> Yes, you will get a lot of S pieces. But it doesn't give you solely S pieces - if that were the case, then it would be possible to make lines forever, which is much too easy.
> If you can't figure out how to turn a constant stream of S pieces to your advantage, that's your problem. Rest assured that once you do, other pieces will appear. If you get creative, it is possible to force all 7 different pieces to appear, including even those incredibly useful T pieces.
I had to once code a ‘wheel of fortune’ UI, that simply revealed trivia in random order. You had the perception of control: you could set a speed for the initial spin and see it gradually stop – as if it was adhering to physical laws – on an item that you haven't seen yet. The same item never came up twice. You always got to see all items on the first try. It was so easy to trick the mind into thinking you had control.
It's cool to toy with Tetris. Did it myself as a student, can't remember all the stuff I tried. But one thing I did was to make the blocks go invisible a few seconds after landing. Fun to try and remember the state of the board.
There are variations on Tetris (e.g. the Tetris Grand Master franchise) where the game mode gets more challenging as you clear. One of the challenges is that the board is invisible, and pieces disappear as soon as you place them; in order to get the best ending, you have to clear a certain number of rows _quickly enough, while still getting tetrises_, while the board is invisible. There are videos on youtube of People doing this.
Another interesting one is that it changes all of the blocks to be monochromatic, including in the "Next Block" preview. It turns out that mode is actually more challenging than you might think; at the speed the blocks are dropping, you depend on peripheral vision to tell you what blocks are upcoming, and now you have to actually examine the block to figure out what it is instead of just knowing from the colour.
For me this breaks after completing 10 or 11 lines, pieces no longer appear or fall unless I press some keys. Edge on Windows 10 with Flash 32.0.0.101 64 bit.
Somewhere recently I saw a tetris variant that, in addition to normal play, allowed for competitive play, where your opponent selects the blocks. There was an option for playing against an AI, which seems very similar to this. I wish I could remember what the name of it was.
Yes, but at least it would be fair. I've tried Bastet for a few rounds and the fact the game can just throw the same piece at you 5+ times in a row makes it feel really cheap.
Which I discovered because, for Hatetris, he wrote a nice twitter-oriented compact binary-to-text encoding, base65536[2].
[1] https://qntm.org/hatetris
[2] https://github.com/qntm/base65536