Tetris is neat. Competitive Tetris is amazing and scary and it's something I much prefer being a spectator for rather than a player.
The final rounds of Classic Tetris Monthly are going on right now -- final matchup coming up soon! If you haven't seen it, these players are mindblowingly amazing at NES Tetris. It is hypnotic to watch.
The game they're playing is modified from original NES Tetris in two ways:
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The first digit of the score is in hexadecimal, counting up to F and then wrapping around. Otherwise every match would be a tie at 999999
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Level 29 used to be the maximum speed - pieces falling at one block per frame - and was considered a "kill screen". You get no grace period when a piece hits the stack like in more modern Tetrises so you have very little time to maneuver. But in the last few years, players developed new controller techniques that let them survive past level 29. For the sake of matches that don't last indefinitely, CTM has created the "super kill screen" at level 39, where pieces fall at two blocks per frame.
Anyway it's on, go watch, this is a good community and I believe a trans woman is kicking ass right now
