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I saw this Polygon story on reddit, and deep in the reddit comments was a link to this fascinating 9-minute YouTube video that explains the latest NES Tetris co

by danso 4y ago

I saw this Polygon story on reddit, and deep in the reddit comments was a link to this fascinating 9-minute YouTube video that explains the latest NES Tetris competitive tech which is apparently "faster than hypertapping!" (I did not know even know what "hypertapping" was) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-BZ5-Q48lE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-BZ5-Q48lE

tedunangst 4y ago
For me, there's an open question whether games like Tetris should have such hacks. (Is it a bug that should be fixed?) Obviously reaction time is a factor in a game that continuously speeds up to increase difficulty, but should inhuman button mashing offer an advantage over auto repeat? You can't make Mario run 20x faster by hyper tapping the run key.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  I can see why one would take issue with hypertapping, a method which seemed to require some inherent body ability to be capable of, but rolling is merely a more efficient method of human tapping. It's like asking if the fosbury flop should be allowed.
  - tedunangst 4y ago
    The high jump seems to be more deliberately a test of physical skill? Did the designers of Tetris set out to make a game that measures the rate at which you can push a button? A lot of games have no glitch speedrun categories.
    - boomboomsubban 4y ago
      If the designers wanted the game to end at level 29 they could have forced the game to end there. They didn't, instead programming a game that allows users to get continue indefinitely even if the designers themselves were unable to pass level 29. Sure you could make a no hypertapping or rolling category for Tetris. Calling better techniques a glitch seems wrong, though speed runners often disagree on what exactly constitutes a "glitch" anyway.
  - throwaway675309 4y ago
    What??? There's no issue with hyper tapping, hyper tapping is literally just being able to press the button faster than most people can, and disallowing it would be like disqualifying somebody who has more fast twitch muscle fiber in the 100m dash. We're not created equal, welcome to literally every sport EVER.
    - boomboomsubban 4y ago
      Seeing why someone would take issue with something is not agreeing it's an issue. I understand why the Tetris community might have been unhappy that a strategy impossible for 90% (completely made up number, I have no idea how common the ability is) of people became the meta. I wouldn't have banned it, but I would understand if they decided to have separate categories for hypertapping and "regular" play. Rolling seems to have fixed the problem.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      The real issue with hypertapping isn't that "not everyone can do it," really. It's the question of if it crosses the line into being inherently injurious to the player in the medium or even short term, in which case the advantage doesn't come from either natural or learned skill but a willingness to ruin your hands for silly game points. Generally speaking regulated sports tend to draw lines here too, though obviously some draw them fairly far into the injury territory. Most of those are explicitly fighting sports though.
      - Ekaros 4y ago
        Gymnastics is also good example. Some routines are just banned, because there is possibility of damage or too high risks. And it is quite fair as long as it is clear upfront and everyone follows the same rules.
        otherme123 4y ago
        That regulations are more in the line "we don't want participants to die or get crippled on live TV". Because gimnastics are absolutely insane for your body, the number of people who end up with totally destroyed knees, shoulders, ankles... before their 30's is horrifying.
  - p1necone 4y ago
    Comparing rolling to the Fosbury flop is basically a perfect analogy, bravo.
- aaron695 4y ago
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  You can make Mario 20x faster by tapping backwards longjump on stairs, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKf_bFNXuu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKf_bFNXuu8
  - gaudat 4y ago
    That Yayayayayayayayayayahoo! has to be one of the best bugs turned features in history.
    - sdwr 4y ago
      Yah.. yah.. yahyayayayyyyyyahoo!
- LocalH 4y ago
  That’s like asking if Guitar Hero should have tapping, where you bring your strumming hand up to press fret buttons. Speed techniques that work with unmodified hardware and game code should almost always be allowed.
- dcow 4y ago
  I dont think you’re abstractly asking a silly question. People do debate whether in-game emergent behavior that leverages obviously unintended game mechanics is allowable all the time. But the analog for Tetris here would be something like “if you press input so fast it overflows some counter and gives you free rows”. That’s not what this is. There is no “hack”. This is skill.
- GoldenRacer 4y ago
  I don't feel it's a hack. DAS is a mechanism of the game that was intended to aid players and make the game play more enjoyable for the typical player. If users want to forgo that mechanism why shouldn't they be allowed? If I'm in a typing competition and am typing a word with a repeated letter such as the two l's in "all", you would never expect me to have to press the l key and wait for the computer to automatically type a second l until I released. You'd expect me to just press the l key twice because it's faster and that wouldn't be considered a "hack". Why would you expect anything different for Tetris players? As for Mario, it's just a slightly more realistic game in terms of you controlling a set of pixels that represent a person instead of blocks. Mario doesn't move from one column to the next, he smoothly travels through all the pixels between columns because people in the real world move smoothly. Tetris blocks aren't real world objects though so they can move one column at a time. If it only takes one frame for a block to move one column, why shouldn't I be able to move the block one column every frame? Also, in the official game, if you use DAS you move at 10Hz (moving once every 6 frames). It looks like top players can tap at around 20Hz. That's only 2x faster.
