Tetris Ultimate for Steam/PC is a disaster

This post is over 8 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

For those who are not already aware, I actually used to primarily be a Tetris personality three years ago. I was the play-by-play shoutcaster and event host for the 2012 world championship grand final, and I used to run a weekly Tetris show.

I left Tetris not long afterwards because I determined that there was no future in it as an eSport. The lack of support I received from the Tetris Company and Blue Planet Software when trying to organize the tour­na­ment was appalling – it was as if they didn’t want me to give their game massive amounts of pub­lic­ity for free, with just a little bit of their help.

We ultimately couldn’t even get a link to sign up for our tour­na­ment on Tetris Friends, which was the of­fi­cial Tetris “client” at the time.

Coinciding with the troubles I was having with the Tetris Company, Hard Drop, the community with which I was associated, was also going through a bunch of changes. As a result of my declining motivation to work on Tetris-related projects, someone else came up to take my place in leading Tetris broadcasting.

Unfortunately, my replacement was completely incompetent and had no clue what he was doing. He man­aged to somehow fumble together another year of world championship broadcasting, and it was a com­plete failure.

I took this as my cue to leave Tetris entirely, and transition onto a different game. Sure, I personally enjoyed Tetris, but there was absolutely no future in it.

Years later, I discovered that Tetris finally had a real client (instead of just an in-browser Flash extension), and the PC version would be released on Steam. Even though I left Tetris on unhappy terms, I still wanted to try it out.

The reason I originally started doing work in Tetris was because I enjoyed the game – I liked playing, and I liked improving myself to be better. Digging back and pulling out all these nostalgic feels, I downloaded Tetris Ultimate for Steam on release day.

I figured that, surely, after all these years, they would’ve made a great product. There were already so many Tetris clones with so many features, that they should’ve already known what the community wants in their games. There was literally no brainstorming required on the part of Ubisoft – they could literally just look at all these illegal, unlicensed copies of Tetris, and put in all the features into their own game.

That is very exactly not what they did. In fact, they took features they already had in Tetris Friends and took them out.

As you can probably tell by now, I’m very disappointed in the Steam/PC version of Tetris Ultimate. I thought this would be the next great thing in Tetris – the new universal hub for every member of the Tetris community to come together and enjoy some games. At this rate, I’m pretty sure people would rather play Tetris Friends in their browser, rather than purchase this US$14.99 inferior game.

I already had a bad impression of the game immediately after loading it up. You expect games nowadays to be crisp and clean to 1080p resolutions.

Tetris Ultimate for Steam/PC

The menu is blurry. The text isn’t crisp or clean, and it’s fuzzy around the edges. You can’t tell from that small preview, but go ahead and click on the screenshot above for the full 1080p resolution. It looks like something in less than 720p was taken and stretched out, rather than rendered at true 1080p.

Now, take a look at this screenshot:

Tetris Ultimate for Steam/PC

You’ll notice that the menu is slanted in the opposite direction. Do you know why? Because, for whatever reason, the panel swivels back and forth, depending on where your mouse is.

Sure, it’s some eye candy that makes the game a bit more flashy and fancy. But it’s probably the most ir­ri­tating and annoying thing that I’ve ever seen done with a menu.

Usually, when you see an item, you move your mouse to it and expect it to still be there when you arrive and click. When the entire menu swings around and your destination is no longer at its former location, it can get pretty infuriating pretty quickly.

So what was I hovering over in that screenshot? The “PARTY PLAY!” section. Apparently, you’re only allowed to add Tetribots to your party, unless you connect to Tetris Live. But, in my experience, even if you turn on Tetris Live … you can still only add Tetribots to your party.

Let’s stop complaining about the menu and jump into the actual game. Surely, it will be better, right? Well, not so much.

The first thing I noticed is the complete lack of control features. There is no initial hold/rotate feature, so if you play too quickly, a good number of your inputs are going to be ignored by the game. The auto repeat sensitivity and rate is very limited, and the game sometimes doesn’t even register a key release quickly enough, so the piece keeps moving, even after you let go of your arrow key.

The ghost piece feature also clearly wasn’t thought through that well, because the game matrix is blue, and the J piece is blue. The ghost piece outline is an extraordinarily similar shade of blue as the matrix, so it’s very difficult to see where your J piece will end up.

