Virtual Tennis Rage

Wow. The last Steam Challenge set a greatly unexpected target.

For the past few challenges, the indie games being sold on sale for $2.50 had achievement objectives set rather low, usually on the scale of try the game out, play through a few levels, etc.

The Chime objective took about 30 minutes, casually playing one or two levels to unlock the required map and then playing it for another 15-20 minutes. Poker Night at the Inventory took a lot longer, but I chalk that up to bad luck and me being incompetent at poker, hence requiring a longer learning curve to even recognize the patterns and figure out the odds.

The Undergarden just required playing the demo, for which I was thankful because the game while mildly amusing was not worth $4.99 for me. I'd pick it up for $2.50 and under. AAaaaaaAAaa was a little more challenging, but I'd already scored a bunch of 'unlock points' the last time I played it through, so it was a matter of figure out what I was doing (20 minutes), unlock the map, and practice (another 20-30 minutes.)

On the third challenge, I didn't even need to do anything. I had already scored Devastator in Magic: The Gathering and the required score in Droplitz from my casual play. I heard some rumblings over the forums that someone specifically trying to attain the Droplitz score for this challenge found it aggravating, but honestly, if I could score it after an hour of fooling about with Droplitz casually, without even trying, that must make me either phenomenally lucky or the score really isn't that hard to achieve.

Ah, the fourth challenge though. *shudder* Left 4 Dead 2 was ok. I hadn't played all the campaigns long enough to score Crass Menagerie (tried the first two and stopped), but it was a matter of just cranking up singleplayer, picking the two campaigns I hadn't played and dragging the bots far enough into the chapter to see and shoot the uncommon infected that I hadn't yet.

SHATTER though. Oh urgh Shatter. The objective set for this poor indie game has people raging up and down the blogosphere and the forums.

To be honest, the game is fun. To get to the Bonus Mode required by the challenge, you need to play through the first three worlds in the story campaign. It is an oddly appealing mix of the brick breaking games of old (Arkanoid on the Amiga comes to mind) and the ye olde arcade space shooters and a little bit of pinpall.

See, you control a bat. Or a spaceship bat. You have a ball, which you send ricocheting around bricks to break them. That's the simple spiel.

Except when you break the bricks, you get brick fragments, which you can hoover up (literally, you have a 'suck' feature) for shield power. The fun is that in hoovering, you also alter the trajectory of the ball, which was previously ricocheting straight, and now curves around.

You may also anti-hoover, or blow, rather,  stuff around. Which comes in handy when the bricks refuse to stay in one place like well behaved individuals and instead come falling toward your spaceship/bat and threaten to destroy it. You also have a shield, powered by those fragments you hoovered, controlled by another key, which allows you to brace for the impact, if you react fast enough.

In an interesting twist, the shield also allows you to ricochet the brick fragments falling toward you back out in a pattern similar to ye olde arcade spaceship laser fire - which also destroys bricks. Or you can collect enough brick fragments to charge up the power bar and unleash uber super combo fire (or whatever they call it) which is a rip roaring frenzy of spaceship laser fire, guaranteed to clean house.

And you need this, because every 4-5 levels or so, there is a Brick Big Boss. Yeah, it's like a lego nightmare. In the standard trope of ye olde arcade spaceship games (and Flash spaceship games), the big boss follows a predictable set pattern of fire and movement, you need to dodge and shield appropriately, and then to shoot, you bounce your ball at its bricks breaking them for enough fragments to pewpew back at the bosses' Weak Spot.

Oh, and in case this wasn't interesting enough for you, you can also ramp up the risk/reward ratio by releasing more than one ball. Yes, more than one ball. Except for each ball you drop, you also lose a life.

There are also power-ups which reward you back lives, and trigger score multipliers and others that make your balls unstoppable or extremely maneuverable and stuff like that.

It all gets exceedingly crazy, and yet exceedingly fun.

So it is beyond most people's comprehension why the Steam objective challenge for Shatter, involves the Bonus Mode for 11,200,000 points.