- yayachiken 4y ago
  The competitive scene is probably also influenced from the speedrun community. And the speedrun community has really worked out the kinks in their ruleset, as in most games, you need to find the sweet-spot of allowing hacks and innovative techniques to break the game, but not too much that it becomes uninteresting. For example, in Super Mario Brothers non-TAS runs, the rules are based around the controller and execution environment. You are not allowed to modify the controller or tilt the cartridge, but that's it. Having the rules only limit the tools required, just like in sports, is quite elegant. If somebody figured a way to play faster with their teeth, it would be allowed, and rolling the controller is just something like that. On the other hand, people found out that you can perform certain feats in SMB by pressing the left and right button at the same time. This is considered impossible with the standard D-Pad (without e.g. cutting it in the middle), so that is banned. At least until somebody figures out a way how to do it with the standard D-Pad.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  Aside from "what is too much" questions, skipping DAS in the nes version of Tetris by tapping is something almost anyone who plays the game will do if they play it long enough and isn't at all unintended behavior. It just makes sense for certain situations. And while it's not true for most 2d platformers of smb's era, performing repetative button actions to move faster than the standard acceleration curve allows became very possible in 16bit games and a later, and you'll see those used in speedruns all the time. Usually a repeated dash, but sometimes weird stuff like running backwards, jumping in certain ways (smb actually has one of these), or rhythmically pumping the shoulder buttons.
userbinator 4y ago
I'm not at all a gamer, but can type decently fast and see much similarity between the "rolling" technique and using all 10 fingers on the keyboard --- e.g. 120WPM is a rate of 10 keys per second, which is extremely difficult to do even with a single finger on one key, but spreading the energy across all the fingers makes it much easier to achieve those speeds. Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available.
- CarVac 4y ago
  > Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available. Only on QWERTY. On Dvorak there's a very rigid mapping and it very evenly uses all the fingers. Personally, the ability to distribute the load more is why I prefer the number row over a number pad when typing numbers; though Dvorak helps there by putting the punctuation closer to the number row. And on my ergonomic keyboard I have the numbers on the home row in the number layer, rather than in a numpad layout.
  - bradwood 4y ago
    > it very evenly uses all the fingers. This has to be a function of what is being typed, not the keyboard it's being typed on. I am assuming you mean English evenly uses all the fingers? Something like Polish, or Welsh, I'd expect to not be very "even" on a Dvorak keyboard.
    - zvr 4y ago
      ... or code in a programming language.
  - Nadya 4y ago
    Dvorak does not evenly use all fingers - it is especially more right-hand dominant and that trait was actually why I hated it as a left-handed dominant person. The amount of finger travelling the right hand has to do for Dvorak is insane. Almost all improvements of typing speed in Dvorak are attributed to the learner finally learning how to type in the first place. The main draw to learning Dvorak should for the ergonomics - which are strictly inferior to Colemak. While Colemak is nearly as right-hand dominant it doesn't require nearly as much finger travel making it more ergonomic for left-hand dominant people as well. Also - as someone who has learned both - I adamantly believe Dvorak is inferior to Colemak in almost every single way. From difficulty learning the layout to the ergonomics once learned to having to rebind or relearn hotkeys - especially common ones like cut/copy/paste. I only wish I had discovered Colemak prior to wasting time learning Dvorak all those many years ago. Colemak heatmap: https://zhangshenjia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/8.jpg https://zhangshenjia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/8.jpg Qwerty & Dvorak heatmap: https://whyfiles.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/dvorak3.jpg https://whyfiles.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/dvorak3.jpg (And as Bradwood pointed out in the response below - definitely biased towards typing English and not other languages. So people who primarily type a language that is not English may have drastically different experiences.)
lern_too_spel 4y ago
This Polygon story explains what hypertapping is and what rolling is. There is no need to go deep in the Reddit comments to find out.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  I still recommend watching the video though. It's like the Polygon article but more audiovisual, and shows what hypertapping and rolling actually look like, and the development of rolling
drexlspivey 4y ago
This video has been posted here 3 times (one by me) with no votes/comments
- dreamoffire 4y ago
  Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and sometimes it rains

by danso 4y ago

tedunangst 4y ago

For me, there's an open question whether games like Tetris should have such hacks. (Is it a bug that should be fixed?) Obviously reaction time is a factor in a game that continuously speeds up to increase difficulty, but should inhuman button mashing offer an advantage over auto repeat? You can't make Mario run 20x faster by hyper tapping the run key.

