they called it "BlockStar" and it looked like this:
i call it crap, and belive me when i say that it most likely raped your children. provided, that is, that your children were your metaphoric desires to play tetris on facebook and the raping in question were an endless (and easily cheated) patience grind devoid of both strategy and skill.
what people liked about this game (insofar as i can figure) was it's endless drudgery. the game, like so many amateur iterations, never ended. the speed topped off at a point that was both playable and frustrating, and only recorded the game's total score, not time--therefore, a 3 minute game consisting of 24 tetrises would be rated below a 35 minute game consisting of 3,000 single line clears. this effectively means a "better" game is a "longer" game, so what you're "scoring" is not a player's "skill", but their ability to put "quotation marks" around words--their ability to continue playing for long periods of time, rather.
actually, this would be a nearly solid design "decision" (i promise that will be the last one) in it's own right, but unfortunately in this case, the game is indefinitely playable by a large portion of it's playerbase. so what you have is a competition to see who has the most literal hours to throw at the game in a single sitting and ultimately "beat" (i lied.) the competition, which brings me back to my previous point: the game is crap.
amazingly, this week it has been removed, and replaced with what may be the first (relatively) lightweight, web based tetris that is worth it's weight in heavy, expensive things.
"Tetris Friends" is being developed by Tetris Online Inc, the same guys who put together last year's surprisingly decent Tetris Splash for the xbox 360--not that it matters, but it is more than surprising that this is an "official" tetris product. the public beta consists of only 1 mode, which is here referred to as "tetris solo", but more commonly known as "Ultra" or whatever you want to call a 3 minute game that rewards score. other modes are promised, including actual online realtime multiplayer versus, but we'll see how that pans out when it finally dishes out its kettle of a skillet sometime in the distant future. spatula.
outside of being a "modernized" version of tetris (read: slow), this game kicks the ass in here. it's at least as solid as Tetris Zone and (at least as of current) is totally free. and it doesn't require a 40MB download. fuck tetris zone, by the way. i mean, it's not bad like BlockShit or N-Blox or anything, but, it's got like... there's all this... seriously... just--fuck that game.
probably the coolest thing about tetris friends is the nifty active scoreboard at the right side of the screen that moves you up during the game as your score increases. because it's integrated into facebook (and this may be the only reason to have gone through such misplaced trouble to have facebook-ized the thing in the first place) there is a picture of every registered player, along with their name, which, in most cases, and most sentences with many commas, is actually their name and not some dumb "iWillB8u@tetris" pseudonym. and you can't be an unregistered player, so it feels very... xbox? and makes for a less anonymous, less douchebag kind of game. also, you can really easily switch it over so that it only shows your facebook friends and not the whole of the site in that box if you get tired of seeing my name above your name all of the time and just want to compete with all of your crappy-at-tetris friends. or all of your really-good-at-tetris friends, depending on how good your friends are at raping--playing tetris, rather.
the game does a crappy job of having music, but still manages to beat out whatever you call the "tunes" they used in Tetris Zone (read: fuck that game), and so, the only real solid complaint with the whole friend-ish experience has got to be the controls.
right now you can't change any of the control options, so they are permanently stuck on the shit setting, which is kind of like your bass amp volume being stuck on 11 while you try to play "Don't Stand So Close To Me" in a rockin' Police cover band at a wedding, and the wedding is full of old people whose hearing aids are all serendipitously stuck on volume setting 11 and they all keep dying of "killer bass line to the brain" disease while they begin piling up, falling on each other in the isles of the church, but the guy pretending to be stewart copeland has actually been possessed by the actual spirit of stewart copeland, and therefore will not let the rockin' groove drop, and you're just forced into killing old wedding people for all 4 minutes and 3 seconds of that gloriously catchy, deviantly schoolgirl crush laden jam.
what?
they list "Customizable keyboard controls" as something to look forward to in the near future, so hopefully that will happen soon and then things will be okay. also, get used to tap tap tap tapping, because holding down a direction takes an obscene amount of time to actually move the block. can we hold Tetris Online responsible for broken keyboards? in the meantime, might i suggest a program like AutoHotKey in order to redefine the keys used in the game on your own end.
most interestingly, there are pages and pages of complaints from former BlockShit players who find Tetris Friends a falling block abomination, but at least as far into that sea of bitching as i was able to safely wade, they are all idiots and know nothing of Marshall McLuhan's work. hopefully, both the people at Tetris Online and the people at facebook will stay the hell away from the comments section on their website long enough to let most of these people die of their own douchebagery, and hopefully give way to some constructive criticisms, like: "why do you like that 'tap tapping' sound so much?" and "do you really think that all that tapping makes the game better?" and "is there any way i can get "Don't Stand So Close To Me" as a ringtone on my phone?". seriously, Tetris Online, you should have thought about these things.
still, well done--i'm beginning to harbor a secret faith in the competency of the Tetris Company. it is possible that they may one day surpass the quality of the freely available fan created games. Tetris Friends is not that passionate surpassion, but it's a definite step in the right direction and a very valid reason to possess a facebook account.
http://www.facebook.com for Tetris Friends now.
