NO ABSOLUTES
NO GRAND MASTERS

within interactive media, one could find myriad instances of games that could be best described as wasting one's time. menus and metaprogression for hours, idle selection. story sequences to kick back and soak in. this is a phenomena that is best described as "low gameplay density".

Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS is the absolute opposite. from the moment you hear the barely-human "ready, go", you begin to waste each and every millisecond of the game's time (don't worry, it's counting them for you!).

Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS iterates on the desperately needed improvements to the timeless soviet program of pattern recognition made by Arika with 1998's Tetris The Grand Master. quality of life improvements have been made, less for the player and more for the arcade operator, but one should never underestimate the performance of proficient player. emphasizing speed and precision amidst the chaos of fair, high-frequency pseudorandom number generation. movement at instant gravity, managing the shape of the stack as a means of player survival. i tend to consider TGM1 as the transitional entity between the "old" school of tetris, alongside Tetris DX and other proto-SRS games from BPS. (the old school of tetris includes but is not limited to nintendo's 8-bit RSI-inducers, atari's endurance testers and sega's 1988 single button primate neuron activator.) arika iterated on, and subsequently continued to perfect the rotation and piece movement introduced in sega's 1988 release, which is a far cry from the sanitized snoozefest that has manifested as the henk rogers mandated Official Tetris Guideline. 7-bag randomization and the Standard Rotation System are without question the absolute worst thing that has happened to falling block puzzle games, and that culminated in a set of rules that is only conducive to player proficiency within a competitive multiplayer environment (read: oops! all t-spins), which i will never care care for, and i will not be be paying for an online service on the thing that has collected more dust than my wii u just to give arika's return to the four blocks dropping a lot a try. (smash that mf <3 button if you've ever passed out [as in started falling asleep] 3 hours into an endless marathon game, 2 hours past the timer's upper limit, in any post-Tetris Worlds Official Tetris Company Licensee Product Strictly Abiding By The Official Tetris Guideline)

100% Video Game: Complete With Life Ruining Potential!

alongside the third Leader Bee game from world renowned mobile gacha game developer Computer Art Visual Entertainment Interactive Company Limited (the fourth one of those overall, and the third Great [as in prefix] one. Now Avaliable On Nintendo Switch And Sony Playstation 4), Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS was the arcade game i played the most throughout my 20's. for months on end, and pretty much the entirety of 2015, the only video game i could touch was Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, an incredibly efficient use of video game playing time all things considered. it is probably not coincidental that 2015 and the first half of 2016 were the worst years of my adult life, and it would make sense that i spent my video game playing time playing a variant of what is probably the only video game with healing attributes, but even then it's not without detriment...

firm/sonic drop was a mechanic arika added to Tetris With Cardcaptor Sakura Eternal Heart, which is effectively momentary 20g on demand, instantly bringing the piece down WITHOUT locking in place, unlike the hard drop required by The Tetris Guideline. firm drop's effect on the pacing in the first half of a clearing run is monumental, pushing the skill ceiling to heights never duplicated in the realm of four blocks dropping a lot. now, the player is in control of the game's rate for the most part, pushing the game until the game begins to push you, total player agency in making order of pseudorandom chaos. any millisecond spent in a state of uncertainty is a millisecond spent wasting the game's time. a rhythm consisting of any order of rotate, firm drop, shift and lock begins to unfold, and if your performance is on point you will be locking the pieces on your own terms up until the lock delay begins to decrease. every addition to the stack should account for the piece you might get 5 peices from now, despite only being able to know about just one piece ahead. the rotate-shift-drop-lock rhythm sears itself into the subconscious, the tuned bleeps announce the next piece to help you keep your eyes attached to where it matters most. a perfect connection between human and machine. you might forget to blink.

...perhaps some things are best experienced sparingly, too much medicine can lead to destructive behaviors permanently altering ones brain chemistry. during the periods of my life where most of my recreational interactions with machines involved Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, something about my thought processes seemed off. beyond a state of what's been studied as the "Tetris Effect" (not to be confused with Rez Tetris), bordering on full blown Tetris Psychosis. maybe it was just an uncovering of a latent, broader ailment that had been chiseling its way to the forefront of my synapses, maybe it was just an obsession not unlike a dependency. waking moments, in situations far removed from the interaction between human (me) and machine (x86_64 computer pretending to be a hitachi sh-2, with lever and multi-button interface), patterns recognized within Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS would intrude the moments of life removed from it, as my brain would try to make order of the sensory chaos of the world. maybe i will reveal an aspect of the self for the sake of this anecdotal retrospective, but it's more likely that this piece of software revealed that aspect of my self to that very self. i am pretty sure i'm not supposed to be hearing this when i'm out at the grocery store, but i did, and it was at first a bit terrifying, but i've come to live with it and things like it, and accept it as a part of me. heightened pattern recognition amidst the pseudorandom chaos of life is a trait, a trait that can be as overwhelming as it enlightening, as complimentary as it is all-encompassing, as damaging as it is enriching. such is life.