See, the bonus mode is straight up pong. Or virtual tennis. Three balls are placed in the field, and your job is to move the bat to bounce them and keep them going for as long as possible. No blowing, no sucking, no brick breaking, no shields, no nothing, but you, the bat and the balls.

Each time a ball bounces off your bat, you accumulate 100,000 points. The twist is that the balls speed up each bounce, and they do not follow a straight path but a slight curved trajectory, and they can ricochet off each other at immense speed, throwing off your ball path predictions because you were only expecting them to collide with the walls.

To make matters interesting, the background is full of psychedelic colors and there is a very annoying pulsing white star effect similar to irritating media player visualizations right in the centre of the playfield (ostensibly in the background.)

There are three map levels for Bonus Mode, and your combined score for each level makes up the overall score. The first map level has your bat in the | (vertical) position, bouncing balls left-to-right on a rectangular playfield longer than it is wide. The second map level turns your bat --- (horizontal), and leaves you with a more squarish top-down playfield. The last map level is an evilly small circle, which is rather disorientatingly unexpected, and doesn't leave you a lot of room to react because the balls bounce off so fast and come back to your bat rapidly.

On my first playthroughs, I was averaging some very normal 6,000,000-8,000,000 points with no discernable improvement.

The hell? What was I doing wrong? I turned to the Steam forums to find it full of the lamentations of men, women and children (but mostly older men), screeching out their frustrations and the fact that their reaction times just are not up to snuff, and that they had to take oh 20 tries or so to get it.

20 tries? I just played 15 times and wasn't anywhere near the target score. Others bemoaned that they were at 10,000,000 or 11,000,000 and couldn't break the last 200k. (Okay, ego rapidly deflating here. I'm only at 6000-8000k.)

Fortunately, there were a few individuals who cared to share that they were at 8000k and also in a rage or had given up because it was impossible for them, they just couldn't focus on the screen and were having vertigo, etc. And I took some comfort in that since misery loves company.

There were some handy tips too, such as lowering the screen resolution and playing full screen to make bat and balls bigger, turning off v-sync and triple buffering because of some skipped frames that make ball prediction harder, and one or two strategies such as how to control the balls by hitting them with the centre or sides of the bat.

Trying them all out, I gave them a shot and ended up averaging 8000-9000k with unlucky streaks of 6000-7000k. *sobs*

About this time, my brain started working overtime thinking and analyzing while my hands were moving on automatic bouncing balls and my strained eyes and frazzled nerves stared in glazed response at the screen:

• What were the factors that would be able to improve my score? Was this a vainglorious but ultimately futile attempt?

• Practice (makes perfect)

That's what they all say. Be it a game, a sport, a hobby, anything. The more you do it, the better at it you get. You subconsciously build in muscle memory, your brain gets more savvy at picking out the appropriate patterns. And if you don't actually do it, everything else is just theory.  

• Natural Talent at predicting paths

Or maybe it's not practice. Maybe some people really are better at predicting paths. Their brains have a better spatial relationship sense. Maybe they have a natural talent at this. Sure top athletes train hard and practice, but they started out better than the average person, that's how they got picked.

• Technique (learnable)

But maybe there are skills that can be taught and techniques that can be transferred. If you keep practising but doing it wrong, then you aren't actually improving. You have to learn how to do it right and then keep practising the right way, which will then produce improvement. Which is good because it implies that there are techniques/patterns/something here that I can learn that will improve my game (and my score.)

• Reaction Time (as proportional to age)

Or maybe I am kidding myself. I'm female, in my thirties - practically over the hill already - and they probably have the scores and challenges set for hormonal male teenagers full of adrenaline and testosterone. I mean, professional Korean Starcraft players are considered no longer competitive by the time they cross 23 or so... It's a known biological fact that our reaction times slows down by the time we're past the twenty-somethings and keeps slowing as we approach 40s, 50s, 60s...

