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Mar. 23rd, 2006 02:29 amQuick thoughts on Tetris DS:
They improved the WiFi setup over Mario Kart's in many ways. Most notably, all players have visible ELO ratings. Yay. They also print messages on the screen telling you in plain language that running away from a game will make you lose and guarantee injury to your rating. I hope that this discourages twits from quitting, a problem I see in Mario Kart all the time; it's not clear in that game that quitting = losing (though I suppose that after a while you'd notice that your loss record was oddly steep).
I haven't tried it yet, but it seems that you can directly invite friends (that is, people with whom you've exchanged friend codes) to join you for a game. This too would be scads better than Mario Kart's rather crappy friend system, which was simply the game's standard four-player matchmaking engine with a friends-only filter on it. There, if you had only one friend on-line, the system would pair you up and then stupidly sit there spinning for a minute or two, waiting for two more of your nonexistent friends to appear before giving up and letting the two of you race.
Gone, however, is Mario Kart's "Rivals", option, which matches you with people at around your skill level. There is simply a "worldwide" button that throws you in an arena with some random folks. I am holding out hope that a "rivals" button will appear after I've played enough to make my rating meaningful, since that is after all how ELO is supposed to work. (As it is, my rating quickly dropped below the starting figure and has remained there. And everyone else I've played so far is above it. And yea, I've been beat up a lot. I don't care; it's Tetris! It's a blast.)
It hasn't occurred to me before how Tetris makes rather cruel use of a positive feedback loop: as you do worse, the game gets harder, since you have less time to maneuver a piece into position when the stack of blocks is higher. Looking at it this way, I might prefer the mechanics of a similar-but-different game like Meteos. In that one, it's also dangerous to let the pile get too high, but since you can slide around blocks anywhere in the stack this is offset by the fact that more blocks gives you more degrees of freedom.
Boy I sure like Meteos. I wish that had WiFi.
They improved the WiFi setup over Mario Kart's in many ways. Most notably, all players have visible ELO ratings. Yay. They also print messages on the screen telling you in plain language that running away from a game will make you lose and guarantee injury to your rating. I hope that this discourages twits from quitting, a problem I see in Mario Kart all the time; it's not clear in that game that quitting = losing (though I suppose that after a while you'd notice that your loss record was oddly steep).
I haven't tried it yet, but it seems that you can directly invite friends (that is, people with whom you've exchanged friend codes) to join you for a game. This too would be scads better than Mario Kart's rather crappy friend system, which was simply the game's standard four-player matchmaking engine with a friends-only filter on it. There, if you had only one friend on-line, the system would pair you up and then stupidly sit there spinning for a minute or two, waiting for two more of your nonexistent friends to appear before giving up and letting the two of you race.
Gone, however, is Mario Kart's "Rivals", option, which matches you with people at around your skill level. There is simply a "worldwide" button that throws you in an arena with some random folks. I am holding out hope that a "rivals" button will appear after I've played enough to make my rating meaningful, since that is after all how ELO is supposed to work. (As it is, my rating quickly dropped below the starting figure and has remained there. And everyone else I've played so far is above it. And yea, I've been beat up a lot. I don't care; it's Tetris! It's a blast.)
It hasn't occurred to me before how Tetris makes rather cruel use of a positive feedback loop: as you do worse, the game gets harder, since you have less time to maneuver a piece into position when the stack of blocks is higher. Looking at it this way, I might prefer the mechanics of a similar-but-different game like Meteos. In that one, it's also dangerous to let the pile get too high, but since you can slide around blocks anywhere in the stack this is offset by the fact that more blocks gives you more degrees of freedom.
Boy I sure like Meteos. I wish that had WiFi.
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