Video Game Tragedy Strikes Our Home

I'm almost too choked up to compose this blog entry, but I'll fight through my grief in the interests of posterity.

Vicki and I were playing Hexic HD on the 360 tonight, and Vicki was doing so well at it that we were actually positioned to test out a theory that I've had for about 3 months now. There are two "winning moves" in that game, although when you've really gotten good at it, you only ever use the one that bestows more points when you do it. That one involves taking 6 black pearls (each of which is formed by positioning 6 silver stars in a certain pattern, and silver stars in turn require that you form 6 coloured pieces into that same pattern) and moving them into place around a central piece. When you put that 6th pearl into formation, the game takes your current score, adds some points to it for what you just did, doubles that score and the game's over. Using that strategy, Vicki's already posted a few scores over 2 million, and has gotten into the Top 3000 on the all-time leaderboard. (A few weeks ago, she even topped 3 million, but thanks to an Internet issue at the time, that score never even made it to XBox Live! That was another sad night in this household!) The other "winning move" happens if you put 3 black pearls together in a simple 3-way pattern (all 3 touching each other) but there's no doubling of your score when you do that, although the game still ends.

So anyway... back when there was no snow on the ground, Vicki and I were out for a walk one day and I had a brainstorm: what if we tried to build a double 6-pearl pattern at the end, rather than just the regular (single) version with which you would normally finish the game? At first Vicki didn't believe that it was possible, but the more we talked about it, the more it seemed feasible. The shape would be a figure-8, on its side, rather than just an oval. There would be two pearls in common between the two ovals in the figure-8, and you'd have to move one of those two shared pearls in last, so that you'd be completing both ovals with the same move. If you could pull that off, I wondered aloud on our stroll, would you possibly get four times your score, instead of just double? In other words, could you launch yourself into even more rarified air at the top of the leaderboard? What a thrilling thought!

Tonight, we had it all set up. As luck would have it, I even have photographic proof:

You can see the nearly-complete figure-8, made of black pearls, in the bottom part of the screen.

Not only that, but you can see 3 pieces highlighted, meaning that all we had to do was swap those 3 pieces in a clockwise fashion (accomplished with one press of a button on the controller), which would have deposited the silver star down to the bottom (which is irrelevant) and put the final pearl into place. I would've finally had my answer as to what the resulting reward would be for that most impressive of displays of Hexic skill (double your score? quadruple it? something even more magical?).

Instead, though, we decided to play on, in order to build up some more points before claiming our victory. After all, we were just one move away, so what could possibly go wrong?

Well, the only thing that could have torpedoed our plan happened: we created another black pearl higher up on the screen, and it somehow managed to drop down onto the top left corner of our beautiful figure-8. That formed a 3-way match with 2 of the pearls there and ended our game, with no additional points added...

I actually came very close to crying when that happened. It had taken probably 15 to 20 hours of game play, over several days, to get us to that point, and then it all went for naught. Her final score wasn't even a new high! (It would have been over 4 million if we'd doubled the score, and around 8.5 million if the result had been a quadrupling.)