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Pokémon Puzzle League
I posted a while back here about having some anxiety while on flights that experience turbulence.
Well, I had a hell of a test of that earlier this week, when a little puddle-jumper of a flight wound up going through some serious thunderstorms—no beverage service, repeated intercom appeals to ensure all seatbelts are fastened, and the whole plane getting tossed and turned every which way like a damn McSalad Shaker.
And the only thing that kept me from full-on freaking out in the cabin... was having Pokémon Puzzle League in my hands the whole time.
See, I've been grinding that game's 1-player campaign on Very Hard mode, which, as you might expect, is very hard. The whole last 30 minutes of the flight was just me playing against Team Rocket, over and over, and losing every time, but relishing the moments when I was able to hang on a little bit longer or put a little more pressure on them, and also, I had the absolutely certain knowledge that if I looked away for even a few seconds, I would lose immediately. No thoughts, just pure focus on the little blocks on my screen.
So, yeah. New lay anxiety treatment: crank up the difficulty on your favorite reflex-heavy puzzle game to the max and you'll be so stressed by the game you can't be stressed by anything else :D;;;;;
***
Pokémon Puzzle League, for those unfamiliar, is a Pokémon-flavored reskin of Tetris Attack, released on the Nintendo 64 in 2000 (which is when I first played it), and re-released on Nintendo Switch Online just last year (which is how I'm playing it now).
(And apparently Tetris Attack is itself a reskin of Panel de Pon, a game I'd never heard of until I started looking up strategies for this game—more on that later!)
The general schtick is that there's a bunch of colored blocks on the screen, and you can swap any two horizontally adjacent blocks with a press of a button. Put three blocks of the same color in a row and they'll disappear. Put more than three together, and they'll disappear and throw garbage onto your opponent's screen (which they can only get rid of by disappearing blocks adjacent toe the garbage). If your blocks + garbage touch the top of the screen, it's game over.
I was able to blunder through a Hard campaign without knowing anything much more sophisticated than that...which unlocked Very Hard mode, and holy hell? I definitely don't remember doing anything this hard when I played it as a kid???
I took a step back to figure out how to deliberately set up chains (a type of attack where, once you make some blocks disappear, the blocks above falling causes another set of blocks to disappear... they cause more annoying garbage for the opponent, but are much trickier to set up, since the spatial reasoning to recognize "when I make this disappear, that'll cause this other set to disappear, and also this other set" is very different than just "put five red in a row" haha). There's a nice "Mimic Mansion" in-game that lets you practice these.
I'm now able to reliably set up 2-part chains, sometimes set up 3-part chains, can luck my way into larger chains sometimes, and can often respond to opponent's attacks with pretty quick chain setups. (When you make garbage disappear, there's a lag between "new blocks appear" and "blocks fall"; if you're really fast with your fingers, that means you can turn their attack right back against them with a giant chain!)
***
It is interesting being able to "feel" yourself getting better at a skill. When I did my most recent run through Hard mode, while not having to use any Continues was obviously a hint that I'm getting better (my first run I probably used ~30 Continues), the really nice bit was getting feelings while playing like "oh, I should play more defensively for a moment," "okay, time to go back on the attack," and also just feeling like I had much greater control over the combos & chains I was choosing to execute, where previously I'd just been mashing together what jumped out to me as fast as humanly possible.
It's a little like what I imagine getting good at speed chess might be like? (That comparison is imperfect because speed chess players have to have such an incredibly deep foundation in conventional chess strategy to start with, and build their quick pattern-recognition on top of that foundation, but, eh.)
***
An annoying thing, though, is that unlike chess, there's an irreducible element of randomness, which makes it impossible to figure out whether any specific victory was a result of Actually Getting Better or more due to luck. I managed to get through Hard mode the first time by just spamming a lot of Continues, and while some of my victories felt legit, some seemed way too fast, like, 15 seconds in and the computer spazzes with what should be a pretty easy clear? (According to this random reddit comment, it's a known AI glitch, so, well, there goes what felt like victory, haha.)
If I keep up with this I should probably go back to Marathon mode and play on Easy, and just try to execute as long of chains as possible, over and over, until I'm able to pull of 4 or 5 chains reliably? (I lose the benefit of getting to respond to attacks, which is a real skill, but it's the only real "controlled" practice environment the game offers, so.)
All that practice sounds a little grind-y and thus may not happen at all, haha. Rote practice is boring! And unfortunately often necessary!
...on the other hand this game is fun as heck so, we'll see. (I was like "there's a tournament every year at Magfest, maybe I'll throw my hat in the ring," but then I checked out a round from said tournament and holy shit. Those dudes are crazy good. What even.)
Well, I had a hell of a test of that earlier this week, when a little puddle-jumper of a flight wound up going through some serious thunderstorms—no beverage service, repeated intercom appeals to ensure all seatbelts are fastened, and the whole plane getting tossed and turned every which way like a damn McSalad Shaker.
And the only thing that kept me from full-on freaking out in the cabin... was having Pokémon Puzzle League in my hands the whole time.
See, I've been grinding that game's 1-player campaign on Very Hard mode, which, as you might expect, is very hard. The whole last 30 minutes of the flight was just me playing against Team Rocket, over and over, and losing every time, but relishing the moments when I was able to hang on a little bit longer or put a little more pressure on them, and also, I had the absolutely certain knowledge that if I looked away for even a few seconds, I would lose immediately. No thoughts, just pure focus on the little blocks on my screen.
