Game:

Frenzy (1984)

Duration: 8:57

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11

In this video I take a break from Repton and revisit another childhood memory by completing all fourteen unique levels of the game Frenzy. (It turns out that after Level 14, the last two levels repeat indefinitely.)

This was a great family favourite when I was young; it was actually my mother who got furthest with it, and was the only one of us ever to encounter the legendary Level 12. Little did any of us realise just how close to the end of the game that was! Back then we all played the "slow way", gradually building up a scaffolding so as to transform the dart's area into an irregular shape and so trap it more easily. However, the fact that you start each level in the exact middle of one side does lend itself rather well to the faster method I use in this video to get through the game within ten minutes.

The movement of the darts is entirely deterministic; just unpredictable because usually the boxes you make, and even the position of the player's paddle, vary each time you play a level. However, if you play the same level repeatedly, you can discover particular patterns of boxes you can create that force the darts into a favourable formation. This is how I manage to trap four on one side in Levels 8 and 13.

At the end I deliberately lost my lives as I was curious to see whether the high score table would register that my score was actually over a million even though only six figures were displayed. It did.

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