boomboomsubban 4y ago
I can see why one would take issue with hypertapping, a method which seemed to require some inherent body ability to be capable of, but rolling is merely a more efficient method of human tapping. It's like asking if the fosbury flop should be allowed.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  The high jump seems to be more deliberately a test of physical skill? Did the designers of Tetris set out to make a game that measures the rate at which you can push a button? A lot of games have no glitch speedrun categories.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    If the designers wanted the game to end at level 29 they could have forced the game to end there. They didn't, instead programming a game that allows users to get continue indefinitely even if the designers themselves were unable to pass level 29. Sure you could make a no hypertapping or rolling category for Tetris. Calling better techniques a glitch seems wrong, though speed runners often disagree on what exactly constitutes a "glitch" anyway.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  What??? There's no issue with hyper tapping, hyper tapping is literally just being able to press the button faster than most people can, and disallowing it would be like disqualifying somebody who has more fast twitch muscle fiber in the 100m dash. We're not created equal, welcome to literally every sport EVER.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    Seeing why someone would take issue with something is not agreeing it's an issue. I understand why the Tetris community might have been unhappy that a strategy impossible for 90% (completely made up number, I have no idea how common the ability is) of people became the meta. I wouldn't have banned it, but I would understand if they decided to have separate categories for hypertapping and "regular" play. Rolling seems to have fixed the problem.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    The real issue with hypertapping isn't that "not everyone can do it," really. It's the question of if it crosses the line into being inherently injurious to the player in the medium or even short term, in which case the advantage doesn't come from either natural or learned skill but a willingness to ruin your hands for silly game points. Generally speaking regulated sports tend to draw lines here too, though obviously some draw them fairly far into the injury territory. Most of those are explicitly fighting sports though.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      Gymnastics is also good example. Some routines are just banned, because there is possibility of damage or too high risks. And it is quite fair as long as it is clear upfront and everyone follows the same rules.
      - otherme123 4y ago
        That regulations are more in the line "we don't want participants to die or get crippled on live TV". Because gimnastics are absolutely insane for your body, the number of people who end up with totally destroyed knees, shoulders, ankles... before their 30's is horrifying.
- p1necone 4y ago
  Comparing rolling to the Fosbury flop is basically a perfect analogy, bravo.
aaron695 4y ago
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
You can make Mario 20x faster by tapping backwards longjump on stairs, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKf_bFNXuu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKf_bFNXuu8
- gaudat 4y ago
  That Yayayayayayayayayayahoo! has to be one of the best bugs turned features in history.
  - sdwr 4y ago
    Yah.. yah.. yahyayayayyyyyyahoo!
LocalH 4y ago
That’s like asking if Guitar Hero should have tapping, where you bring your strumming hand up to press fret buttons. Speed techniques that work with unmodified hardware and game code should almost always be allowed.
dcow 4y ago
I dont think you’re abstractly asking a silly question. People do debate whether in-game emergent behavior that leverages obviously unintended game mechanics is allowable all the time. But the analog for Tetris here would be something like “if you press input so fast it overflows some counter and gives you free rows”. That’s not what this is. There is no “hack”. This is skill.
GoldenRacer 4y ago
I don't feel it's a hack. DAS is a mechanism of the game that was intended to aid players and make the game play more enjoyable for the typical player. If users want to forgo that mechanism why shouldn't they be allowed? If I'm in a typing competition and am typing a word with a repeated letter such as the two l's in "all", you would never expect me to have to press the l key and wait for the computer to automatically type a second l until I released. You'd expect me to just press the l key twice because it's faster and that wouldn't be considered a "hack". Why would you expect anything different for Tetris players? As for Mario, it's just a slightly more realistic game in terms of you controlling a set of pixels that represent a person instead of blocks. Mario doesn't move from one column to the next, he smoothly travels through all the pixels between columns because people in the real world move smoothly. Tetris blocks aren't real world objects though so they can move one column at a time. If it only takes one frame for a block to move one column, why shouldn't I be able to move the block one column every frame? Also, in the official game, if you use DAS you move at 10Hz (moving once every 6 frames). It looks like top players can tap at around 20Hz. That's only 2x faster.
yayachiken 4y ago
The competitive scene is probably also influenced from the speedrun community. And the speedrun community has really worked out the kinks in their ruleset, as in most games, you need to find the sweet-spot of allowing hacks and innovative techniques to break the game, but not too much that it becomes uninteresting. For example, in Super Mario Brothers non-TAS runs, the rules are based around the controller and execution environment. You are not allowed to modify the controller or tilt the cartridge, but that's it. Having the rules only limit the tools required, just like in sports, is quite elegant. If somebody figured a way to play faster with their teeth, it would be allowed, and rolling the controller is just something like that. On the other hand, people found out that you can perform certain feats in SMB by pressing the left and right button at the same time. This is considered impossible with the standard D-Pad (without e.g. cutting it in the middle), so that is banned. At least until somebody figures out a way how to do it with the standard D-Pad.
stormbrew 4y ago
Aside from "what is too much" questions, skipping DAS in the nes version of Tetris by tapping is something almost anyone who plays the game will do if they play it long enough and isn't at all unintended behavior. It just makes sense for certain situations. And while it's not true for most 2d platformers of smb's era, performing repetative button actions to move faster than the standard acceleration curve allows became very possible in 16bit games and a later, and you'll see those used in speedruns all the time. Usually a repeated dash, but sometimes weird stuff like running backwards, jumping in certain ways (smb actually has one of these), or rhythmically pumping the shoulder buttons.

