Apotris

Those of you who have followed my blog know that I’m a serious Tetris player and even created my own game known as Chaste Tris.

However, there is a person who created such a Tetris game unlike any other. The name of the game is Apotris. It is a Gameboy Advance ROM which was made entirely by someone not affiliated with video game companies who simply learned how GBA games are made. This means that the usual legal issues about using ROMs are avoided because the creator akouzoukos has made it available to everyone and often updates the game.

And perhaps what makes it most interesting is the fact that it is a ROM that can be played using an emulator. This means that not only can any PC capable of running a GBA emulator play it, but it also allows for Tool Assisted Speedruns. Only special emulators are capable of the movie recording features required to do this.I personally use Bizhawk because it was recommended by TASvideos

If you don’t know what a Tool Assisted Speedrun is, basically it means the emulator has features to save and load the game at any time and also the ability to record a movie as the input at each frame. Most emulators also support frame advance which means that you can step through each animation frame of the game and input buttons at that specific frame.

As you might imagine, this is especially helpful in Tetris because it allows looking at the blocks to plan out specifically where they need to go even under high gravity because the game is paused.

Of course it is worth mentioning that my game can do the exact same thing and was designed for the same purpose.

You could even think of my game as sort of a limited version of Apotris that does the job of playing perfect Tetris games. But akouzoukos is by far a better programmer whereas I’m more of a Tetris player than programmer. I love his game so much and I wanted to spread the word of it because I’m sure others crave the ability to play Tetris with less stress and perfect scores in a way that mainstream officially licensed Tetris games never allow because almost nobody can play at the high levels where blocks drop and lock before you can press a key or button!