Tetris Ultimate for Steam/PC

Sure, if you’re looking straight at it, then you can tell the difference between the two shades of blue. But, when you’re playing at an extremely high level with great speed, you end up just barely glimpsing at all the elements on the screen, rather than focusing in on one thing, because you need to take in as much information as possible, as quickly as possible.

When doing that, it’s far too easy to not realize where your J piece ended up, especially because of the excessive number of inputs the game ignores. (Meaning, you press the keys and expect the piece to end up in one place, but because the first few key presses were ignored, it ends up somewhere completely different, and you don’t have a reliable ghost piece system to tell you that the piece will not drop where you expect it to.)

Tetris Ultimate for Steam/PC

The profile and achievement system is also wildly mediocre. Not only can you not really tell what the a­chieve­ments are, because they’re so poorly organized, but the clear achievement series that you can tell (because it’s right at the top) – the belt system – is very shallow.

You automatically get a green belt if you finish all the levels of Marathon mode. You get a black belt if you can complete Level 28 in Endless mode. (Also, since when is purple belt ever better than a red belt? Some martial arts even have red belt ranked higher than black belt.) There is absolutely no depth to it – you can literally become a black belt without ever really knowing how to play Tetris.

The other achievements are so hard to keep track because of how badly the panels are organized. It seems like this game was designed for console, then, when transferring it over to PC, instead of redesigning it to work well with computers, they just copied the controller-based menu over.

Grouped in with a bunch of random percentages that show up when you open your profile page (that represent the Tetribots’ achievements) (wait what?), it’s very difficult to actually build up a profile of Tetris credentials because none of it is very intuitive. Not to mention, if you do manage to get badges, they’re all very pixelated.

After playing Tetris Ultimate on Steam for a few hours, and thinking decently hard about it, I’ve concluded that this game is geared towards very casual players who are used to playing console games, but for whatever reason, want to play the PC version of Tetris.

There is no way high-level players can appreciate Tetris Ultimate because of how little it addresses com­petitive needs. People who play at the highest speeds simply cannot, because there is a forced delay be­tween pieces where inputs are not accepted. Players who play at the highest levels against others world­wide, again, simply cannot … unless they are able to figure out the multiplayer settings better than I can.

This was Tetris’ chance to prove that they really do care, and that they really have been keeping up with the communities of players who love their game. Without a doubt, they failed.

In a quickly advancing and evolving era of gaming, where even near-perfect games still cannot become big, Tetris is eventually going to be buried as one of the classics that couldn’t break through into the mod­ern industry.

After trying out this game, I’m glad that I left and moved on to games made by better companies with brighter, more innovative developers – instead of continuing to meddle with the struggling Tetris scene.

 

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Regarding the Tetris Tournament Online III (TTO3) grand finals

This post is over 10 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Due to the overwhelming number of requests I have received to comment on the Tetris Tournament Online III grand finals broadcast, I felt like I could not ignore them any longer. I’ve given my opinion to a few different people in individual conversations, but like always, what I say always gets changed when passed along. So, I decided to post another official announcement again, this time regarding the results of the tournament.

For those who are completely unfamiliar with the Tetris Tournament Online, it is the world competitive Tetris championship tournament, sponsored by the Tetris Company, the copyright holders of the Tetris brand, and organized by Hard Drop, the largest Tetris community in the world (as of today).

One of the most frequent questions I got was why I didn’t stream or cast anything in the tournament. I already answered this to a decent level of thoroughness back on October 19, 2013. In case you missed it, you can read it here:

http://parkzer.com/2013/10/19/

The next most common question is how the tournament went. I managed to get the statistics for TTO3 from Twitch, Hard Drop’s primary streaming platform, and can give you a comparison to TTO2 from last year, which is the tournament where I hosted the stream and casted.

  • Unique visitors. This is the number of different people who saw at least some part of the broadcast. TTO2: 37,963. TTO3: 3,340 (8.8%).
  • Max concurrent viewers. This is the largest number of people who were watching the stream at the same time. TTO2: 2,049. TTO3: 604 (29.5%).
    • An interesting supplementary piece of information – after TTO2 was over, we did fan games. During this time, the max concurrent viewers was 624. This means that we had more people watching fan games last year than the tournament had overall during the main event this year.
  • Average minutes per visitor. This is how long, on average, people watched the stream once they arrived on the page. I’m not 100% sure how to interpret this correctly because they’re displayed as ranges on a per-hour basis, but these numbers are taken straight from the Twitch statistics. TTO2: 3-45 minutes. TTO3: 7-14 minutes (25.3%).

