What are you Currently Playing?

Posted by Hiryuu
Posted by The Evil Vampony
I've gotten back to my TAP Master grind last night, and after months of not seriously grinding (just occasional TGM 20G on my Switch handheld to kill time), and I very quickly made a 16 second improvement to my best time. That sweet M rank is crawling closer, but it's still so far away yet!

I should really consider doing this now that I've gotten sub-60 in Apo and my official times in official games are close enough. The best 'clone' performance I did was on Heboris back in the day but it was a cheat - used SRS rotation to get S9. That's not nearly as difficult as using a rotation system like TGM that has limited wall kicks. I don't think I've done better than S3 or so on the original TGM but it's been a hot minute since I've tried.

Honestly, I feel like TGM is a different beast, because seemingly everything about getting good at it doesn't seem to translate much back to guideline Tetris and vice versa. Best advice I can give, is to press Down x8 CBA on the title screen to get a 20G start. You've gotta be able to survive at least 500 levels of it so you might as well start practicing the hard part (when you go back to normal runs, you can treat 300-500 as if it were 20G to make things less complex than trying to remember whats still possible and for how long). Another bit of advice is to not underestimate the step reset. SRS's basically infinite lock delay stalling makes it very easy to get used to hesitating for as long as you need when you get stuck in a really tricky situation, even for an otherwise very fast player like you, and TGM will beat you into the ground for hesitating too long. Other than that, don't think about the kicks too hard. What you're really trying to do, is avoid dependencies (such as kicks), because the randomizer, while forgiving enough to usually not flood you the same piece too much, is more than happy to not give you the piece you want for a long time. Have a plan B to fill things, and don't hesitate to skim your board if you're getting high up or things are dicey.

I'm sure you know about the Arcade Archives releases of TGM and TAP, but I do highly recommend them. Easy, simple, and very low latency is just really fucking convenient. I find MAME to be laggy if you don't do something to try and improve it, and just less convenient and annoying in general TBH. Fightcade FBNeo and the TGM PSX Conversion is simple enough and low latency too if you're really against spending money.

If you do give it another shot: Good luck!

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