The Flower of Prolonged Failure
March 17, 2009 - Shenanigans
Well, after 27 minutes, I was finally able to kill myself in High-Resolution Tetris. I thought this might be easier than actually clearing a line, but I was surprised at how excruciating the endgame got. What you see here is that it’s pretty easy to stack the pieces until you get about 4/5 of the way up the game board, at which point you start having problems getting the pieces over to the center fast enough. (New pieces appear on top at a random point along the horizontal axis.) Even worse, once you actually build up to the top line, you’re stuck waiting for a piece to show up right at the point where it can collide with one of your pieces instantly. So I started just trying to get pieces to the center as fast as I could to build a bigger platform, which resulted in this flowery structure – the more distant the piece’s initial starting point, the further down the stem I could eventually hook it. I find the result quite attractive.