In what will come as a shock to absolutely no one in light of what I wrote previously, I've been playing a whole hell of a lot of Hamster's re-release of Tetris: The Grand Master on my Switch. Even when it lacks certain features and QOL aspects of Tetris' current guidelines, it turns out that the prospect of not having to turn on MAME or my supergun every time I want to play it is an alluring proposition indeed. So much so, it's put Harvestella completely on the backburner as my main game to unwind after work. (You're still great and I'll get back to you during the holiday break, I promise!)
Much to my surprise, though, the bulk of my time hasn't been in the regular score attack or 20G modes, but rather, the secret "Big Mode." Originally accessible only be inputting a code on the title screen, in this re-release, it's broken out as its own readily selectable leaderboard category, meaning it's more or less available at the press of a button from the main menu. Having only very lightly dabbled in this mode in the past because of the hassle of accessing it on the real thing, this has been unexpectedly revelatory, as it's given me a proper opportunity to evaluate it on its own merits and man, this is a perversely fascinating way to play Tetris.
On the face of it, TGM's Big Mode is as straightforward as it gets. The pieces are twice as large as usual while the well itself remains the same size. Since mathematically speaking you now have to manipulate 16 chunks' worth of mass for each piece instead of the usual 4, this means that if you're not careful, the well will fill up very, very fast. And the best way to fill up the well very, very fast is to try to play Big Mode like it's regular Tetris because the now-claustrophic space you're afforded with the unchanging well results in pieces not fitting together in the same way as before. Or, they might if you get two complimentary pieces. But at that point, you've probably already filled up most of the lateral space for at least one row of the well, if not two. Empty spaces are therefore an inevitability much earlier than they otherwise would be in a conventional Tetris game when playing well, and if you try to avoid them by playing "perfectly," you'll soon be stacked right up to the top where you confront the other bitter reality unique to Big Mode: the effective ceiling is far lower because pieces now need far more empty space to spawn and rotate. You'll much more regularly lose because of an incoming piece clipping the board than from having the board properly top up from a full well.
In my experience, to avoid this fate, or at least delay it, you end up having to all but forsake pursuing any Tetrises whatsoever, instead opting to build much flatter, lateral wells that can facilitate quick one or two-line clears to keep shaving off the top as routinely as possible. This leads to some fascinating reevaluations of the way in which these supersized pieces now relate to each other within the well and it's forced me to unlearn some very entrenched habits to achieve any modicum of leaderboard success. When you resign yourself to introducing empty spaces to pursue short term goals and how in fact, the best play you can make often involves deliberately creating them, you end up resorting to wild things you almost never have to in vanilla flavors of Tetris. I pieces almost always get laid flat to pave the way for an easy one-line clear attainable with nearly any other follow-up piece, while Js and Ls get hung off of ledges in such a way as to cause two-line clears at their top and bottom, leaving a space open in the middle to be hopefully filled in their wake by whatever's coming next. There's nothing to inherently stop you from playing regular Tetris like this, too, but the smaller piece sizes mean that you almost never have to; the greater breadth afforded relative to the well inherently incentivizes much cleaner overall play-styles, barring some fancier tricks like T-spins and whatnot. By comparison, the premium placed on space in Big Mode offers a massive incentive to achieve proper all-clears (ie: emptying the space completely so no chunks remain after a line clear), a feat made all the more difficult by a piece randomizer that, to my eye, is very hell-bent on trying to offer you the worst piece possible for any giving situation, or at least close to it.
I know this is a lot of Tetris shop talk from someone who would only describe himself as, at best, very casually, lightly competitive, but hopefully the clip I've pasted above from one of my own sessions earlier today highlights just how much the mere act of enlarging the pieces while keeping all of the other rules the same changes how you play the game. It feels wrong and, indeed, perverse to play Tetris like this and yet that's the very reason I can't stop myself from taking another stab over and over again. If you can hold your own in Tetris and stuff like 20G Mode in this game or getting, say, top 10 in Tetris 99 isn't so daunting to you, I genuinely urge you to give this mode a spin. Even if the skills and strategies accrued while playing it don't really plausibly transfer to many other kinds of Tetris, after two decades of basically the same old, same old post-guideline solidification, it's a hell of a refreshing way to play that challenges your well-building approach at its most fundamental.
