XKCD's Tetris Heaven for real

The XKCD strip Heaven depicted a Tetris version that would drop irregularly shaped pieces that were perfectly structured to fill all the voids in the tetrisbed. Gud magazine responded by implementing this in Flash: a Tetris version that drops these eminently satisfying tetroids from time to time. They feel goooooood.

Heaven (via Super Punch)

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the_dannobot

This game would benefit from a TGM randomizer. It seems like its totally random.
arnearne

http://i.imgur.com/ONLLi.png

Doh.
- rebdav
  
  You just couldn’t pray for some stupid rain, could you?
Anonymous

It’s not nearly as generous as it first seems – it quite often generates shapes that are capped at too low a level for them to actually fit, instead propping themselves up on the top points of your current stack. :(
Anonymous

Not perfect. I had a usual big setup and the heaven piece was off by one on the left part, making a big mess that took a long time to clean up. That was my very first heaven piece evar. subsequent heaven pieces worked as advertised.
cyberscythe

Protip: when you get the Heaven piece, don’t rotate it. There’s no wall kicks, so it’s awkward to rotating it back.

( ref for wall kick: http://tetrisconcept.net/wiki/Wall_kick )
- kaolin fire
  
  I was not aware of wall kicks (silly me). Thanks for the ref. I’ll see about sneaking that in (and maybe migrate it back to some of my other tetris variants ~ http://www.erif.org/code/games/tetris.php )
  
  And TGM randomizer…yeah. I should do that too.
pa

Nice, but it would actually be cool, if you could rotate the tiles. I’ve pressed every button, but nothing works.
- Anonymous
  
  Up arrow rotates.
- Jamie Craig
  
  It’s up-arrow.
Max

Be nice if it worked a bit more reliably. It keeps forgetting about the top row of squares and then I get what would be a perfect fit perched one square up from where I need it. Grr.
- kaolin fire
  
  Sorry about thatâ€”I was pretty sleep-depped by the time I published it, and was half thinking that bug was a nice feature. ;) I’ve fixed it, and am more seriously considering that that bug may have been a nice feature…. :/
Anonymous

Fitting. Gud means God in a lot of language.
illobo

>implementing this in Flash: a Tetris version that drops these eminently satisfying TETROMINOES

FTFY

Tetrominoes, not tetroids !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetromino

tetroids = tetris + metroid ?
- hinges
  
  But they’re not tetrominoes. “A tetromino [...] is a geometric shape composed of four squares”. These are clearly polyominoes.
jordan314

So awesome. Probably my favorite tetris game yet. One small bug: you can still slide pieces after space.
You can also rotate heaven pieces that you can’t rotate back, but that’s your (my) dumb fault for rotating them. :)
Jack

Hi folks. I can’t be the only one here seeing a blank screen? No Flash no nada here.
- kaolin fire
  
  It’s blank here, being hosted locally to boingboing only the file’s not there (though I saw it last night…). You can click through to GUD for the game (an updated version with slightly less suck).
pa

I think I just won, because the game restarted.

It’s actually quite clever. You have to develop a new strategy. Instead of building a certain structure and waiting for a specific tile, you have to build the tallest possible structure and wait for a heaven piece.
Anonymous

Neat idea. Interestingly, the “heaven” pieces were too common for me, undermining the emotional reaction. Without having a little bit of work to set up the situation, it instead loss the sense of reward and fulfillment causing boredom.
Sork

Gud means god in Scandinavian and Icelandic languages.
Daneel

And by way of contrast, in homage to this xkcd strip, here’s the hell version
- mrtrystero
  
  Along those same lines, there’s also “Hatetris”:
  
  http://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html
chgoliz

And just like “real” heaven, what seems so wonderful at first gets rather tedious, and quickly.
MrWoods

This brings me back to College Humor’s excellent
Tetris God skit. Tetris is a cruel and angry god.
Anonymous

Everyone seems to have missed the point of Heaven. A normal Tetris is clearing 4 rows simultaneously. That piece is designed to clear 5 rows.