Published On Jul 18, 2023
Play the games:
Not Tetris 2: https://stabyourself.net/nottetris2/
Not Tetris 3: https://designdialectics.itch.io/not-...
0:00 Intro
0:16 This game right here Is Vetrix
0:27 Not Tetris 3
1:05 The Meat
1:32 falling Apart
1:53 Fast and Hard
2:24 Recommend?
2:44 VR?
-- Transcript --
Not Tetris is Tetris if a game was designed to be asperges nightmare fuel.
On my setris video, or as I called it "estris" because I'm an idiot, I got a lot of comments suggesting that I give the classic Not Tetris 2 a go. I guess because its the king of the fucked Tetris genre. I held off doing any more Tetris stuff because I didn't want this to be the gimmick Tetris rat channel, which sucks because I AM that rat. I can’t get enough of weird tetris shit.
So Instead of playing Not Tetris 2 I decided to play the alpha unfinished buggy mess called Not Tetris 3, or as EA would call it, a perfectly shippable game.
So I went to stabyourself’s github and immediately couldn’t be bothered finding the build for it or learn how to compile it myself so instead I went to itch.io and downloaded a game with the same name that I’m 99% certain isn’t even Not Tetris 3. This might be the one time in my life I can say this is not not tetris 3 and have it not be a double negative.
And you know what it's close enough to Not Tetris gameplay. Blocks smoothly fall from the top of the field to the bottom with classic Box 2D physics bounciness causing an absolute shit show at the bottom. The bottom of the field pretty much represents how organised my life is.
Like the rest of the game Block flipping has been designed to give maximal chances for fucking up, with smooth turning and inertia allowing for over correction. These games were designed to be a bad time, and I love it.
This game feels like playing Tetris with oven mitts on.
You don’t need to get it to exactly fit for it to count as a line and the play space is a bit wider to account for how disorderly it's all gonna be. Once a line gets deleted the blocks above are still affected by gravity and will cascade down. Then from there you just hope and pray for a chain reaction. Not Tetris 2 would do a one cube tall perfect cut through everything, and instead of leaving perfect cubes behind it’d leave ugly little slices, which added to the blasphemy.
Sometimes you’ll see a stack start to tip over so you’ll desperately slam bricks down while you have the chance. This is the closest Tetris has ever come to feeling like domestic violence.
I will say that Not Tetris 2 had a more managable speed. This one feels incredibly fast and hard, like my love making. In 2 it feels less like dropping bricks and more like bringing in a ship to park in Elite Dangerous. You pilot bricks into position, shunting them up into tight little stacks. This version is just way too quick.
Would i recommended these games? No absolutely not but it's fun for exactly the amount of time it is to understand that this was done as a giant meme to begin with. With that said NT2 when played seriously does still manage to capture the hypnotic trance feeling of actual Tetris. This knock off NT3 on the other hand I'm not so sure.