HomePosted on July 8, 2009
I finally got all my YouTube copyright disputes taken care of.
You may notice a pattern here: fair use 3, copyfraud 0.
So here's a new video that should have no chance of tripping anybody's copyradar: Little Red Riding Hood. It's an outdoor game that I invented based on a story collected in 1697 by Charles Perrault.
Posted on June 25, 2009
Caffeine, who ran TetrisConcept.com, got tired of running a forum. So he moved the wiki to Wikia and shut down the forum. Members of the community have started a temporary successor forum.
Posted on June 14, 2009
On Thursday, June 11, a YouTube representative finally got around to switching this video back on, a total of 21 business days after the representative forwarded my counter-notification. The trouble is that U.S. law specifies that a video is supposed to go back up 10 to 14 business days after that, not 21.
The 2000s decade is coming to a close. It will soon be the teens, and time for something new.
Posted on June 6, 2009
Google celebrated the 25th birthday of Tetris today with a custom logo on the Google Search page. In June 1984, Alexey Pajitnov completed his first prototype of the video game Tetris on an Elektronika 60, a Russian clone of Digital's PDP-11 minicomputer. Fans of computing history may recognize the PDP-11 as the platform on which Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie first developed the Unix operating system. Since then, both Unix and Tetris have been cloned numerous times, just as the PDP-11 was. Tetris Zone can run on Mac OS X, which is based on Darwin, a clone of Unix. The Linux operating system, used by Tetris Friends and by Tetris Zone's web site, is also a clone of Unix. In fact, the IEEE publishes an international standard called POSIX that tells exactly what a Unix clone should look like.
Where did the name "Tetris" come from? Vadim Gerasimov, who ported Pajitnov's prototype to the PC, described it as a portmanteau of "tetromino" and "tennis". Tetromino itself is a portmanteau of Greek tetra-, meaning four, and "domino". "Tennis" comes from French tenez meaning "take", short for "take heed that I am serving the ball". Tenez itself comes from Latin teneō, meaning "I hold", whose infinitive form is tenēre. And like most Latin words, teneō is derived from a Proto-Indo-European root, the same root word that produced English "thin" (like an I piece) and the Greek word tetanos, or "tetanus", or Lockjaw.
Posted on May 21, 2009
You may have seen the NES, GBA, and DS sections on this web site and wondered why I haven't tried developing for Wii. Wonder no more: I'm starting to like the PC better than homebrew.
Posted on May 17, 2009
Pygame is a set of code modules designed for programming video games for the PC in the Python programming language. It wraps the SDL library so that games made with Pygame can work on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Popular video games made with Pygame include Pydance, Frets on Fire, and Galcon.
Numerous people have used Pygame to develop puzzle games. But unfortunately, the developers of some falling block games appear to lack imagination in the naming department.
Posted on May 13, 2009
A falling block game called Gnometris is part of the GNOME desktop environment. Canonical Ltd. distributes Gnometris, along with the rest of GNOME, as part of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. Likewise, Novell distributes Gnometris as part of the openSUSE project.
LTris is another falling block game. It comes as part of the operating system loaded onto ASUS Eee PC subnotebook computers, which is based on Xandros Desktop.
GNOME and LTris are is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GNU GPL is one of many free software licenses that grant the user the freedom to change the software and to share it with their neighbors, including selling copies, without breaking copyright law. Other widely used free software licenses include the Apache License, the Mozilla Public License, the MIT License, and the new BSD License.
A lot of programs distributed as free software are "clones", or replacements for proprietary software that perform the same function. You may have already used OpenOffice.org (compare to Microsoft Office), GIMP (compare to Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop Elements), Mozilla Firefox (compare to Internet Explorer), Pidgin (compare to AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and mIRC), VLC media player (compare to Windows Media Player), or any of several others. Because copyright does not cover functionality or menu structure, these free applications present a reasonably familiar user experience, allowing users to learn them quickly. In fact, users of Microsoft Office 2003 have found OpenOffice.org easier to learn than Microsoft Office 2007.
2009 archive | 2008 archive | 2007 archive
Posted on May 12, 2009
On Wednesday the 6th, I received a notice that YouTube had taken down "THIS FAN GAME VIDEO WILL BE FLAGGED" on a copyright infringement claim by Arika. The same day, I sent YouTube a counter-notice, which I cc'd to tetrisconcept.com. Today I got a reply from YouTube's copyright agent, and it should be back up by the end of May.
Once the video comes back, I may continue development of Tetramino for NES, but under a new name to clarify who made it. I want to remind readers that any similarity between it and Tetris is a consequence of common methods of operation, which are excluded from U.S. copyright (17 USC 102(b)).
Posted on May 6, 2009
Arika, publisher of Tetris the Grand Master, is spraying DMCA takedown notices for videos of falling block games across YouTube again. But this time, Arika got YouTube to take down a video of LOCKJAW, which isn't a direct imitation of any Arika product, and even a video criticizing Arika's practices, which should be textbook fair use. So to be safe, after today's bug-fix release of Tetramino 0.40 for NES, I've put development of Tetramino, TOD, and LOCKJAW on hiatus until the situation becomes clearer.
Posted on April 24, 2009
My dream last night became a nightmare when I ended up trying to express the idea of "free software" in Toki Pona. I could get the "free" part (roughly "any person can give or change this"), but Toki Pona, a very Eloi-ish language, doesn't fit well for describing the Morlock concept of "software".
Tetramino 0.38 is in color now.
Posted on April 12, 2009
I hope everyone had a happy Resurrection Sunday today.
I'm not Catholic, but I did make a bet with the Lord that I could lose eight pounds (3.6 kg) between Ash Wednesday (February 25, 2009, the first day of Lent) and Good Friday (April 10, 2009) by limiting myself to 1500 calories (6300 kJ) of food per day. The first two weeks went fine, but then I lost the willpower to diet. I resumed my old eating habits and gained some of the weight back. But two weeks later, I came down with a spell of dry coughing fits and off-and-on fevers up to 103.1 degrees F (39.5 degrees C). It all ended around Good Friday. In fact, I think the Lord might have let me get sick for a reason: I lost all the weight that I had set out to lose.
Oh, and Tetramino 0.37 is out, adding music and a combo counter.
Posted on March 28, 2009
It's official: LOCKJAW Tetromino Game is nightmare fuel. A member of tvtropes.org described its Rhythm speed curve as
a mode in which pieces drop instantly and lock to the beat of an eerie rendition of Korobeiniki (the Game Boy Tetris A-Type theme). The music gradually increases in tempo, and at about 3 minutes and 14 seconds (if you can survive for that long), the music is suddenly interrupted by a voice saying, "You're better than I am, you don't really need this music anyway," and then the music suddenly turns into a creepier, dying monotone. If you haven't died yet at this point from speeds reminiscent of Tetris TGM2's Death mode, you sure will now.
Posted on March 13, 2009
We've been using Google ads for a couple years now, and they're about to get better. In April, Google will introduce new ways to determine what ads you'll find most interesting. The privacy policy has the details. And thanks to whoever reported the problem with the contact page: it works now.
In other news: Tetramino is getting polished, albeit slowly because I'm at somewhat of a roadblock with the music. I have 5 KiB out of a 16 KiB ROM to fill with a few minutes of music. If you don't already know, The Tetris Company owns a U.S. sound trademark on the song "Korobeiniki" for use in video games, so I can't use that in something that I plan to publish through RetroZone.
Posted on February 7, 2009
I'm trying to get Tetramino to a "finished" state. This will require a lot of spit and polish.
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