Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Zune -> Hexic

That's right... I've got a Zune.  Of course, I don't use it to listen to the radio or anything cool like that, or to connect to hundreds of my fellow Zuners.  I've got the manual in deep storage someplace, so I can't figure it out.  But every once in a while, when I'm sitting there, trying to fall asleep at 3 in the morning, trying to not look back at the train wreck that is my life, studying the configuration that the various cars have made, and why I can't seem to move them... I'll turn to my Zune and either watch some videos I have on there (mostly non-porn now) or I will occasionally turn to the unfortunately short list of games.  I was playing the checkers for a while... oh, crap.  Now I KNOW I'm getting old.  Next thing you know, I'll be telling people "Okay, thank you!" all the time as I get ready to go back to the old folks' home.  But last night, I believe it was, I was fiddling around with the ol' Hexic again.  Yes, give that Pajitnov his due.  Even he couldn't replicate Tetris's success with such hasty follow-up fare like "Hat-tris."  Hah!  But his legacy seems to live on, if only for me, in such modern incarnations as your Candy Crushers, your Bejeweled Blitzes, what have you, and now your Hexices: a hexagonal switch-em game.
 But as with all Microsoft products, it ultimately falls upon the users to provide feedback to the programmers and to the finer minds who've chosen the Microsoft lifestyle on a more permanent, salaried basis, yet somehow manage to not find all the flaws that the poor suckers who actually use their products always manage to find.  Of course, games are odd birds, and their logic is far too complicated these days, even with seemingly simple fare like that fu... wonderful Farmville 1 and 2 and all its ilk.  But where they're part of a vibrant community, Hexic is in an all-but-forgotten backwater, and I'm certainly not expecting a patch any time soon... and if I do get one, well, then I'll know for sure that I'm of interest to the NSA and their ilk.  But I think I understand programmers of games, and that they can't be expected to anticipate all the permutations that can arise.  In this case, as you can sort of see from the circle in the lower image, I was on the last move in "Survival Mode," "Expert" level.  The algorithm missed that green combo there, and started the end-of-round tally when the every last move has been exhausted.  So, if anyone does want to look for that glitch, it'd be somewhere in there.  It does the tally, counting all the empty spaces and locking down all the free hexic tiles, then goes on to the next level.  But in this case, it couldn't go on to the next level, because, well, there's one combo that hasn't been processed!  And so, the game froze... hence, my ability to take a picture of the screen.  I had to let the battery run out, and start the whole thing all over again, which as a Zune user (...or a Zunatic?), I'm used to by now.  It happens.  Probably happens with video iPods, too, right?  ...RI-IGHT????!!!!!!!

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