Nintendo DS: Day 224 (Tetris DS)
23 June 2006, lunch time
Some of you may recall my annoyance with the people that play MarioKart. With MarioKart, most people are so anal about keeping their wins high and their losses low that they’ll drop out of a series of races when it looks like they aren’t going to get the top spot. Tetris DS has corrected this behaviour by assigning a loss to the player that drops out in the middle of a game. Now, this is unfair to those players who are being dropped from games because of bad connections, but I imagine this sort of thing doesn’t happen all too often. All is not well in the world however.
In Tetris DS, after finishing a 2-player game, both sides are asked if they want to continue, or stop playing. As far as I can tell, if you beat the other player he won’t play you again. If you lose to the other player he’ll play till he loses. I’ve played a fair number of games online, and this seems to always be the case. The only people that don’t do this look to be new players like myself. This is annoying, but definitely not as annoying as what goes on in Mariokart. I feel like I’m the only chump willing to lose a few games before I admit that the opposing player is probably much better than myself. I first read about this happening over at A Whole Lotta Nothing.
Soon after I started playing wifi tetris, I started getting really protective of my ranking. I would jump into games with better ranked players and leave if I lost the first one. I noticed now that my ranking is going up, the opposite keeps happening to me—people drop after they lose one.
Of course, there are enough people playing Tetris DS that you can find a new person to challenge fairly quickly. I haven’t tried the 4-player games yet, I may do that tonight. Nintendo’s WiFi system is brilliant.
Tetris DS is fun. There has been plenty written about it already: Gamespot review, Modojo review, IGN review, 1up review, etc. I’ve been playing the versus mode primarily, as the games are quick. If you have Tetris DS, let me know your friend code.
- Tetris Friend Code
- 832750 – 370000
I, too, find it quite wierd that people would be so protective about their e-profile. All it is, is a set of statistics stored somewhere on some server, where the numbers only have any significance to people that want to compare themselves to you.
I find games more fun when you can’t win. Whether it be against the computer, or against another human player. If something is too easy to acquire/do then when you actually get/finish, it’s not as rewarding. And in the end, you’re just ruining your own experience.
I think all of my best gaming experiences have been ones where I couldn’t win, or got stuck on a level for a few days, or just plain suck at the game.
I think everybody should play Ikaruga to completion and learn a lesson on the benefits of trying to do the ‘near impossible’.
by Iluvitar on June 23 2006, 2:55 pm #