It kinda bothers me that NES tetris as seen as some sort of pure, fundamental, corrupted tetris while TGM is seen as Tetris for weirdos, when TGM is about focusing on tetris fundamentals and NES Tetris is for people who love tetris but also hate their fingers.
NES Tetris players are like the kung fu dudes who drop their hands on a bag of grain 1000 times every day, destroying their hand to create a perfect weapon. But in this case the perfect weapon is mashing left and right REALLY FAST
FUCK, UNCORRUPTED EDIT TWEET EDIT TWEET
But yeah this isn't to disparage NES Tetris I used to speedrun SOTN I'm not gonna be here like "MASHING TO GO FAST IS DUMB"
(with that said, as a tetris lover, I fucking hate NES tetris outside of its music and look)
Yeah this is a huge issue. Guideline Tetris really sucks for anything but multiplayer so you either get NES Tetris or this weird inelegant 'kinda sorta' tetris. Also fuck T Spins.
So to go into this a bit, the biggest limitation of being good at NES tetris is moving left and right fast enough. The game only goes so fast -- at a clip where I feel like most skilled tetris players could play forever if it had faster auto sideways movement (DAS) settings.
It actually in practice works out a lot like how TGM is played. Since the high score is so low you spend roughly 10 minutes trying to hit an end goal score as fast as possible while mostly battling your hands and mean RNG.
TGM shifts things away from your hands and intense RNG to try and focus on the actual fundamentals of tetris and building. with it's very specific rules for speed and wall and ground kicks. At high speed its the TOPOLOGY OF YOUR BUILD THAT MATTERS not your hands.
Where as 20G speeds in guideline tetris allow you to get away with murder, TGM tetris requires you to build structures pieces can flow down well. You can't avoid having to engage the game at this level after a certain skill level.
(Guideline tetris makes building important by putting a focus on t-spins which I personally hate as it's extremely unintuitive but it's also why this works out well for competitive play, especially when you go into the risks of crazy double t-spins and stuff)
Like I don't play enough competitive multiplayer tetris but the sad truth is that just making tetrises probably isn't interesting enough for having a good competitive game. :(
But a lot can also be said for how TGM scales over time. It's changing how hard it is all the way up to the end.. I still can't the 900s in TGM2 and that's SO CLOSE to the end. The particular ways the games scale make it great for people who want to slowly learn and improve.
