the first few games, I found myself just randomly trying to fit the blocks together like pieces of a puzzle. After that, though, I started to strategize and anticipate what types of openings I should leave available on the bottom level while keeping an eye on which shapes would be coming next (based on the little indicator box on the upper right hand side of the screen).
Also, I found myself playing more quickly than I had before, and feeling a little bit more anxious about whether or not I was sticking to my strategy. This helped me to play better and increase my score, but also left me feeling a tad bit lame for being at all emotionally invested in tetris.
GAME DESIGN
Overall, I feel that the design of the version of tetris that I've been playing has a number of weaknesses. First, there is the fact that there is not much space on the screen in which to maneuver and for this reason it's easy to become bored, because every new challenge is essentially the same as the last - except maybe a little faster (based on levels and how long you've been playing). Also, it almost seems like the game is designed to encourage short gameplaying sessions, because after a certain amount of time the speed of the blocks' descent increases and the frequency with which the player is faced with certain difficult-to-maneuver shapes also increases. For example, I had been playing for a while and the speed of descent of the shapes increased in an almost comically obvious way. Directly following this, I was barraged with a ton of "Z" shaped blocks one after the other. Of course, I failed this level soon afterwards, because it's impossible to fit shapes together that are all the same. I felt like tetris was screwing with me.
On the plus side, though, this type of design does encourage more creativity and strategizing in the game player. So, essentially, in my book the up-side of tetris is that it could be viewed as intellectually productive in its ability to encourage creativity and problem solving abilities in the game player. Much in the same way as those little block puzzles (where the kid has to fit certain shapes into their corresponding nook in the gameboard within a specific time limit) are used as educational tools in kindergarten and grade school.
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| [January 14, 2008 06:22:25 PM]
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In Tetris, the gameplayer is faced with a screen that is blank at first. Then, different shaped blocks fall down that screen and the gameplayer is able to manipulate their shape using the controls A and B, as well as their direction of descent with the arrow buttons. The objective of the game is to gain points by manipulating the shape of the objects in such a way that they form an unbroken line (or a series of unbroken lines stacked on top of each other) on the bottom of the screen. The level of difficulty the gameplayer chooses controls the speed at which the blocks fall.
I was honestly pretty bored while playing this game, and was glad that I could do it with one hand so that I could smoke a cigarette (or several) with the other while I played. Of course, I was probably bored both because I'm twenty two years old and it's a one person game. I know that the game design of tetris has been changed, though, so that with more sophisticated devices (like an xbox, for example) the gameplayer has the option of 3-D tetris, multiple players, etc. This is definitely a good change, because the overall objective of the original tetris as it was played on my gameboy is not that engaging for the player - there's nothing at stake (other than your dignity, but really, you're playing tetris, so it's not like you're that awesome to begin with), it doesn't require that much skill and you're interacting with inanimate objects (blocks) rather than, say, people on a quest for something.
On the plus side, however, is that it doesn't take a lot of prior experience to become good at Tetris, anybody can do it with a relatively high amount of skill with little or no familiarity with the game. Also, there's the kitsch factor, which is always a good thing in my book. It could either be really lame that I just played Tetris for 45 minutes, or it could be awesome. It's up to interpretation, which I like.
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ketritt's Tetris (GB)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Monday 14 January, 2008
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This is the only GameLog for Tetris. |
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