| Why Quadra
We all loved TetriNET. For me, it was even a case of first love. I never cared about Tetris before TetriNET. But we have to realise facts - TetriNET is dying. TetriNET is a slow, messy and buggy game. It was written by an amateur programmer in 1997, completely coded in Delphi, and it hasn't been updated since. This isn't meant as a rude personal attack on someone who's given me more hours of Tetris enjoyment than any other man I know, it's just the way it is. Stormcat is currently working on his new client named TetriNET 2, which is a pretty piece of software, but it's still written in Delphi, it's still slow, it's still buggy and the master TetriNET 2 server hasn't been up for half a year. Some self-designated elite players found a friend in T2net, which, while an interesting and entertaining game in itself, is unknown by almost everyone, abandoned by its author since over two years and even more buggy than TetriNET. The latest craze in the TetriNET world is TetriFAST. While this was a major breakthru for many people, me included, it is still nothing but a simple patch which ultimately doesn't solve the major problems of the TetriNET world, the problems that are killing TetriNET - non-standard applications, buggy servers, stupid, power-crazed ops, lame, unfriendly players and incessant cheating. This is the truth. But there is a way out of this, and it's Quadra. I first heard of Quadra from a ladder player maybe one year ago. I tried it out, and while I found it impressive, I found that playing it destroyed my regular TetriNET stacking since Quadra works with recursive line-clearing. Also, when I tried it out first, the game had not yet got a drop key - you had to pull every piece down with the down key, which could be accelerated, much like the classic arcade machines. Since I had still not given up hope on the regular Tetris scene, and, well, since I was too lazy to give the game a real chance, I forgot about it. I returned to the game two weeks ago. Since then, I have been playing every day, maybe two, three hours a day, always learning and having a great deal of fun. Quadra is a recursive Tetris game. This is the thing ordinary Tetris players will have a problem getting used to since it puts many concepts of traditional Tetris stacking upside down - for one thing, Z's should almost always be placed vertically, and greed is actually most of the time the way to win. What it gives, however, is far more than it demands. There are people who say Quadra suck. These are invariably the people who have never truly given the game a chance, who have maybe played once in a ffa and got slaughtered - the "great TetriNET players" who are too conceited to recognize their own ineptitude in the field and try to do something about it. These are the people who have never felt the sensation of stacking a recursive line-add and sending every other player in the game into oblivion with a 14-liner-add. Does this sound impossible? It is not, it is in some instances not even particularily hard. It just takes practice. The Great Skills are at Quadra now. You won't find them hanging around in slow, lagged, cheated and bored-to-death regular TetriNET servers. You won't even find them among the speed demons at plibble.com and - dare I say it - hellfire.darktech.org. Make no mistake, though, Quadra can be an incessantly fast game. That's just part of the charm about it. The others are, in no particular order, great design, no noticable bugs, civilized players and furious action. It should be the choice of any newbie entering the pure Tetris scene. Come play and try it out with us, but be warned. After playing it, you will lose all respect for the regular Tetris games. spindizzy/HELLFIRE, 10/00 Update. The Quadra master server currently goes up and down. To
play, sometimes you will have to manually enter an IP. q.recognize.nu is
usually online.
Quadra Public FAQ/Guide written by ComDAC.
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