aGameScout
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2024
9:34 · 5.1M views · Apr 17, 2021
aGameScout explains rolling, the third major NES Tetris playstyle, in which players tap the back of the controller to move pieces faster than hypertapping. It covers how the technique works and where it comes from.
HN points to it as the concise explanation of the latest competitive NES Tetris technique.
5 comments from Hacker News
I saw this Polygon story on reddit, and deep in the reddit comments was a link to this fascinating 9-minute YouTube video that explains the latest NES Tetris competitive tech which is apparently "faster than hypertapping!" (I did not know even know what "hypertapping" was) this video
Do you ever stop to think about whether what you are doing is wrong? I understand and am not surprised that there are businesses built on cheating (see Blizz vs. Glider), but it's pretty striking to me that you never even mention ethics or morality in your post. I have been creating and hacking games for at least 20 years now. The hacking actually started when a friend who I shared one of my earliest games with (most likely a Breakout clone in Windows GDI / C++) hacked it with a memory editor to change his score. I was amazed at the time, both by his apparent ingenuity but also how easy it was to do myself in other games. 12+ years later you could still use a memory editor to desync RTS games (aoe2) or even over-write resources or XP (as in some SC2 custom games back in 2010). But I've also played games competitively. I was probably very close to good enough to compete in cash tournaments in Unreal Tournament 2004. I remember ending up in a game with a cheater who bragged about his aim-bot's ability to compensate for high latency (up to 300ms). I was genuinely impressed but at the same time found it off-putting. I imagine what I felt was tiny sliver of what someone must feel after working their whole life at a professional sport only to lose out on an Olympic gold medal to someone who was later found to be using PEDs. And then take it a step further and imagine if Lance Armstrong gloated about how long and effectively he was able to keep his PED usage undetected. It may sound
Here is a video about the rolling technique, I remember watching it when the technique was first pioneered: this video In short, you hold the controller so that you have a finger resting on top of the d-pad, and then with your other hand, you drum your 4 fingers in sequence against the back of the controller, causing the d-pad to press into your finger in extremely rapid succession. Tangentially to this, I'm part of the speedrun community, where controller legality can be a hot topic on a per-game basis. I think it's equally cool to maximize skill within the restrictions of the original controller as it is to use new hardware to break that barrier. Different communities decide upon what mods or alternate hardware is acceptable based on what they feel is appropriate for getting the most enjoyment out of their game.
I was curious as well and found this video explanation[1]. The idea is that tapping on the back of the controller pushes it up into the player’s thumb which is resting on the D-pad causing a button press. [1] this video
This is where I learnt about hypertapping and rolling: this video Though this is a different video of the same author as the original video in the OP