To put things simply, TTO3 was massively less popular than TTO2.

The next main question I received was why this happened. The cause of this is simple – the leadership behind the tournament this year was insufficient. Hard Drop was not prepared to host the tournament yet, but an unqualified individual took over the lead and pushed this tournament to release without proper preparation. The founder of Hard Drop did not stop this because all he was interested in was to get something happening in the community.

Finally, the last question is if I will ever be re-entering the Tetris scene to revive streaming and broad­casting with high-quality production value. Unfortunately, I have no answer to that at this point. The primary determining factor is if the Tetris Company will start making an effort to promote their brand again. If they make an effort to improve the official Tetris game (which at this point is Tetris Friends – they can either improve it or make a new one), and become more motivated to get people involved with Tetris, then yes, I may consider re-entry. If not, then I will not.

 

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Why I am not streaming for Tetris Tournament Online III

This post is over 10 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I do a lot of things on the Internet, so you might not necessarily know me for this, but a good handful of people discovered me due to my primary streaming leadership role in the Tetris Tournament Online II, the official annual Tetris tournament sponsored by the Tetris Company, the official copyright holder of the Tetris brand.

Many people were looking forward to Tetris Tournament Online III (TTO3), the sequel to last year’s tournament, and they were eager to have me return this year as a streamer and shoutcaster. However, most of these people noticed that I have not been the one streaming or shoutcasting any of the TTO3 matches so far.

I did announce some specifics about why I have not been the one streaming, but due to the unofficial nature with which I shared the information, a lot of it was lost or changed as it was passed on from person to person. There have also been some particular individuals who intentionally changed information as a personal attack to me.

To make things easier for everyone, I decided to publish my reasons here. If you hear anything else not included in this list, and it seems a little outlandish, it’s probably a rumor.

  1. I am gravely disappointed in the Tetris Company, and do not feel they deserve the publicity and free advertising that comes with Tetris Tournament Online. Their cooperation last year was mini­mal, and they just barely provided enough to get the tournament running. Nobody with whom I spoke showed any sort of genuine excitement about the tournament. The amount they supported our tournament was abysmal. They had many outlets to let Tetris enthusiasts know about our tournament so they could sign up, compete, and watch others’ matches; these outlets were barely used at all. Instead, a majority of our publicity came from Twitch, with whom I partnered in preparation for the event.
  2. I received next-to-zero compensation from the Tetris Company for the work I put in last year. The competitors at least received mediocre prizes – the first place winner received an electronic, but the runners up received prizes worth less than the shipping costs needed to send them internationally. The stream­ers, organizers, and hosts received absolutely nothing. The only benefit I received whatso­ever from streaming was a little bit of advertising for my website via the logo I had on the stream overlay. My co-commentator for the grand finals received literally nothing.
  3. I no longer have the time to put into Tetris. I graduate from undergraduate university, and have moved on to a graduate and licensure program. I no longer have the time to do whatever I want with my free time like I did when I was an undergraduate. I also have other things into which I must invest time.
  4. I no longer have the resources to stream. Back when the Tetris Tournament Online II was going on, I lived in my own apartment in Madison, WI that came with free 50 Mbps Internet. I no longer live in Madison; I moved out after I graduated. I now live back at my regular house in my home town, and commute to my graduate university. This also means that we don’t get free Internet, and the Internet we have is approximately 1.5 Mbps – nowhere near fast enough to stream anything at any viewable quality.
  5. The time I do spend on gaming, I would like to spend on games that have a future. At the rate the Tetris Company is going, Tetris has no future. Their attitude towards the Tetris community is counterintuitive, and is causing them to miss out on opportunities that will make their game more popular. On the other hand, there are plenty of other game developers who engage closely with their community and player base that has a much more promising future. I am going to stick with those companies.

Hopefully that will satisfy a lot of curiosity revolving my Tetris situation. Again, there is a lot of incorrect information intentionally being passed around by individuals who oppose my decision and wish for my failure. If you wish to remain at a neutral or supportive stance with me, I ask that you combat the wrong information by linking to this post, or simply by just not passing the wrong information on further.

 

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FAQ About my Competitive Tetris Stream

This post is over 12 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

As I suggested a few days ago, I will not be having my competitive Tetris live stream today, nor will I have it next week Friday, because of my spring break. Even though I’m not actually going anywhere on vacation, I would still like to take a vacation from my normal responsibilities in order to relax for a little bit.

