Hell
Hell
[The panel shows the display of a Tetris game where the bottom of the pit is curved into a semicircle making the two blocks at the bottom, a square and a reverse L piece lean crookedly towards each other at the bottom of the pit; an S piece is falling and the next piece is an L piece.] Next Top 000000 Score 000000 Level 01 [Below the panel:] Hell

Tetris is a game where the player has to manipulate falling blocks into forming complete rows, which will then be deleted and give points to the player. This comic is a play on this, presenting the player with a version of the game with a curved bottom that renders forming flat rows nearly impossible. Hell is a mythological and/or religious concept of a posthumous punishment for wrongdoers, depicted in many religions as eternal torment. Here the Tetris player feels they are in Hell when they try to play this game.
The title text presents similar situations where frustration is likely to occur. Katamari Damacy is a video game in which the player controls a sticky sphere which grows by assimilating objects smaller than itself, so gameplay would be extremely frustrating if none of the objects available is smaller than your sphere. Super Mario is a long-running franchise of platforming games; in some of the games (beginning with Super Mario 64 ), levels are completed by collecting large, golden Power Stars – so it would be very frustrating if one is impossible to reach.
This last part may also be a reference to the Ancient Greek myth of Tantalus ; as punishment for cannibalism, he suffers in Hades , confined to a pool with a fruit tree above it. As his punishment, the fruit branches on the tree recoil every time he tries to eat, and the water recedes every time he tries to drink.
Also see comic 888: Heaven , which presents an inverse situation in which the Tetris game provides unfairly perfect pieces to help the player win.
There is a playable version of this comic at Kongregate which, unsurprisingly, is frustratingly difficult ( but not impossible ) to play.
[The panel shows the display of a Tetris game where the bottom of the pit is curved into a semicircle making the two blocks at the bottom, a square and a reverse L piece lean crookedly towards each other at the bottom of the pit; an S piece is falling and the next piece is an L piece.] Next Top 000000 Score 000000 Level 01 [Below the panel:] Hell
