Tetris DS. Standard Marathon Mode (200 line clear) cleared in 1 minute and 18.7 seconds, complete with must-watch credits. Enjoy!
This movie was made in DeSMuMe 0.9.4+ r2881. It works also on 0.9.4+ r2872, and probably, the newest SVN version.
Fix ARM Cycle Count must be on. Fast Fetch-Execute should be left off.
- Aims for fastest completion of Standard Marathon.
About the game
Tetris DS is well-known for its intense Nintendo theme. It is also known for three other things that make it appealing to TAS:
- The hold piece, which allows a player more freedom.
- Sonic or Hard drop; where pressing up causes the blocks to fall immediately. This isn't new; it existed in some PC Tetris versions.
- No delay between pieces, except during line clears. Similar to PC versions. In Tetris terminology, ARE=0.
- Sliding pieces along a surface. If a piece comes to rest on a surface, or is nearby, rotating it will cause it to slither along the surface, sometimes in unexpected ways. This is particularly noticeable in the late stages of this run. It is possible to create "T-Spins" with the T-Block.
About the run
This run took longer than expected. Every time I thought I had figured out something, the game threw in something new. I redid the last few sections three times because I kept running into I-Block trouble (I need 50 Tetrises). The last 8 lines took a long time to optimize. Due to the unlucky piece sequence, I cannot complete it in 500 pieces, needing 501. To complete it in 500 pieces requires either an even number of T-Blocks in the first 500 pieces, or an I-Block as the 501st piece, neither of which happened.
I initially made the run without using Fix ARM Cycle Count. After completing the run, I figured out that Fix ARM Cycle Count is required to avoid a graphical glitching of the Level 4 transition (when the run reaches 40 lines). So I edited the DSM by a menu redo and gameplay copypaste. In doing this, I saved 38 frames on menu transitions and 1 frame in the gameplay itself.
Fix ARM Cycle Count is also required for Catch Mode to work correctly, although Catch Mode is not relevant to this run.
Gameplay is 4722 frames (1m 18.7s) long, from the first "ghost piece" appearance to when the line count reaches 200. A TAS I found on YouTube goes from frame 807 to 5571 (4765 frames). However, it is not exactly known what the beginning and ending points were.
Thanks
Thanks to Baxter for various discussions about a possible TAS showing off different modes. Since selecting what to show off is subjective, and potentially long, I decided to do a fastest run on the showcase mode because it is short and objective.
Thanks also to an anonymous TASer (probably a Japanese speaker) who made the TAS linked above so I can compare.
mmbossman: Fast, technically sound (the youtube version that was posted is tough to verify, if someone can find the source for it, I reserve the right to review this decision), people like it, and the goal is easy to understand. Accepting for publication.
mmbossman: I would like to apologize to FractalFusion for prematurely accepting this. I thought I had followed along with the thread well, but I somehow managed to miss this post, which provides a [dead link removed] to a .dsm input file that beats this same mode with same goals in 1:37.53, or just shy of 3 seconds faster than this submitted movie. And, as I stated above, and as is stated in the rules, since this movie does not beat all existing records when aiming for the same goals, I am now setting this to "Rejected". I apologize again to FractalFusion for this oversight.