Mastering Mode

a key difference between arcade games (both electromechanical and video) and its far seedier relative is fairness. you master the machine, rather than the other way around. despite sharing bits of language (but not the entire language) with one another, they exist(ed) in disparate realms of machine-human communication. a machine that masters the human is one rooted in cognitive exploitation, a human that masters the machine is emblematic of a state closer to the martial arts rather than the "haha number go up" such programs and machines are far too often misconstrued to be. a skilled player will get the most out of their credit, a rightfully earned state of success. contrast this with the relatives of such machines, ones which do not require skill, which seek get the most credits of their victims "Players", feeding off their anticipation of a probable, yet uncontrolled state of presumed success. "Do Nothing And Win Big!!!" vs "Take Everything You Learned And Perform To The Best Of Your Ability"

before my supple mind was altered by Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, i had spent around 12 alkaline AA's worth of time on Tetris (v1.1) for the Nintendo Game Boy (an unmodified DMG-01, to be exact). that's probably the only version that i have come close to actually being a master of as of this moment (more on this later, well technically simultaneously but Later is how i will roll), alongside Sega Tetris (1999). firm drop, 20g, zangi-moves and even the concept of lock delay were foreign to me, but the sheer speed and seemingly infinite skill ceiling of arika's take on the soviet computer game of pattern recognition would burrow its way into my subconscious, permanently cementing itself into the upper echelon of Things Humans Made Microprocessors Can Do For Human Recreation, or perhaps a part of the lowest unmoving foundation that all Things Humans Made Microprocessors Can Do For Human Recreation sit upon. subtle alterations made by arika may not seem present at first, especially to a novice player (to arika's flavor), but a player is very unlikely to be completely fucked by the (pseudo)randomizer here as it would be in, say, any of the versions preceding Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS's predecessor. it provides a much more engaging and challenging assortment than the malaise of that which is now required by The Official Tetris Guidelines. what's the point in making order of chaos if the order isn't slightly chaotic? chaos will ensue, but it's a chaos that is fair and under control rather than whatever the fuck was going on here.

Tetris Affect

once 20g is in full swing, you have no more chances to second guess. that's not to say second guessing won't occur - it will, and you are likely to be punished swiftly if you aren't adept at managing overhangs or the misdrops that come with the act of second guessing (or with careless haste!). i've come to recognize that some problems are best addressed at a later moment, when the mind has achieved some clarity, but not lost focus. but, Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, unlike it predecessor, continues its trend of actively minimizing downtime once the player has reached 20G (a quality of Not Your life improvement). it leaves them less time to spend ruminate on where the 5th peice from now might go, less time spent removing that which no longer needs to be, less time spent dropping four blocks, more four blocks dropped. it primarily does this through tightening the various delays until it becomes something only the most adept players can manage, but something that can still be overcome with human intervention. in fact, the player never, ever loses control until either a failure state is achieved or until AFTER the credits roll. some inputs (rotate and shift mostly) can be buffered during some delays even as they grow ever tighter, but there is never a moment where a player is not in control of the peices somehow. i didn't quite realize this until about a year into playing any TGM, but initial rotation is a thing, and it rules, an absolute necesity for the back half's instant gravity. it too plays an audio cue as soon as the peice comes into the field and leaves the queue. less time spent rotating four blocks, more four blocks to rotate. an unrelenting pace for all <10 minutes it would theoretically take to see those credits begin to roll. not a single moment wasted in every respect, the sounds give just enough information without being totally drowned out by some of the finest work by aya and megaten, and beneath the playing field and peices lies a constantly moving assortment of machines that never once tend to distract (see: Sega Tetris[1999]).

what you've heard is probably true, but is probably more of a byproduct of human pattern recognition, ritualistic machine interaction and neuron activation, courtesy of said machine. i would continue to just see squares everwhere, as if they were mocking me. sometimes they were beckoning me. i didn't mind and wouldn't have had it any other way. maybe the next time i really start to play this game i will see and hear them again, maybe they miss me. sometimes i do too.

any other iteration of four blocks dropping a lot will never surpass this, certainly not under supervision of henk rogers. i feel like arika themselves didn't quite surpass this with Terror Instinct, which may be mechanically robust, but is a major step back in its presentation, with just rotating .pngs for its backgrounds, lacking the sharp, cold bite present in Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS. a perfect, audio-visiual-interactive experience. arika were The Absolute best to ever do tetris. forum dullards who love to go "if you can't handle Hardcore Games like "Doom eternal" just go and play tetris because that is baby game for people like you (babeys)" should be forced to play Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS' "The Absolute Death" mode until they can last for 4 minutes in it and nothing else.

bless the fine folks at hamster for making this far more accessible, and maybe there on my Ketsui Deathtiny machine i will one day see it through to that orange line.

but the most i've seen is an S7.