Things learned from playing tetris ds for the past week

(6610, originally uploaded by mathowie)

– I usually play for about 30 min before bed (11pm, Pacific), and almost everyone I play seems to be from japan (or they love kanji names).

– I win more if I play during the daytime. Perhaps I’m taking on homeschooled kids? People that out-rank me are easily beaten.

– 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.

– I have beaten only a couple >7000 ranked people, most mop the floor with me in a minute or so. I beat one player so easily that I wonder if a friend was playing on their ds or something.

– I got really pissed when some 7500 ranked superstar used my own playing against me. I would work frantically while they would wait until I scored a tetris or two, then they would use the neatly added blocks to score against me. Tetris should introduce more random patterns when adding blocks to other players to avoid this. The person was unbeatable for me.

– Somehow, someway, I played against the same person twice in quick succession. I won a game and they left, then we both searched for new opponents and ended up in a rematch. Nintendo should prevent that.

– It usually takes a minute to find an opponent in head-to-head tetris. Getting a 4-way game takes 2-3 minutes, so I rarely play that style. It seems like it should be faster to find other people ready to play given the hundreds of thousands of copies of the game floating around.

– I suck at the 4-way tetris, probably because of all the lucky bonus items. I guess it’s like mario kart, where not necessarily the best driver wins, but the one with the most luck that doesn’t get hit by special items.

– I don’t understand all the warnings on ds wifi games that say once you’re online the game rating might change. Given there is no chat and no interaction of any kind, tetris doesn’t change whether you play against computer AI or a real person.

– Nintendo really has to revamp the whole adding friends thing. It’s a chore that every game I have gives me a different ID, and all my friends have different IDs and then we have to line everything up over AIM and then sometimes we still can’t find each other. Like Anil says, they did everything they could to prevent older creeps from stalking young players, but for adults, all these protections get in the way of simply playing a game online against your real life friends.