Flappy ball.

June 16, 2021 6:33 PM

Dot dot dot is a game of great gravity.
posted by kaibutsu (26 comments total)

Is this the game that hypnotizes us into letting you take over the Enterprise?
posted by Nerd of the North at 6:55 PM on June 16, 2021 [20 favorites]

Well, no comment, except to say that a) this is obviously just a soothing amusement I picked up on Risa, and b) you haven't really LIVED until you've played level 47.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:58 PM on June 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

well this is ENRAGING.
posted by stray at 7:07 PM on June 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

BOING
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:17 PM on June 16, 2021

I just trapped the ball in a cozy nest where it stays still. No more bouncing, just at rest for now until the end of the universe (aka the browser tab closing). Sleep my little ball, sleep. No one can hurt you now.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 7:40 PM on June 16, 2021 [24 favorites]

This is the all-time greatest waiting-for-my-code-to-compile game, ever. Totally engaging, but you can drop it in a second when you need to go respond to something that broke.
posted by The Baffled King at 9:02 PM on June 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
posted by darkstar at 9:05 PM on June 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

I'm on my phone and can't find any rules. How do you level up?
posted by mefireader at 9:23 PM on June 16, 2021

It's abstracted golf. Get the little ball to go over the black hole.
posted by flabdablet at 9:27 PM on June 16, 2021

I think this is really interesting. It took a little while to get the hang of it, but then I thought it was pretty easy up to about level 25. From 25 to about 38 I found it harder and harder to make progress--all those dots started getting in my way--but around 39 or 40 it got easier--there were so many dots that the ball wasn't going to easily fall off the screen, and often there was kind of an open pathway to the exit. I just had to steer the ball to the path. Levels 40-55 were easier than anything that had come before. A couple of times I didn't have to do anything at all. But then around 55 there were so many dots on the screen that the exit was often blocked from most angles, and it got difficult again. I kept making it to 58 and getting a near impossible screen and moving back down a level.

I'm sure this is a wonderful metaphor for something, I just don't know what.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:27 PM on June 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

I’m on my phone and can't find any rules. How do you level up?

You tap the screen to add dots, strategically bouncing the ball into the black hole. When you are successful, you go up a level. When you fail, you go down a level.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:31 PM on June 16, 2021

It is also the same game, but meaningfully different with different input modes. Mouse input vs (woefully inexact) touch input makes a big difference.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:06 PM on June 16, 2021

This sounds like something my uncle who works at Nintendo would say but: I did actually manage to place a ball pixel-perfect dead center of the drop path, and the drop-ball just bounced up and down before coming to a rest on top of the placed ball.

Once I did that, I don't care what the level is: I won.
posted by glonous keming at 10:09 PM on June 16, 2021 [17 favorites]

Yeah, I played on a MacBook with the trackpad. I can imagine it being easier on a haptic screen, but the small screen size is an issue. Maybe something like an iPad Pro is the best of both worlds.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 10:10 PM on June 16, 2021

one element I didn't notice until I was pretty far in is that the number of dots you can place at once goes down. Level 80 and up you can only place one at a time, which isn't too bad given the number of permanent dots on the screen at that point.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:38 AM on June 17, 2021

I'm sure this is a wonderful metaphor for something, I just don't know what.

Scientology.
posted by Nanukthedog at 7:02 AM on June 17, 2021

How do you know what level you're on?
posted by madcaptenor at 7:05 AM on June 17, 2021

Small number top right.
posted by flabdablet at 7:24 AM on June 17, 2021

glonous keming, I did that too, without even meaning to do it. After it happened I tilted my phone to see if the game checked your accelerometer for gravity. It did not.
posted by fedward at 7:30 AM on June 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Interestingly, it uses the size of the browser window, whatever it is, as the play field, but doesn't scale any elements. If the hole's annoyingly near the right edge or bottom, you can expand your window to get some breathing room. Or you can play up to about level 100, and then resize the window to be a lot smaller, and then the next level will be comically crowded (if you have a browser which permits you to make your window really tiny, then a window a few pixels wide and tall will make the game very strange indeed as it tries to cram every element onto such a tiny pane. There's a limit to how high it puts bumpers but not how high it puts the target, so a tiny window will usually win immediately. I set a tiny window to run unattended and it's at level 126 already).
posted by jackbishop at 9:46 AM on June 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Followup: I expanded the window back up at level 565. The next game it gave me was literally impossible, in that there was no path whatsoever from the ball's start point to the target.
posted by jackbishop at 10:00 AM on June 17, 2021

wait... so you are saying that I am handicapping myself by playing this on 7680 x 4320?
posted by Nanukthedog at 10:26 AM on June 17, 2021

Definitely better at this on my phone than on my laptop, although I'm not sure whether that's due to screen size or due to mouse vs fingers. (I guess I should try a small browser window on my laptop to figure that out?)
posted by madcaptenor at 10:32 AM on June 17, 2021

wait... so you are saying that I am handicapping myself by playing this on 7680 x 4320?

Well, a larger window makes it easier, for the most part --- less crowding of the permanent circles, more likelihood that the target isn't really close to an edge --- and up to any reasonable point making the window smaller makes it a lot harder to keep the ball on the screen when you're trying to aim it, but once you go past reasonable and into very short screen sizes as narrow as the target, the rules the game uses for circle and target placement (it looks like the target can only be partially covered by circles) mean that the target is always right where the ball is falling and only fairly extraordinary positions for the other circles prevent the ball from falling right on the target.
posted by jackbishop at 10:43 AM on June 17, 2021

You tap the screen to add dots, strategically bouncing the ball into the black hole. When you are successful, you go up a level. When you fail, you go down a level.

Note that the ball exiting the screen through the bottom or sides counts as failure; the ball going back up through the top edge is not a failure, and it will come back down.
posted by nubs at 11:43 AM on June 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

It gets unsolvable well before level 565. I saw it happen occasionally in the 40s, but I also let a tiny window go for a while and then opened it back up again at 127. The game just can't cope.
posted by fedward at 4:56 PM on June 17, 2021