Twintris

Twintris is a Nintendo 64 homebrew game made by Twinsen and released in February 1998 to compete in the Presence of Mind competition of that year.

You can download the game on its download page by using the password ‘twinsen’.

Files and documents
readme.txt

BETA

The Secret Force Presents:
Twintris

Created by Twinsen

Presented in February 1998
for
“Presence of Mind 1998”

Sponsored by Dextrose website and Bung enterprises
www.dextrose.com – www.bung.com.hk

KNOWN BUGS:

ROTATE will not function if another button is being pressed.

Sorry about the beta crap, I know there’s still a few bugs in the
graphics.

Well I hope you have some fun playing this anyway.

Twinsen/TSF 1998

send comments/complaints/death threats/money to:
Twinsen <[email protected]>

pom.nfo

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ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ `---------------------------------------' ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ

This production was provided to the World-First N64-Demo-Competition
                         organized by Dextrose !

file_id.diz

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³     Û  Ü Ü Û   Û                      |
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³   Fith Place: Twintris by Twinson/TSF ³
³                                       ³
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Dextrose description

A nice Tetris-Clone covered by a professional outlook

The ROM has a fairly elaborate intro. First it starts by saying ‘Shall we play a game?’, a reference to the scene from the 1983 movie War Games. I don’t think it really relates to anything in the game, it’s probably just a little doodle. Next we have a rotating 3D model of The Secret Force’s logo for a few seconds.

The logo then descends into a spray of glowing cubes as the title card appears: “The Secret Force presents a game by Twinsen”. And then boom, it hits us with the title card.

The game menu offers some basic settings. The game is single-player only, so all you can really do is change the settings.

Twintris is a clone of the classical Tetris. In fact, it’s almost as bare-bones as you can get for a complete game as you can get. You can move the pieces left and right, rotate them, drop fast and insta-drop. There’s even a level select if you want to increase your difficulty a bit.

That’s about it. There are several things that it’s missing that you almost come to expect from any Tetris game that are not in Twintris, and those are:

  • Rotation in the other direction (you can only rotate with the B button since the A button drops)
  • Block-clearing animation
  • Shadow of where the block will appear if you drop it
  • Next block preview
  • Tetramino shuffle algorithm (I got 5 consecutive I-blocks at about 03:40 in the video)
  • No level progression as you get lines/points (as far as I know)

The controls are pretty stiff, it’s quite easy to miss your mark even at low difficulty. This is the biggest crux of Twintris and makes it very irritating to play. Switch a bit between this and The New Tetris and you’ll know what I mean.

There’s a couple of interesting tidbits in the readme included with the Twintris ROM file. For instance, Presence of Mind was sponsored by Bung, the creators of the Doctor V64. Also it looks like usa.net, the domain used by Twinsen to provide email has been bought out by a cybersecurity company.

Give the game a go, it’s a nice little game, and though it has its flaws, it is still very complete for a homebrewn Nintendo 64 game.

Articles across the web

Twintris is a Nintendo 64 homebrew game made by Twinsen for the 1998 Presence of Mind competition. It is one of the most complete homebrew ROMs to date.
Article published on N64 Squid

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