And you thought you were a good Tetris player!

I thought I was a pretty good Tetris player. I could always turn impossible situations around, or deal with pieces going down pretty fast, etc. I’ve played Tetris on a variety of consoles, but never have I seen anything as fascinating as Bastet.

Bastet has probably been around for quite some time, but I’ve only discovered it today. Bastet is also known as Evil Tetris or Bastard Tetris. The idea behind Bastet is to provide a new level of difficulty for Tetris without the standard speeding up or raising the level of odd bumps. Instead Bastet finds the best piece for the current scenario and simply avoids giving that piece.

For example, if you have a straight line like the picture above, you will never see a straight piece. The result is a challenging and extremely annoying Tetris game. It isn’t fast or blurry, it is just ridiculously hard, giving even veterans a run for their money.

The flash version that I was playing has pretty slippery controls, no point system and frankly the colors were bland. But even so, I thought it was a pretty fair Tetris game. It has an interesting take, and as annoying as it is, it is also extremely addictive.

So go try out Bastet here: http://l0ser.net/src/as3/bastet.

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!

UPDATE: I managed to find the actual windows program and the official site for Bastet. I’ve mirrored the file on my site here as their site is horrendously slow. The homepage can be found at http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.shtml.

The controls for the actual application isn’t as slippery, but I simply can’t take using the up button for rotation and space for the instant drop. I guess if you can swap buttons easily, then you wouldn’t have a problem with this version at all. Have fun!