Yay I managed to re-beat Tetris Plus, the puzzle mode on the GB version! I beat this game when I first got it as a teen on the original Game Boy Pocket but I can’t have been playing on Very Hard (whicth is what I beat it on now) because I’m not sure level 84 (out of a hundred) is humanly possible.
The actual strategy isn’t hard, it’s just outracing the professor’s climb that’s hard.
I actually wanted to see if it was possible even for superhumans like if Supergirl travelled to a yellow sun planet could she do it? So I turned on 4x slow-motion in RetroArch (Gambatte core) so I could make the inputs virtually four times faster (relatively speaking). One of the bigger sources of slowdown is inbetween placing a piece and waiting for the next to appear—start moving too quickly and I move the old piece out of place by mistake, too late and I lose frames in the race. Thinking isn’t the bottleneck since I could mentally place the next upcoming two pieces while moving the current piece.
But even with slowdown I couldn’t do it at first. I know that to make one of the lines you need to drop at least (and ideally at most) four pieces and then depending on what those pieces are you can get by on two more for the next line if they are both I-pieces. Possible on Tetris Plus since it’s bagless but even then the professor will outclimb you.
Then I thought “Okay, so on the PSX version the thing I had the biggest problem with was the repeat rate and the repeat delay. Maybe if I just spam the arrow directions I can get the piece to move faster than if I just hold it?” And it turnus out that it worked, and I could beat the stage pretty easily with that trick! So then I went on to beat the rest of the game normally without slomo and after beating the last stage a level select unlocked so I went to see if I could beat level 84 without the slowdown using this technique of repeatedly tapping the D-pad instead of holding.
I could not.
With slowmo+tapping, yes, I can beat it pretty consistenly. With only slomo or only tapping, I can’t. It seemed as if I was doing even worse with the tapping than holding actually since you need to tap in the right frame or something I dunno. I believe if I set up RetroArch to have turbofire on the D-pad (especially down), I might be able to do it without the slomo but I didn’t try that since I was like “okay yeah I can do it tool-assisted, I aready know that, I don’t need to try a different tool”.