Get Your Blocks Off

Don't you mean where your life went so deeply RIGHT?! God knows I wish I had the means to stay up 'til four, Tetrissing around!

u gonna be ok?

man, i am so downloading that tonight...tetris is so addictive. i think i had a serious grade point drop senior year due to the fact that one of my roomies had tetris on her laptop. between that and "Snood" freshman year, i pretty much ruined my chances of getting into grad school...

What are worse in that game? The cubes, or the Zig-Zag? I always want a straight block, I can handle easily a right justified, or left justified right angle piece. The wierd 3 pronged one is a cinch, you can always fit that one. The blocks just take up so much goldarn space and they tend to drop on your tetris "Match" (I call it a "MATCH" because it is worthy of that)like a brutal 5 punch combination. They can destroy whatever favorable situation you have created. Now the Zig-Zag just fucks with you. You have that moment of panic where you have no idea where to put the fucking thing and realize that it is going to slam on top of some piece that it has no business being on. What do you guys think? I think that the Zig Zag is the worst piece. Pat your thoughts?

Ian,

First, I knew exactly what you were talking about of course, but are those the official piece names or just what you call them? Just curious, I've never heard each piece given a proper name before. I mean, you used the word "justified." I'm impressed.

Now, of course the "worst piece" honor depends on your situation, but it's hard to beat the obnoxious nature of the zigzag. You see it in the "coming soon" section of the screen and you know things are about to fall apart. And there are two varieties of course, right and left, which makes it all the worse.

Without a doubt, the finest piece is the straight line. I like to build four rows, leaving just the one thin column blank, and then jam that baby in without a condom, laughing maniacally as the word "TETRIS!" explodes onto my screen. Or if you're in a bind and just need a quick onesie, you can lay it down flat horizontal and you're pretty much halfway there.

Despite the bulky and obtrusive cube fucking with me the other night, I actually tend to like the cube.

HOWEVER, there's no worse feeling in the world than getting the cube when your puzzle is nearly to the top of the screen, and you've got the "castle" going, meaning no flat surfaces on top. You just know you've got to plop that cube down where it don't belong, and you're not going to recover from that.

NOTE: When I say there's no worse feeling in the world, I'm including death of a loved one.

Got a similar story about video games, just as sad, except I was much younger. When I was about 11, it was fairly common that my friends and I would all congregate at my friend Rob's house for the weekend. Rob had many qualities you looked for in a fried at 11, the two key ones being a father with a truly staggering collection of 70s "gentlemen's publications" stowed in the attic, and the other being that he was the first one of us to get the original NES. He also owned Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, Super Mario Brothers III and Metroid, three of the greatest things ever created by humans on the planet Earth.

One Friday afternoon, we were sitting around playing Metroid, which Rob had just purchased at this point. It is at this point that another friend of mine, Kraig, pipes up with a bit of trivia that changed, if not the course of our lives, certainly changed the course of the rest of our weekend.

"Hey, did you know that Samus is a girl?"

Yeah, whatever, fine, sure. In addition to being, to this day, one of the horniest kids I've ever met, Kraig was also a consummate bullshit artist. You know the kid in your school who swore TO GOD that the hoverboard from Back to the Future II was real, that his cousin had a friend who actually owned one, but they stopped making them because some kid out in Oklahoma hurt himself? That was Kraig.

"No, seriously. Samus is a girl, and the faster you finish the game, she takes more of her suit off. If you finish in under an hour, she's just in her underwear. I read it in Nintendo Power."

Now this was something that had to be explored. Kraig actually did have a subscription to Nintendo Power, despite not actually having a Nintendo. Amongst a group of 11 year old boys, video game supremacy was a team effort. You had the kid who was good at side-scrolling games, usually known as the Mario Kid, the Kid Who Could Press The Buttons Really Fast (useful for sports games), the Kid Who Was Good With The Light Gun (not that useful, but sometimes you just want to kick some ass in Duck Hunt), the Kid With Nintendo Power (puzzle games) and the ever-present Kid Who Sat In The Back And Made Supportive Comments (a rotating position).

Anyway, bullshit was called on Kraig, so he was dispatched back to his house to get the issue of Nintendo Power in question. He took off without complaint, because as 11-year-old boys, if we had heard that there was a semi-naked girl, or even the picture of a semi-naked girl, at the top of Mount Everest, we probably would immediately have started putting together stores of oxygen tanks and jerky.

He returned in about an hour, and sure enough, there was the story on Metroid, with the bit on the different endings. Some cheeky bastard on the Nintendo Power editing staff had even shown an picture of the final ending with everything except for Samus' head covered by a large box that said, "Only for serious gamers!" Nintendo Power, you goddamn tease.

Well, that was it. We had our mission. There was no question about the story being false; we took Nintendo Power more seriously than the Bible.

We played all through that night, and well into the next morning. We slept in shifts and sent some of the crappier players out periodically, down to the kitchen for sandwiches and Kool-Aid.

At about 11 AM on Saturday morning, Rob's parent came up to yell at us, some crap about how it was a beautiful day outside and we shouldn't spend all our time on this goddamn machine. We managed to get around this by stashing our best player under Rob's bed, then doing that thing where you turn off the television but not the Nintendo itself, then we all made a big show of going out to "play." If you want to know what we looked like, round up a bunch of heroin addicts and make them play tag. We were a squinty, teeth-grinding crew, occasionally tossing a grim glance at our Swatches to see how much longer we had to keep up this bullshit charade.

We had to get more creative that night, after Rob's father threatened to chuck the NES out the window. Eventually, we countered by killing the sound and playing under a blanket to block the light that could be seen from the hallway.

All told, we beat the game five times that weekend. Finally, after 51 HOURS, we got our prize:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Metronosu-2.png

Here's the sad part: You know Pat's description of his Tetris loss? Imagine the exact opposite. We thought we were GODS. Even today, when we get together back at home, we will tell that story like we were paratroopers who had jumped out of the same plane over Europe.

Come to think of it, the fact that I just spent twenty minutes typing up this story is also pretty sad.

Jackson,

That is hardly a prize. I would have been really pissed.

Ian

Jackson,

That was brilliant.

Jackson,

EXCELLENT little essay there. And the payoff was having that screen shot at the end. I clicked on that and laughed my ass off. PATHETIC. I was going to question why you needed to see an animated girl in her underwear when your friend had the Playboys in the attic, but then I remembered the age. LORD KNOWS I went to some ridiculous lengths to see anything close to nudity in those days, despite the fact that one of my friends had a truly staggering collection of 70's PORNO VIDEOS! And we watched them all the time.

Never played Metroid believe it or not. I wonder what all that Nintendo did to us kids.

Ian- Truthfully, I was surprised when I Wiki'd Metroid to get that screenshot. I remembered the ending as much more of a Leisure Suit Larry-style art shot. Considering how I ate when I was eleven, though, I was probably tweaked out of my gourd on Doritos, Flintstones fruit snacks and IBC root beer. I was probably seeing a lot of things that weren't there.

Rob- Thanks! It is comforting to know that even the most wasted childhood can still provide a few good stories.

Pat- There is truly nothing better for the self-esteem than 70s porno. You just sit there thinking, "Well, if these ugly bastards can get some..."

However, it does mislead young minds on womens' fondness for mustaches.