17 January 2002

I am such a dork.

So I've been playing around on Neopets lately. I like a lot of their games, and it's a generally cute site.

One of the games that I'm particularly good at is called Codebreaker. I won't go into all the rules, but the idea is to guess a pattern of four colors randomly chosen by the computer, using the cues it gives you, in ten steps or less.

I've always loved logic puzzles. And I had a game exactly like this (with different graphics, of course, but it was the same game and rules) a while back, so I already knew the strategy for this one. There's no time limit for each level, though you get more points for solving it more quickly.

The Neopets website gives out little "trophies" to the highest-ranked people in each game. I thought to myself, I'm awfully good at Codebreaker. I should go for the trophy. (You understand, there's a cap on the number of points you can earn, so if I'm playing for points, I quit the game after the 25th level. But there's no cap on the score - just on how the score translates to points. But the score is what earns the trophies.)

Then I looked at the list of high scores and trophy-winners. The person in first place had a score in excess of 75,000. Let me put that into perspective for you: You earn 20 points per level, plus bonuses for time. If you assume this person solved every puzzle in less than 30 seconds, they earned 30 points per level. Which means they played at least 2500 levels. At thirty seconds per level, that's something in excess of twenty hours of play time.

That doesn't allow any time to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, or even stretch. I spent almost all day at work yesterday playing Codebreaker (well, the parts of the day I wasn't actually working) and got to level 550.

So I thought to myself... The game waits indefinitely between levels for you to tell it you're ready to move on. I could just leave it running on my computer overnight, and pick it back up in the morning. And then the next morning... And so on, until I either get careless and lose a level (I've worked out the logic; it's not possible to lose unless I get careless, though sometimes it takes me considerably longer than 30 seconds to work out the final steps.) or get to the level I want to get to.

So that's what I did. And that's what I'll be doing, for what looks to be about a week. (Because you don't see your score with the time bonuses calculated in until you quit or lose - so all I know about my score is that it's at least twenty times the level I'm at. Which means that in order to know I've beaten this person, I have to go level 3750. Though I can work in some fudge-factor, because I know at least 75% of the time I'm coming in at less than a minute.)

Whoops, I'm babbling again.

So anyway, that's my plan. All so I can take the top score in this silly game, and acquire a silly graphic.

And while I'm working on this, I'm actually faintly worried about two things: First, that the office will have a power outage, or that the I.T. person will decide she has to run an upgrade, or something else that will force my computer to reboot, losing all my hard work (because you can't actually save the game).

And second, that I'll log in to the website and do something to reset the Codebreakers screen. (Like try to play another game, for instance.) I'm even mildly worried about playing Neopet games from another machine.

Yup. I'm a dork, all right. I'm sorry. I'll try not to babble at you about this any more. Though if I actually get through this and manage to win the trophy, I may post it. Just 'cause.

--Liz