• Luck (just plain dumb)

Or maybe it's just luck. The balls seem to start out moving at ever so slightly different speeds/angles, and by the time I hit them 2-3 times with the bat, the balls are moving at what appears to be completely random patterns, quite different from the previous times, so you're forced to react to what is happening to them -now- rather than learn from what happened in the games previous.

• And there was the last thought. That this was alarmingly like real world tennis. Or badminton.

Which is probably a combination of all of the factors above. Which was both depressing to my ambition of ever hitting the mark, and yet ever so little bit hopeful since I might be able to steer technique and practice in my favor, even if all other signs were pointing to no.

Oh, and me being sick, in the throes of flu, might not be the best time to attempt fast reaction tests either. With a mild pounding headache and sleep deprivation (it being 5am yesterday). So I gave up and settled down for a long long sleep.

When I got up, I tried it again, and in the space of 5 tries or so, got an incredible 10,500,000 points. Way better than my previous attempts. Hey, wow, this sleep thing really has an effect. Unfortunately after that, my shabby technique and all the other factors pulled it back down to my 8000k-9000k average. Crap.

Did some other things. Took a nap. Rested up after the nap, and came back yet again. 10,000,000 points. Durn. And then, after another umpteen tries, 11,000,000 points. Raaaaarrgh. So close. Two more bounces.

One thing I did observe is that practice was indeed improving my path prediction. I was getting fairly good and fairly automatic juggling one ball for about 1 million points before it got too fast for my reactions, (and the last few hits were usually done in a sort of sub-trance state in which the hand was twitching there before the conscious brain registered anything. In fact, distracting the conscious brain by thinking these future blog notes was doing my score a world of good by letting hand and subconscious just react.)

The problem was keeping three and two balls afloat for long enough. I was crap at juggling them. Still presumably the longer I kept at it, practice would get me there. The key was to score at least 3 million for each level, and preferably higher, 4 million. If not, quit and restart.

In the meantime, I was also learning the technique for each map. The last map (the circle) was quite interesting. If the ball was coming towards the sides, you have to hit it with the side of your bat to make it bounce back to the centre. If it came straight down from bouncing from the centre zone, then hit it with the centre of the bat to have it bounce back to centre (more or less). Centre bounces were more predictable, but very fast on the return. Side bounces took long to ricochet back and forth, but were terribly unpredictable and could often slip through the bat.

The second map was fairly straightforward. Centre bounces were best. Hit the ball dead on, centre bat, and juggling of the one ball could commence fairly well.

The first map bamboozled me for a while. Forum technique said side for one ball, centre for the second ball, side for the last ball. Well, it didn't work for me. It was ricocheting all over, balls were coming to the bottom at the same time, it was a mess. Neither did hitting them all dead on in the centre. Or hitting them all with the side of the bat. Eventually I figured out there was a middle point between centre and extreme side. Hitting them with this middle point kept the balls pathing a little more predictable and well-behaved, like a good long tennis serve.

Welp, eventually, I did get 11,200,000 points. By the skin of my teeth. Or else I wouldn't be writing this blog entry now, and would still be at it until the deadline expired. (And probably after that too.)

I quit with a lot of relief. While I probably won't be following in the footsteps of people who complained that this ruined the game (or just Bonus Mode) for them - presumably the "grind" for the score or for the TF2 hat got to them - I'm happy to put the game down for a while.

On the contrary though, I find it quite interesting to see how a studied careful analysis of something (plus boatloads of practice) can lead to discernable improvement. (Not to mention fairly addictive behavior - juuust one more go, if I don't make it, I'd stop and try again later... 10 rounds later... maybe I should sleep now.)

Of course, whether you'd really want to go through all this trouble, for one measly game and one measly 'achievement' score is another debate altogether - and one that would be likely won by the "I got better, more meaningful things to do with my time" department.

But assuming that you'd self-selected the challenge as something you'd want to strive toward anyway, and were intrinsically motivated to complete it, the above analysis would apply.