Game:

Art of Balance (2010)

Duration: 5:38

475 views

36

Hello guys, it's been a minute! Here to upload something completely random, so if you'll humour me, allow me to provide a little bit of context:

I have been completely away from youtube for the past half a year, because I turned 18 with not much going on, I got a full time job, and I'm training in grounds maintenance now! It's a pretty good progression for me, I'm enjoying the work, and it gives me the freedom to save, do what I want, and see my girlfriend whenever I please (Love you, angel!) Due to that, however.. Being completely transparent, my hands have regressed to the point where playing games like GD, or rhythm games, are impossible now, I haven't even downloaded Geometry Dash 2.2 yet, crazy right?

However, through my time off through the weeks that have passed, myself and my dad have been playing this obscure game released to the WiiU ages ago, called the Art of Balance, because we have been eyeing the infinity mode in the game for literal years, our first time playing the game was likely around 2017-2018, and it started by trying to get an in-game trophy with the goal of getting 250,000 points in the infinity mode in a single attempt, but after that, what would come of the mode? Well, every player's best ever score would be documented on an in-game leaderboard, and in 2017, I remember the absolute highest score being held by BingoTruck 20, at around 374,000 points back then. My dad and I at that point weren't talking all that much, I was struggling to get on with school, and he was working ridiculous hours to provide for me and my siblings, but as I turned 18, with complete boredom, while waiting for Gran Turismo 7 to redownload on our new PS5, we decided to open up the game for the first time in 6 years, right around christmas 2023. We came back to see the new leaderboard, with Bingotruck's new highscore clocking over 500,000 points, and someone else above that!

My dad and I, out of curiosity, started innovating new strategies from scratch, since there is almost no footage of the game's infinity mode anywhere, everyone seemed to be safeguarding these incredible highscores, and so there was no blueprint for a world record attempt, or even a score much better than 250,000 points, but we got back into it; our old high score from 2017 was right around 300,000, which was a great score for the time, but in a more competitive 2023, that score had fallen right down the leaderboard. We started climbing, however, getting highscore after highscore, chipping away at the 200,000 point gap from our past to the idolised future, and I want to iterate, the goal was not to be #1 in the world, at this point, my dad and I just wondered if it'd be possible to get a 400,000+ score, or maybe even a 500k with an absolutely perfect setup, and as the 400k came in January 2024, we had our sights set on the half a million pinnacle..

This is where we hit a 3-month deadzone with the game, although we were getting some small new PB's, going from 410,000, to 420,000, and so forth, the increments were slowing down, as was the rate of these PB's being achieved, and at the very end of february, my dad clocked an incredible 489,350 points, putting him at #3 on the global leaderboard, but.. he had an absolutely incredible run, with luck that he didn't know if he could ever replicate, and the record stood, bound by the parameters of the game.

Just to give a little bit of insight to the game without going too in-depth (I'll be saving that for another video entirely), the goal of these attempts is to get as high a multiplier as possible (by having as many concurrent shapes on screen as possible), and then hold that multiplier for as long as possible until getting to 50 shapes; this is a weird parameter of all attempts in the game, but the infinity mode has a bizarre mechanic of almost ALWAYS crashing at 50 shapes, for the past 6 years my dad and I have known this, and so before now we've always planned to get to around 45 shapes, and then start breaking apart our structure to squeeze as much value from our attempt at possible to prevent the crash, and then ending the run at around 47-49 shapes to be safe.

However, this go disproved that notion in a really bizarre way; my dad and I decided to start playing the game together, with a controller each, and somehow, we got to 54 shapes without even realising it, something is different about the game's co-op mode that allows the player to go beyond 50 shapes on rare occasions (we suspect without much proof that it might have something to do with us coordinating placements at the exact same time), and that alongside a very solid, albeit boisterous attempt, led to us breaking the boundary of possibility that we had been questioning for so long, we had finally done it.

I'm running out of characters for this description, but simply put, I'll be doing one more video on this game to serve as the blueprint that me and my dad have developed. I want to push this game to a new standard. :)

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