There are many universal language, and almost none of them are actual languages. Movies are often named, as is football. Video games are another kind of universal language, although games often have their own regional biases and focuses. A gamer who grew up with Indiana Jones movies might have a different understanding of Nathan Drake, for example, than one who doesn’t. But the distance is shrinking every day, with games like Fortnite focusing less on cultural details and more on shared experience.
Apparently, it started with Tetrisa game that dates even Super Mario Bros. The game was born in unlikely circumstances. Tetris was created by Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in what was then called Leningrad and is now known as St. Petersburg, during his spare time, on a computer without a graphical interface, with zero understanding of the larger industry of video games. .
It was a long and complicated road from the Soviet Union to global dominance, halted in no small part by prejudice against any kind of content emanating from the USSR. But once the game debuted in America, proudly waving its Soviet heritage, it stalled. Countless iterations of his original game, matching four-block tetrominoes into rows, have appeared.
Tetris 99, which came out in 2019 and is currently free for Nintendo Online subscribers, is a particularly clever iteration. it takes the universal language of battle royale that Fortnite popularized and brings it into another universal language, Tetris.
Tetris 99 there are two levels of gameplay: first is classic building and elimination Tetrisand then it’s about everyone else. Tetris 99 makes the concept of “waste” lines crucial to the game. Junk lines are what the game artificially adds down your screen, making room to solve puzzles Tetris smaller and smaller.
Garbage lines are the weapons of choice in Tetris 99. Disappointingly, the game doesn’t offer any tutorial or explanation of how it works, so a tutorial (as my box‘s) is very useful. Clearing one row does nothing, but clearing two sends a row of debris, clearing three sends two, and getting a tetris of four clears sends four. You can choose from four targets, including whoever is targeting you, any of the other ninety-eight players who are nearing the end of the line (called a KO), anyone who has earned what are called badges, or a random selection.
Players have a chance to avoid a trash attack by clearing their lanes and are incentivized to go for KO’s on others not only from the competitive incentive, but also by getting a chance to earn the aforementioned badges. Each KO is a “pie” of a badge, and they keep getting exponentially harder to earn.
Signs can make you a target: they multiply the number of lines of garbage you send. Above my box‘s explainer, it comes out twenty-five percent more for the first badge, fifty percent more for the second, seventy-five percent more for the third, and 100 percent more for the fourth.
All of this happens very quickly amidst flashing lights and upbeat techno music that resembles the game’s original sounds. It may take a few rounds to get the hang of the game mechanics, but the learning curve is small if you have, say, twenty minutes to spare. Games move quickly, even if you’ve made it past the early stages, where the game speeds up.
Tetris it is a universal language, a game that needs no words to understand. Tetris 99 complicates things a bit. It might not be the best, most comprehensive version of the game available – it would be The Tetris Effect –but it does what it wants to do perfectly. If you are looking for a game that emphasizes competition Tetristhis is a blast.