In light of this distressing news, allow me to cheer you up with a video of Harry "SuPa" Hong, the Tetris world record holder, maxing out the point score of the NES port of that game to 999,999, starting from the highest selectable difficulty level of 19. It is effectively a "perfect" Tetris game. He eventually stops at level 29 because at that point the blocks fall to the bottom faster than the fastest human reaction times.
It is startling what an engaging experience watching that video is. If you have ever played tetris even for a minute, your knuckles will be white and your brain will be swimming in adrenaline. It's like watching someone juggling knives.
> He eventually stops at level 29 because at that point the blocks fall to the bottom faster than the fastest human reaction times.
As I remember, it's not a human limitation; the blocks fall to the bottom faster than the NES game checks for controller input. Even playing the game frame-by-frame on an emulator, you can't move the tetronimo from the center to the edges of the screen in time. It takes up to 5 clicks of the d-pad left or right, so you need at least 10 frames of time for the 5 on-off cycles.
Newer Tetris games deliberately work around this limitation. When the dropping tetronimo collides with something, you're always given at least a half-second to continue moving and rotating the piece before it locks into place. http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Infinity
That's one of many surprisingly detailed rules regarding movement and rotation that newer Tetris games always follow, to create a consistent game and experience across multiple platforms and versions. See http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline
The video is very good but I have to disagree with your last paragraph. The videos with people hard-dropping every piece and winning the invisible tetris during the credits are more impressive imo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo
You're right, that one is more impressive, but as I understand it that version of tetris has more forgiving physics than the NES version, and he's using a more ergonomic controller, so I think there's a pleasing purity about maxing out the famicom edition.
Also to be honest that second guy comes across as terrifyingly superhuman. The NES one actually looks like something I might actually be able to eventually do with practice, and is therefore more engaging to watch.
The physics are more forgiving to make up for the fact that gravity (and as a side effect, vision) can become much less forgiving. At that point, the game's much closer to DDR or Rock Band, except with a much less readable note chart (the well + next 3 pieces). You have to think about where each one belongs and have your move ready before the piece drops; instead of just one piece you have a small amount of time to work with.
The new Tetris versions also use a friendlier and not-so-random number generator. Basically, it generates a random permutation of the seven different pieces, deals those, and then generates a new permutation. This makes the game much more predicable. You can see the player make clever use of the hold area in anticipation of this cycle and that's pretty entertaining to watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99R-fKRr73I
It is startling what an engaging experience watching that video is. If you have ever played tetris even for a minute, your knuckles will be white and your brain will be swimming in adrenaline. It's like watching someone juggling knives.