Bastet – Bastard Tetris (updated)

Have you ever thought Tetris(R) was evil because it wouldn’t send you that straight “I” brick you needed in order to clear four rows at the same time? Well Tetris(R) probably isn’t evil, but Bastet certainly is. >:-) Bastet stands for “bastard tetris”, and is a simple ncurses-based Tetris(R) clone for Linux. Unlike normal Tetris(R), however, Bastet does not choose your next brick at random. Instead, Bastet uses a special algorithm designed to choose the worst brick possible. As you can imagine, playing Bastet can be a very frustrating experience! — http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.shtml

That is the description of Federico Poloni‘s Tetris clone, Bastet. I first played Bastet over a telnet session to some person’s machine. In November of 2007 I started work porting it from its C code implementation to ActionScript 3.

I ported it for fun and because I didn’t have a Linux system handy on which to play Bastet. This version should not be viewed as a full game, as it isn’t. The controls will suck, it will give you several of the same piece in a row, it may not work at all and it definitely won’t be fun. 🙂

I have recovered the source code and made some changes to it. The controls should work a little bit better and it now tells you your score. Also, the debug text is removed.

Here is the result (instructions and more info are below):

Instructions are simple. Arrow keys left and right to move your tetronimo left and right. Up and Space to rotate your tetronimo. Down to move the tetronimo down. Pressing R will restart the game. As I said, simple. Standard Tetris fare.

The catch, though, is that the game looks at your playing field and determines which piece you will probably want most and then … denies it to you. Score keeping is not implemented. The text you see at the top is some of the debug data used for the current piece choice.

It is still under construction, so there may be some issues. I seem to have misplaced the source in the year-plus since I worked on this. I have recovered the source. If you find any glaring problems, I can be reached through my contact page. I don’t promise to fix them, though.