userbinator 4y ago

I'm not at all a gamer, but can type decently fast and see much similarity between the "rolling" technique and using all 10 fingers on the keyboard --- e.g. 120WPM is a rate of 10 keys per second, which is extremely difficult to do even with a single finger on one key, but spreading the energy across all the fingers makes it much easier to achieve those speeds. Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available.

CarVac 4y ago
> Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available. Only on QWERTY. On Dvorak there's a very rigid mapping and it very evenly uses all the fingers. Personally, the ability to distribute the load more is why I prefer the number row over a number pad when typing numbers; though Dvorak helps there by putting the punctuation closer to the number row. And on my ergonomic keyboard I have the numbers on the home row in the number layer, rather than in a numpad layout.
- bradwood 4y ago
  > it very evenly uses all the fingers. This has to be a function of what is being typed, not the keyboard it's being typed on. I am assuming you mean English evenly uses all the fingers? Something like Polish, or Welsh, I'd expect to not be very "even" on a Dvorak keyboard.
  - zvr 4y ago
    ... or code in a programming language.
- Nadya 4y ago
  Dvorak does not evenly use all fingers - it is especially more right-hand dominant and that trait was actually why I hated it as a left-handed dominant person. The amount of finger travelling the right hand has to do for Dvorak is insane. Almost all improvements of typing speed in Dvorak are attributed to the learner finally learning how to type in the first place. The main draw to learning Dvorak should for the ergonomics - which are strictly inferior to Colemak. While Colemak is nearly as right-hand dominant it doesn't require nearly as much finger travel making it more ergonomic for left-hand dominant people as well. Also - as someone who has learned both - I adamantly believe Dvorak is inferior to Colemak in almost every single way. From difficulty learning the layout to the ergonomics once learned to having to rebind or relearn hotkeys - especially common ones like cut/copy/paste. I only wish I had discovered Colemak prior to wasting time learning Dvorak all those many years ago. Colemak heatmap: https://zhangshenjia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/8.jpg https://zhangshenjia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/8.jpg Qwerty & Dvorak heatmap: https://whyfiles.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/dvorak3.jpg https://whyfiles.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/dvorak3.jpg (And as Bradwood pointed out in the response below - definitely biased towards typing English and not other languages. So people who primarily type a language that is not English may have drastically different experiences.)

lern_too_spel 4y ago

This Polygon story explains what hypertapping is and what rolling is. There is no need to go deep in the Reddit comments to find out.

woojoo666 4y ago
I still recommend watching the video though. It's like the Polygon article but more audiovisual, and shows what hypertapping and rolling actually look like, and the development of rolling

drexlspivey 4y ago

This video has been posted here 3 times (one by me) with no votes/comments

dreamoffire 4y ago
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose and sometimes it rains