💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~stack › gemlog › 2022-05-11.addicting.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 03:18:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
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I gave up the big Internet, and no longer waste time looking at 'interesting' sites. I did get addicted to Bubble Shooter, first because my IQ dropped radically from Covid (and perhaps never came back?), then because of a curious feature of the game.
For those who don't know the game, and I hope you don't, it's an idiotic time-waster in which you swivel a cannon at the bottom of the screen and shoot balls at other balls, trying to hit ones of the same color and make them disappear. A well-placed shot can dislodge dozens of balls by removing their support to the balls above. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I rapidly became the laughing stock of the entire family, and my kids genuinly worry about early dimentia, all because of the 'balls' as they call it. Are you ballsing again? Not the BALLS.
So here is the curious detail that keeps me in, even though I hate wasting my life two minutes at a time. The game has bugs. Are they placed there intentionally? How would I code such bugs? This keeps me going...
There are many subtle and weird bugs. All are very rare - you have to play dozens, or even hundreds of levels to see something odd. Sometimes a ball will wind up where it is not supposed to be. Sometimes balls collapse unexpectedly: how did I do that? Shooting a ball exactly into a corner, instead of bouncing it back, makes it kind of stuck, then vibrate its way horizontally to the opposite corner. And then the doozy with the bombs.
Bombs just blow up balls within a small blast area. You can earn bombs by clearing a bunch of levels and getting a reward. I wound up accumulating them at some point and had maybe 32, when the game bugged out and gave me 32K bombs - obviously some weird overflow. Or was it?
The 32-thousand-plus bombs were a short-lived joy - I used a dozen or so, clearing the level entirely with bombs, and just like that, they were gone.
I've been playing for a few months trying to recreate the situation, unsuccessfully. I've now cleared more than 4000 levels, and have a ridiculous amount of coins, which are useles..
I can't recreate any of the anomalies I've seen ('cept for the corner shot). Occasionally I see new ones. Is it just bad code, or is the creator of the game much, much smarter than anyone had ever imagined?