the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

I'm the hedgehog masque replica guy

嘘だらけ塗ったチョースト


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iiotenki
@iiotenki

My other main takeaway from the Direct is that while a Tetris collection from Digital Eclipse is super cool (disclaimer: I worked on their Wizardry I remake, if briefly, so take what I just wrote for what you will), as someone who was just beginning to think about finally plunking down the money to have Tetris the Grand Master 3 in the home (I already have 1, but 3 is my favorite by far), I'm feverishly doing an over/under in my head about the likelihood it's among the remaining games yet to be announced when they're making a point of emphasizing how many of them have been Japan exclusive until this release.

On the one hand, it would be nice to not potentially drop... six figures in yen just to have more authentic arcade Tetris to play at home (or maybe, maybe even finally have prices on it come down a little), but on the other, it feels like any TGM would be one of the legally weirder ones to work out, even if you would figure (hope?) that at least some installment or other of that gets featured. 3 feels like the most realistic choice for a number of reasons, especially so as to not step on Hamster's toes and I'm sure not holding my breath of them ever touching any PC-based games for obvious reasons, but... 🤔

If any of y'all have opinions, I'd love to hear them because for as much of a Tetris head as I otherwise am, I can't say I actively keep abreast everything that goes on with Arika and that series. 🤷


gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

I was gonna say I had a longer reply queued up that I was scrapping in favour of a shorter version but this version's not much shorter so whatever:

you can take Nintendo dropping a NES Tetris NSO announcement right alongside this one as a sign that they're not giving their games to this collection, and I really don't believe Sega will participate, either... which immediately eliminates a massive chunk of the biggest and most culturally-significant commercial Tetris games from this comp, to the point where you almost wonder why they'd bother doing it without them. TGM doesn't strike me as a complete impossibility—their VP Mihara has spoken publicly about fielding interest from Arcade1UP or some other similar company, only for said company to back down when they conceded they weren't confident they'd be able to satisfactorily reproduce the originals—but I certainly wouldn't trust DE to do a flawless job, either, or to even match the existing Hamster versions.

(EDIT: this comment on the Steam forums all but confirms no TGM: https://steamcommunity.com/app/3180240/discussions/0/4423185135322890837/)

Like, they've pledged a "recreation" of the original Electronika 80 version. Neat! They have a bunch of BPS' Japan-only FC/SFC games, perhaps most notably the Chunsoft-developed Tetris 2+Bombliss, designed and advised by an all-star team of collaborators with the intent of rectifying the mistakes of the BPS' FC Tetris. Cool, if you're a Tetris nerd, and probably far less cool if you're not, especially if you're not a Japanese person closing in on middle age. Hatris, because why not. The Atari arcade game seems like a given, which certainly isn't nothing. (EDIT: or not, I forgot that it's owned by Warner Bros.) What else, though? How about any of the zillion-selling games that one might reasonably expect from a Tetris collection?

Putting aside the futility of trying to assemble a commercial anthology around a series as fractured as Tetris, there's no doing justice to the history of the series as a museum piece, either: The Tetris Company could not give less of a shit about the history of the series beyond perpetuating the Pajitnov/Rogers folk story to whatever minimum extent will allow them to continue cutting deals for tetromino-shaped bath salts or whatever, and any history that centres on them or is forced through their filter is necessarily going to exclude all of the vast and varied movements that gave this game a culture worth commemorating, because it runs counter to their cute little licensing business. I mean, the anniversary they're commemorating isn't even a real anniversary—they just up and changed the supposed origin date back in 2009 because they felt like running a 25th-anniversary campaign that year.

tl;dr: it's not going to have much of a through-line as an assemblage of software, nor will it include most if not all of the most popular, globally-recognised and playable versions; it's doomed to offer only the most basic, sanitised, marketing-copy version of "history"; and it's a complete coin-flip as to whether the games it does contain will even play adequately (because, for all their work to reposition themselves as a high-end curation studio, a lot of their emulation work's still very rough around the edges).


dog
@dog

Every one of the games listed in the trailer is BPS, so I think it's safe to say this is what's happening: it's "Tetris documentary" as corporate mythmaking. This is the authorized documentary problem, something that's become a real problem with streaming service documentaries in recent years - everyone wants the access benefits of making the "real", "official" documentary even if it means you're just telling the specific story a brand wants people to hear.

The early history of Tetris is defined by the non-BPS Tetrises - not just Nintendo Tetris (which is being rereleased separately from this), but the home computer ports, the arcade versions, and so on. There's a Tetris story you can tell by focusing specifically on BPS Tetris and The Tetris Company, but that's a Tetris story - the story of this company and its role in a wider culture, not the story of the culture itself.


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in reply to @iiotenki's post:

As much as I want Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura in the collection, hearing TGM3 has Sakura mode which has mostly the same or at least very similar levels to that game and might be a good inclusion to have in that collection?

Some friends and acquaintances have pretty much convinced me that this thing will likely not have any TGM in it at all since it seems to be skewing very, very heavily towards the flavors developed by Blue Point Soft for better or (I would somewhat argue) worse. But I will say that TGM3 specifically, in case you're not aware, is just a Windows game at heart and has long since been cracked to work on regular computers. So if you've always been curious about the Sakura mode stuff specifically and want to see how it compares for yourself, it's totally viable to do so without dropping money on the real thing like my dumb ass is probably gonna do eventually. I'm not terribly familiar with the CCS Tetris, so I can't vouch for its authenticity either way, but yeah.

Ah thats a shame. I'd still might pick it up just for Tetris Battle Gaiden at least just so I can play it with arcade sticks instead of just SNES controllers. I've definitely heard about the cracked version floating around but just keep forgetting to try it, but thanks for the heads up regardless.

