Originally posted by: arnpoly
The main thing is that I want to at least have a chance of finishing every NES game instead of spending all of my time mastering Tetris, hahaha! I look at completing the game as finishing all the content and on a game that is essentially endless like Tetris I need to draw a line in the sand somewhere. The 120K best ending is just more sensible to me than reaching Level 29.
It seems like we have a disconnect on what it means to be "good at NES Tetris" and how hard the game is. I have a much lower threshold of hard than 500K as in your example. I think I'm pretty good at the game but 500K would only be possible for me if I dedicated myself only to Tetris for weeks or months. When I look at rating difficulty from my minimum criteria the difficulty goes way down.
I had not planned on doing any kind of difficulty score at all until some folks here mentioned they'd like to see it. I figured it's not that much more effort to slap on a number and call it a day. Now look where that's gotten me!
Another thing is that the concept of beating a game is going to be an issue on future games that go on indefinitely. Take Donkey Kong. What does it mean to beat that game? It could mean beat the three levels and get the ending scene, it could mean looping the game for as long as the difficulty increases, and it could mean reaching the kill screen. Where do you draw the line?
Looks like Ecstasy of Order came out in 2011 before I was a member here, so that explains why I never saw all of that promotion.
Yeah, I completely understand that rating the difficulty of score-based puzzle games, or "endless" arcade games, is always going to be challenging.
So in that sense, for Tetris specifically, I'm offering the critique that you only played through half of the available B-mode (i.e. level 10 - 19 are, in fact, playable in B-mode), and it might be worth a mention in your otherwise fairly thorough blog write-ups.
You're right that we have different definitions of what "good at Tetris" looks like, though my views were skewed even further by working with the EOO project.
Prior to that, i thought I was pretty good, being able to get in the 500k-600k range, but once you see those guys that can play through the level 19-28 range, it's like they're practically playing a different game. (don't think I've ever gotten farther than level 24, for instance)
In terms of DK -- didn't we have a member make it to the NES equivalent of the kill screen?
(though that is a ridiculously high bar to set)
You don't really "beat" games in that genre, though.
With few exceptions, they always eventually beat you, no matter how good you are.
I think the best you can do with score-based "endless" games would be to:
(a) do some research on a reasonable score threshold to achieve
(b) if you insist on rating difficulty include the concept of comparing against what is possible beyond what you were able to do
i.e. for Tetris, 250k was no problem but you say 500k might have taken you weeks of practice... or imagine a max out... thousands of hours of practice involved.
So your threshold was 2/10 or 3/10, 500k would maybe be 6 or 7/10 on the same scale and 999k would be 10/10.
For all the other exposition, I think that kind of discussion would probably add more perspective for somebody looking to learn about the games from your blog.
Because, while I can speak with great knowledge on a game like Tetris, I know there is easily 70% of the library that I've never bothered to play, and will have no context for what your difficulty ratings mean if they don't give a sense of what you goals were relative to some external benchmark.