So, yeah. New lay anxiety treatment: crank up the difficulty on your favorite reflex-heavy puzzle game to the max and you'll be so stressed by the game you can't be stressed by anything else :D;;;;;
Pokémon Puzzle League, for those unfamiliar, is a Pokémon-flavored reskin of Tetris Attack, released on the Nintendo 64 in 2000 (which is when I first played it), and re-released on Nintendo Switch Online just last year (which is how I'm playing it now).
(And apparently Tetris Attack is itself a reskin of Panel de Pon, a game I'd never heard of until I started looking up strategies for this game—more on that later!)
The general schtick is that there's a bunch of colored blocks on the screen, and you can swap any two horizontally adjacent blocks with a press of a button. Put three blocks of the same color in a row and they'll disappear. Put more than three together, and they'll disappear and throw garbage onto your opponent's screen (which they can only get rid of by disappearing blocks adjacent toe the garbage). If your blocks + garbage touch the top of the screen, it's game over.
I was able to blunder through a Hard campaign without knowing anything much more sophisticated than that...which unlocked Very Hard mode, and holy hell? I definitely don't remember doing anything this hard when I played it as a kid???
I took a step back to figure out how to deliberately set up chains (a type of attack where, once you make some blocks disappear, the blocks above falling causes another set of blocks to disappear... they cause more annoying garbage for the opponent, but are much trickier to set up, since the spatial reasoning to recognize "when I make this disappear, that'll cause this other set to disappear, and also this other set" is very different than just "put five red in a row" haha). There's a nice "Mimic Mansion" in-game that lets you practice these.
I'm now able to reliably set up 2-part chains, sometimes set up 3-part chains, can luck my way into larger chains sometimes, and can often respond to opponent's attacks with pretty quick chain setups. (When you make garbage disappear, there's a lag between "new blocks appear" and "blocks fall"; if you're really fast with your fingers, that means you can turn their attack right back against them with a giant chain!)
It is interesting being able to "feel" yourself getting better at a skill. When I did my most recent run through Hard mode, while not having to use any Continues was obviously a hint that I'm getting better (my first run I probably used ~30 Continues), the really nice bit was getting feelings while playing like "oh, I should play more defensively for a moment," "okay, time to go back on the attack," and also just feeling like I had much greater control over the combos & chains I was choosing to execute, where previously I'd just been mashing together what jumped out to me as fast as humanly possible.
It's a little like what I imagine getting good at speed chess might be like? (That comparison is imperfect because speed chess players have to have such an incredibly deep foundation in conventional chess strategy to start with, and build their quick pattern-recognition on top of that foundation, but, eh.)
An annoying thing, though, is that unlike chess, there's an irreducible element of randomness, which makes it impossible to figure out whether any specific victory was a result of Actually Getting Better or more due to luck. I managed to get through Hard mode the first time by just spamming a lot of Continues, and while some of my victories felt legit, some seemed way too fast, like, 15 seconds in and the computer spazzes with what should be a pretty easy clear? (According to this random reddit comment, it's a known AI glitch, so, well, there goes what felt like victory, haha.)
If I keep up with this I should probably go back to Marathon mode and play on Easy, and just try to execute as long of chains as possible, over and over, until I'm able to pull of 4 or 5 chains reliably? (I lose the benefit of getting to respond to attacks, which is a real skill, but it's the only real "controlled" practice environment the game offers, so.)
All that practice sounds a little grind-y and thus may not happen at all, haha. Rote practice is boring! And unfortunately often necessary!
...on the other hand this game is fun as heck so, we'll see. (I was like "there's a tournament every year at Magfest, maybe I'll throw my hat in the ring," but then I checked out a round from said tournament and holy shit. Those dudes are crazy good. What even.)
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It's a GREAT game to feel yourself getting incrementally better at. The main skill for the game is pattern recognition, so I think despite the randomness any given victory is fairly likely to be due to skill. There's so MUCH randomness in the game that I think it's pretty hard to actually get a string of RNG that genuinely screws you over, and getting better at the game largely involves being able to take advantage of what you're presented with. That also means I'm not sure how useful practice in controlled conditions actually is for this specific game.
Panel de Pon is also on Switch Online so sometimes I play it when I need a break from working l0l.
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and yeah, it's not that i've ever felt screwed over by the RNG, so much as, sometimes i do a combo next to some trash, and the falling blocks cause, like, a 5x chain, and it feels like i only did enough work, personally, to account for like 1 part of that chain? :D;;; so it feels a little like i didn't "earn" that chain, even if that's just the way the rng falls, lol. (though i have been wondering/experimenting with if there's "heuristics" that you can set up even if you're not seeing really deep chains yet... e.g. "try to keep as many vertical two-color pairs at the top as possible, b/c then you're in a better position to chain off of falling blocks" or whatever
i did NOT know the og panel de pon was also on switch online! i may give it a whirl, it'd be fun to see if there's any differences!
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Kid!me never got the hang of chains longer than 2 or 3, so all this strategy and meta stuff is super interesting!
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anyway, I'll be looking forward to when you get to the later high-difficulty battles and experience firsthand the terror that can be inspired by consecutive Dewgong noises
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SO YEAH I AM HAVING FUN BEING A N00B :P
dewgong. oh god. that nidoqueen's already making me break out in hives ngl
(did you ever beat mewtwo on very hard / give super hard a shake???)
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(plus I can't say I pulled it off first try when I did pull it off either-)
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