Someone asked about this over on the steam forums, and it doesn't sound like any of the TGM titles will be included.

Steam user:
No Arika Tetris No Buy
holding out desperately for some sort of TGM rep to be included as part of tetris forever's celebration of legacy.

Dan Amrich:
This project is a history of Tetris, told by the people who lived it. The games included are illustrations of that history. This is consistent with our other Gold Master Series releases, as well as Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. We're telling a story, but letting you play it as it's told.
That said, everybody has a favorite version of Tetris. There are dozens if not hundreds of variants and releases. It is impossible for us to deliver every Tetris game made, and it was not our goal. It does not make your favorite game any less awesome.
In addition to our narrative focus, every project has a scope. We feel we're offering a good variety of games that are both historically important and still fun to play, plus some new stuff.
So I'm bummed to hear you're out because of what we don't have, rather than curious by what we do. But thank you for the consideration, at least.
I believe the Arika arcade games are available on Nintendo Switch.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/3180240/discussions/0/4423185135322890837/

Ah, yeah, that just about it settles it. I wasn't seriously expecting it anyway, if mainly because of TTC's general disdain for that branch more than anything else, but if they're not even going to tease its potential as one of the remaining games yet to be revealed (which to be clear, I'm glad they're not when they have so many Tetris games they have to exclude), then that reads to me as a sign to definitely not hold my breath.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I genuinely appreciate it! 🙏 I can go back to dreading how much money TGM3 is gonna cost me in peace, then. :eggbug-relieved:

in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

Yeah, I was checking Twitter earlier and saw you mention that the lineup seems to be skewing very BPS-heavy, which in hindsight isn't terribly surprising, but also doesn't personally excite me all that much and I am one of those Tetris nerds to have very specific opinions about particular flavors. So I'm very inclined to agree with you that without the actual backing of either Sega or Nintendo at the very least that the plausible scope of games to be covered is significantly diminished and TGM probably won't fall within that limited remit, even if we can't outright rule it out right now.

I may well still pick it up anyway in large part because I don't own all of the announced games already and it would be nice to just have those when I want something other than 99 to play on my Switch despite what I just said, but yeah. My gut feeling was that I probably didn't have too much to worry about in terms of dumping stupid money on TGM3 at an inopportune time and you've renewed my confidence that if I do take that plunge in the next few months, I'll probably be okay, ahaha.

So yeah, thanks for taking the time to write all of that up! I genuinely appreciate you sharing your insight on all of that and for piecing together the BPS stuff in particular, which I just overlooked entirely. 😌

It seems a bit less like a curation of Tetris history as they are selling it and more like this is what they could get and now they are trying to pretend they are historically significant. Well, at the very least, the Famicom Tetris game should have an option to swap controls which would finally make it playable.
I wonder what the chances are that the Tetris Company would allow Nintendo to re-release Tetrisphere?

At least it has Battle Gaiden, I guess. It would be neat if they could get CD-i Tetris or some other weird stuff, but it’s kind of wild to do this collection without any Nintendo or Sega involvement.

in reply to @dog's post:

Yeah, you two have pretty thoroughly convinced me that with like 99% likelihood this is gonna be a TGM-free game entirely. Which I kinda intuitively figured deep down even with that marketing language about all the Japan exclusives just knowing how the TTC has wavered between indifference and outright hostility towards it (and is probably back to that cycle again post-Arcade Archives). But you two connected the dots that in hindsight are plain as day to see about how these games are being curated, so I more or less trust that if I finally go down the TGM3-at-home rabbit hole in earnest soon enough that, for better or (mostly) worse (for my wallet), it won't be made redundant by a home release that costs 20 times less. 😅

Thank you as well for sharing your thoughts! I know we don't talk a whole whole lot but I genuinely always appreciate your insight on things! :eggbug-relieved:

it being BPS specific was the first impression i got from the initial image showing the titles they announced; there's also some lingering curiosities there for me, like "Super Bombliss DX" is (as far as i'm aware) the JP color version of Tetris Blast, which was very much a US game (and, imo, superior).

wonder what other games they might put in it; Jaleco providing Tetris Plus 1 / 2 would be neat

e: it would be pretty funny if they counted Super Bombliss DX and Tetris Blast as two different games and included them tho. shame there's no real information about the rest

I am hopeful they might include at least Tetris Plus 1, cuz I imagine City Connection might be open for that compared to Nintendo or Sega, but I'm not sure. I presume the remaining stuff is gonna be the likes of The Next Tetris (which I wouldn't mind, I still dig that one) or probably some of the even more obscure BPS ones like Tetris S (which would be funny cuz that one's pretty much a remake of Sega's Tetris, so it could be an interesting loophole), but who knows.

Yeah, I wonder how much longer it'll take for the full game list to come out. It would be very funny if they end up doing filler Tetris by having basically the same game twice, huh?

I once worked on a licensed version of Tetris for Cable TV. By which I mean the game was running at your local cable TV distribution (the "headend"), the video was send like a cable channel back out to you kinda, and then the controls were sent from your remote to the set top box, back to the game running at that kinda sorta datacenter. It was weird and afaik it was never publicly available outside of a limited test market in like Tennessee.

This hits on the main issue with the Digital Eclipse documentaries I've had since Atari 50 started with basically nothing on Computer Space. The narrative seems to be largely built around who and what is available, and don't really scratch the surface past that.

They're still quite good, and way better than any equivalent product. But for all the hype about being more than just another retro game collection. I kind of expected more.

It's also a bit concerning that in the reaction to this announcement, there seems to be no familiarity with what the past Gold Masters releases are.