Most of the times when I play games, I’ll play either CS:GO or osu! because for me they’re the most fun, and you get to compete with other people in one way or another. A few weeks ago I started playing some more Tetris, and now I have quite a lot of fun playing it.
I used to play Tetris every now and then if I was really bored, but I never got into it that much because I wasn’t that good, and it seemed like a mostly single player game to me. My brother has been into Tetris for a while, and if you check his blog he has written multiple posts on different types of Tetris variations that he’s played. Sometimes when I played my own games on my computer, I’d see my brother playing Tetris next to me. I eventually noticed how he was sometimes playing against other people, and that’s I found out about Tetris Battle 2P which was a game mode on the website Tetris Friends, where you play against other people in a ranked system. I’ve always liked games where you have ranks and get to compete against other people so I was pretty interested.
You win by either getting three KO’s which is when you make the other player top out, by having the most KO’s in two minutes, or by having the most lines sent in two minutes. The level system worked in a star rating where you’d start at rank one with two stars out of five, and if you won a game you’d gain a star. If you lost a game, you’d lose a star. If you reached five stars at rank one, you’d go up a rank and your star rating resets to two at the next rank. It was also possible to skip ranks if you beat your opponent easily. The ranks capped out at rank 20 on the Tetris Friends website.
For the most part, I only used standard Tetrises in my games which is when you clear four lines and send four lines of garbage. I managed to get to around rank 15 until I couldn’t rank up anymore because I just wasn’t fast enough to beat other players. I stopped playing for a few months, and the only times I played after that was when we had parties and my brother would let people play multiplayer Tetris on his Nintendo Switch. Another day when I was doing my own thing, I saw my brother playing Tetris Battle 2P, and he lost against another player that wasn’t using normal Tetrises. Since I could almost never beat my brother I was interested in what strategy this other guy used to beat him, so I asked my brother what the other player was using. It turned out that the other player was using a strategy called the side four-wide combo where you are able to clear single lines in rapid succession which ends up sending lots of garbage very quickly. Up until then, I had only ever heard of Tetrises and T-spin Doubles.
The four-wide combo is supposedly one of the most powerful standard setups in Tetris, so I started learning it. It was difficult at first, but I was able to learn the side four-wide pretty quickly. I tried it out at rank 15 on Tetris Friends, but I still wasn’t able to win as easily since I wasn’t fast enough. Then, I learned of the better variation of the side four-wide called the centre four-wide where even if your opponent sends you lots of garbage you’ll still be able to survive since the pieces will always spawn in the centre.
I played more often than I used to on Tetris Battle 2P and got up to rank 17 on the site until just yesterday when the website shut down for reasons I don’t know about. Now, I’m looking at getting Puyo Puyo Tetris on Steam since it’s a very popular version of multiplayer Tetris with a ranked system other than Tetris 99.
Overall, I still wouldn’t say that Tetris is my new favourite game, but it’s now one of the games that I’ll play more often than others. I’m still learning more about different strategies and how to improve in general. In the end, I guess I’m starting to enjoy it more after seeing how it’s quite a skill based game with ranked systems in place since those are generally the type of games I like to play.