Because I’m not streaming today, I decided to instead address two frequent questions about my stream.

I’ll start off with the first one, which includes all questions regarding how I stream, what software I use, and how I manage to make it look so professional, even though I haven’t been streaming for very long.

To get the simple quesions out of the way, the only software I use for actually streaming is XSplit. In the background, I have Tetris Arena open on Google Chrome, a bunch of other pages open on Firefox, and Skype up and running so my co-caster can make it into the stream. It might seem a little strange that I’m able to macromanage all of this at once, but it’s actually somewhat easy for me because I have a conveniently large 17.3″ widescreen laptop. Thus, I can have programs open in the section of my moni­tor that is not shown on the stream, which keeps things uncluttered for the viewers and gives me convenient access to useful tools.

As for the professionalism of my stream, all the scenes and transitions seem clean and aesthetially appealing because XSplit offers a feature where I can switch from one set-up to another with an easy press of a hotkey combination. As for the actual graphics, I spent a little bit of time creating those my­self in Photoshop. It takes a little bit of intuition and a good fundamental understanding of geometric graphic design to get the overlays to match up well (or, if you’re unskilled, just spend tons of time doing trial-and-error and you’ll figure it out eventually).

If you were curious about the facet of professionalism in the sense that I was able to literally come out of almost nowhere and become a skilled streamer, it’s because I didn’t really actually come out of almost nowhere. Even though I wasn’t known to be a streamer at all before my debut during my pilot broadcast a few weeks ago, I was still working behind the scenes on behalf of other people with projects that in­volve streaming and eSports casting. As you might have already guessed, I have a lot of background experience when it comes to multimedia production of pretty much all different types, and that ex­pe­ri­ence I built up helped me jump to success.

And now, we’ll move on to the second frequently asked question, which was more commonly asked by my closer supporters who were curious as to a slight discrepancy they noticed about how I’m promoting the stream.

If you’ve been keeping up with my website and looking at the stream recaps I’ve been posting as blog entries, you might notice that I always post them in the form of Twitch.TV replays, rather than YouTube videos. Only recently did I start posting YouTube versions of the replays of the streams, and this was only because there were people having trouble accessing the Twitch.TV replays.

Those supporters who are closer to me know that I’m all about taking advantage of opportunities and max­imizing rewards. To them, it seemed strange that I wasn’t immediately uploading these replays to Youtube and advertising them there, as, because I monetize my videos on YouTube, I would be re­ceiving direct benefit from all my views.

No, this is not something that I simply overlooked – if I was so unalert that I overlooked things as obvious as this, I would probably not be as relatively successful as I am today. The real reason I am sticking with promoting Twitch.TV replays is because of a long-term goal that I would like to achieve.

Similar to YouTube partnership, Twitch.TV has a partnership program where they offer their streamers portions of the advertising revenue they earn. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that people can get from one hit video like on YouTube. For those who are unfamiliar with YouTube’s monetization program, and for those who have not yet been fortunate to have a decently popular video on YouTube: if you upload a video that gains a good influx of views and attention, YouTube will invite you to monetize that video, no matter what the condition of your other videos. So, for example, if you have 100 videos that have 5-10 views each, but one video turns out to be a great success and gets 5,000 views on the first day you upload it, YouTube will send you a notification saying that you are eligible to make money off of that video.

On the other hand, with Twitch.TV, streamers must be well-rounded and have consistent success with their live broadcasts, and the standards for what Twitch.TV considers successful isn’t negligible. Some of the qualifications include concurrent viewers during streams, but other qualifications include view counts on stream re­plays.

I think by now, it’s clear as to why I’m promoting the Twitch.TV replays. I’m confident that, because of how unique Hard Drop is in the sense that there are not very many competitive Tetris communities out there right now, and because of how massive Hard Drop is relative to other competitive Tetris com­mu­nities, we have a good shot at becoming a Twitch.TV partner. The only thing left now is to work our way up the popularity ladder.

So, bringing this all to a full-circle close, here’s my greedy personality shining through once again that my long-term supporters have come to know me for – I feel that, by taking a sacrifice now and not uploading replays to YouTube, and instead collecting all these views on Twitch.TV, it will help us get partnership in the long-run. Once we get partnership, I feel it will be well worth it, far more worth it than getting a small immediate monetary reward for my efforts.

I think this will be a good place to end this blog post. I most likely will not be updating my blog fre­quently throughout my spring break, but I will post a relatively large update towards the end of break covering things that I did.

 

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