Game:

Tetris Party (2008)

Duration: 10:32

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14

And now for something a little different. Both are played with a nonstandard field twice the size of a standard matrix designed for use by two players. The first is "Duel Spaces" which is all about fencing off portions of the field to "control" more of the board than your opponent. The other mode to use the double-wide matrix is Co-op Tetris, where two players simultaneously share the space and drop pieces with the same goal as regular Marathon.


The first mode using this field is Duel Spaces, which is all about taking turns and trying to control the most territory by fencing it off with your moves before the other can do likewise. It seems to me like something of a crossover between Go, Tetris, and that game school kids play where there's a square grid of dots and you have to try to complete squares for points by taking turns drawing single lines between them.

Duel Spaces matches end when no more pieces may enter the field and the scores are tallied. If you had the lead or were at least within four points before a drop, you could conceivably win by game-overing the double-wide matrix, I suppose...but to do so would require that you sacrifice your turn in the event that you didn't actually succeed. I prefer to keep the game going as long as possible anyway.

Before I get into the details...tet me start with this thought on Co-op Tetris. It's very entertaining and amusing to play with another human, but I can't STAND to play with a computer ally like what you see here. Their moves are fast, sure...but utterly devoid of common sense or any real semblance of cooperation. This goes well beyond the handicap of being unable to communicate with your would-be ally, because even two humans who play without exchanging a word can do better than this.

Matters are of course further exacerbated by the fact that you and your "friend" share the same Hold piece and the AI will completely ignore any moves you make until you actually drop a tetrimino into the matrix itself. This can lead to some annoying circumstances surrounding the AI's trigger happy hard drops and seemingly arbitrary moves brought on by the fact that once it "decides" what move it will make, it will do so as quickly as it can, only changing its mind if you happen to upset that plan (the plan that it can't possibly let you know about in advance by perhaps holding off on that quick drop for a couple of piece descent cycles as maybe a fair warning).

Don't get me wrong...the computer is a fairly competent player, I guess. The problem is that it's not the only player here and some of its choices are quite honestly a complete mystery to me and as such I can't really say as we even have all that much of a good working relationship.

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