Tototris
What is it?
A skinnable Tetris, yes that's easy to comprehend. Skinnable games have been around for year, and any game that stores its graphics in seperate files is, technically skinnable. But a moddable Tetris? What would a Tetris mod look like?
At closer look, this is one of those things where you cry out,
why hasn't anybody thought of this before?
After all,
programmers have changed the rules of the original Tetris from the
very beginning. Just think of Pentix. They
have changed the size and shape of the blocks and introduced new
features.
The idea of Tototris is to let you do most or all of this. It's a create-your-own-Tetris kit. It's the Tetris clone to end all Tetris clones. The mod that's installed by default, for example, increases the size instead of the speed of the falling blocks as you level up:
In two words, one could say Tototris is another Tetris clone. Actually, it's notjust anotherTetris clone; the nameTetriscomes from the greekTetra, which meansfour, whereas the nameTototriscomes fromTotor, which means several in Klingon. Can you guess the most important difference between the two games ? Yep, that's right, Tototris' falling pieces are not limited to the good old four-block tetraminos we're used to. Be prepared to feel relief when a one-block piece starts falling from the sky… And to feel anxiety when that huge, ugly, 10-blocks hat-shaped piece appears…
So it's Klingon. Gee, and I thought it was some kind of reference to the Wizard of Oz. See how wrong you can be.
Another unique feature are the seeds, which have been popular with card and Mah Jongg games, but which I have never before seen with a Tetris clone: The randomisation of the blocks is not done at runtime, instead there is a huge number of possible sequences. You can access them by typing in a name at the beginning of the game. Games with the same name will always have the exactly same block sequence, so if you screw up, you can restart the game and see if you can do better.
There is one drawback however: you need to have .NET Framework 2.0
installed. So someone is actually using this bunch of things that
do stuff
(Christopher B. Wright). Personally, the lure of being able to
create my own Tetris clones was not quite sufficient to convince me
to install yet another monster library on my system. But if you don't
mind or already have it, head over to Well Played and try this out.
Three cheers to the anonymous programmer!
