Tetriswiki, Working Harder than Me

In my infinite wisdom I was about to start working on a little piece called Bestris where I would play each and every version of Tetris, ultimately deciding that The New Tetris on the N64 was the best. Doing a little searching to see how many iterations and alternate incarnations were out there I quickly hit the proverbial wall.

Not only are there about 10,982 different Tetri, each has been picked apart by Tetriswiki and analyzed on a mathematical plane that I didn’t even know existed. Just as an example, here’s their description of my beloved New Tetris:

“The New Tetris for N64 had lock delay, soft and firm drop, 4×4 squares, hold piece (though not IHS), three next pieces, ghost piece (TLS), and milder wall kick than SRS (notably, T-spin triples don’t work but lock delay is still abusable on no-garbage play). The game features an unusual and unique compensation system, tuned around the sometimes bizarre tetromino configurations required for making gold and silver squares. Its speed never gets anywhere near 20G.”

Poke around the Tetriswiki site if you’re as interested as I was about what all that means. So, I’m pretty much not doing a Bestris piece anytime soon but in the face of all that technical data I still declare The New Tetris as THE best Tetris ever!