I. L.O.S.T. J.Z.

I love tetris, but who doesn't. I finally decide to do something I've wanted to do for a long time: code it myself. Microsoft recently came out with a beta of XNA Game Studio Express, so I wrote it on top of it. It's cool because it let me write it all in managed code (c#). The down side is that to distribute your game, your consumers must have a lot of stuff installed on their machine (.net 2.0, directX, c# express 2005, and XNA). Right now, it works with a keyboard attached to a PC or 2 Xbox 360 controllers. I'm looking forward to the final release of XNA so I can fully port it to my Xbox 360.

In doing this side project, I learned a lot about the world of tetris. Wikipedia's entry on it has a lot of great details like scoring variations, traditional colors, and terminology (did you know the term for a piece in tetris is a 'tetromino'?). I also stumbled on some interesting implementations of the game. The one linked to below includes an ai mode and nightmare mode (you're always given the worse piece).

Sharptris (code, app, and screenshots): http://mrsharps.com/code/SharptriS/
XNA: http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/XNA/default.aspx
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris
Some guy's awesome java implementation: http://isapan.org/html/tetris.html