?
First, so the readme file tells us, there was
Tetripz from Mute Fantasies. Then there was
TOD™. TOD™ simulates a game of TETRIS® experienced
under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. Officially, TOD stands
for Tetanus On Drugs, but it also is German for death.
This is one side. Another, maybe more prosaic side is that TOD is simply an application of the SNES's Mode 7 to Tetris. Mode 7, the mathematics of which Damian Yerrick had studied at seventeen, when he was learning C, allows a 3D view of the tiled worlds of SNES games. In Terranigma, you see it whenever you use the plane; in Dragon Quest VI, whenever you use the Pegasus; in Final Fantasy VI, if I remember correctly, it is used only for the first airship flight.
The result of this experiment has been called more a joke than a game, and maybe it is. But it is an experience that should not be missed.
Why Tetanus?
Before TOD, Damian Yerrick had created a collection of half a dozen small games named DOSArena or freepuzzlearena. It contained a simple whack-a-mole named Hampsterdeath with the hamster graphics from the then immensly popular Hampsterdance page, which put him at odds with that site's creator, Deidre LaCarte. There was a typing tutor; a strange game named Zeus where you shoot pieces of various colors; a SameGame named after and inspired by the TI calculator implementation, Insane Game; Vitamin, a Dr. Mario clone with anime backgrounds and Bill Gates' face as virus graphics, the only game in the bunch to run in SVGA; Vitamin 2, a Puyo Puyo clone; and of course, a (more or less) classic Tetris.
This Tetris was called Tetanus, probably because both words start with the same syllable. A special feature of Tetanus is that pieces are either blue with an R on each block, or yellow with an H. Clearing a row where all the letters are the same gains extra points. TOD is now indeed based directly on Tetanus, it has the same feature, hence the name: Tetanus on Drugs.
About This File
This archive is based on the last release of TOD, as can be found on allegro.cc, but additionally contains the DOS executable, which has not been available anywhere for a while. Through DOSBox, TOD can be run in a window, the Windows version can not. I have also moved the sources into a subfolder. Of the files in the archive, only the executable of your choice and idltd.dat are needed to run the game.
Additionally, you will need alleg40.dll (the Allegro library) for the Windows version and CWSDPMI.EXE for the DOS version. You can put the alleg40.dll into the system32 folder. The CWSDPMI.EXE has go into the game folder. On a real DOS system, I guess, you can put it somewhere in the path, but I'm not sure.
Related changelog entries: 2008-09-10, 2008-08-11.
