Three months ago, I never imagined I would be able to break the level 500 barrier in Tetris: The Grand Master 2 – The Absolute PLUS (also known as TGM2+ or TAP).

For those unfamiliar with TGM, it’s a series of Tetris games developed by Arika, designed for advanced players. It’s an intermediate between old-school NES / Game Boy / SNES Tetris (well, if you wanna get very technical, substitute that with Sega’s 1988 version of Tetris) and the very lenient “guideline” Tetris that has become the standard in recent years–close enough to the former to provide a challenge, close enough to the latter to have some features that keep the game out of what TV Tropes calls “Fake Difficulty.”

From the time I started playing the TGM series in late October of last year, it took me four months to reach level 500 in TGM1 (“level” being roughly “pieces dropped + lines cleared”, as opposed to the more traditional definitions that are “lines cleared / 10″ or “times goal reached.”), the point at which pieces start dropping to the bottom instantly instead of having any time in the air. It took another five months to replicate the same thing in TAP, partly due to changes in the randomizer, partly due to changes in the internal mechanics, and partly due to how the visuals and mechanics affect my line of thought when I play.

I’ve also been playing what is possibly the most infamous mode in TAP–the “T.A. Death” mode, in which pieces drop instantly right away, and the game gets harder through tightening other mechanics such as the time a piece needs to “lock” in place and the delay between lockdown and the appearance of the next piece. At times, I favor playing this mode over Master mode, the de facto main mode of the game (where you get your grades and stuff), partly due to my shorter average play time (which makes it a good mode when I don’t have a lot of time to kill), and partly because I sometimes find Master mode’s slower initial speeds to be a chore. In comparison, playing at instant-drop speeds turns TGM into a totally different game from playing at higher speeds, and demands a combination of a new line of thinking and more on-your-toes reflexes. Stacking decisions are also more crucial at this speed; a wrongly placed piece can limit one’s options for piece placement, or worse, doom a game to an early end.

My last record on TA Death is level 227. Unlike in Master mode, there are no grades to obtain–it’s a time attack to level 500, with a fast enough time to that level being rewarded with an M grade and a chance to continue to level 999, a feat that maybe less than 500 people throughout the world have completed. I’m very far away from 500 myself; I need to get to level 300 first, at which point the game takes a nice spike in difficulty.

Sometime, I’d like to go to Arcade Infinity, home of one of two Tetris TGM3 machines located outside of Japan. Yes, TGM really is that rare, and that’s because most Tetris players don’t care for TGM (and because TGM is an arcade game series that has never been released outside of Japan); it’s either the Super(-Lenient) Rotation System and newer Tetris games like Tetris DS (hi, infinite spin), or the older, clunkier Tetris games like the one on the Game Boy.

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