Spot -- AI vs. AI
0So this last bit could be completely skipped if you were so inclined, because it's pretty much just for my own interests and amusement that I determine how the AI works against itself. Be glad, I could've stretched things out for curiosity's sake to almost an hour of me watching the AI for weirdo nuances...and indeed I did, but visually it proved to fall into some pretty disappointing patterns and even where there was variation, it was a little more disappointing than it was interesting.
For starters, as I pointed out earlier...the AI is much better at being led than it is at leading. Which makes it a really weird balancing act of neither of our esteemed performers wanting to make certain moves until the other has already gone and done something to create a significant enough opening for the other to be tempted enough to exploit.
That said, while they're waiting, they have a really funny way of showing indecision. It also comes up, albeit far less often, when it has an opening that only happens to "break even" on its logical scales, thereby making it just as acceptable as any ol' random move. So if you want to know if you've got the AI frazzled, just look out for moves that you can't even fathom how they seemed like a good idea. And I don't mean like making a clone with no captures instead of jumping into a five-piece conversion...I mean more like...a jump into the middle of nowhere or a single piece takeover. Because in those situations, even a plain ol' clone will be a turn better spent. (There are some rather rare and way late endgame situations that will make that generalization untrue, though.)
One of the cases that comes up that should definitely be noted, although also one that seems to be generated specifically by the haphazard finickiness of the computer player stylings is the situation of two adjacent blank spaces within a mass of player pieces. If you fall into the temptation to cram a piece of yours into one of the vacancies, you'll find a staggering number of captures ensue... but you'll also pretty much guarantee that the other player will have an even more lucrative gain upon filling the other one, often a case within cloning distance, too.
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My color selection this time is the only preprogrammed palette in the Game Boy Color repertoire that works on the premise of negated black and white. It makes the title screen look pretty awful, but the game screen looks almost like it could've been intended to look like such.
I recall back in the days of the Super Game Boy, one of my favorite ways to customize the palette would be to set three of the four choices to a solid color and have the fourth color, the one for sprite outlines set in contrast. This would commonly be black and white... or really any color on black. It made for a rather striking visual. Of course, it obviously wouldn't work on a game like this.
Anyway, that's it! The game that is Spot has pretty much run its course, even if it did take a rather significant hiatus before I got around to the finishing touches. Still, I gather from the initial view counts that it's not the kind of game that makes people hang on the edge of their seats, so I figure nobody who really enjoys it later on will mind that it wasn't all available at once.
You hear that? This was for you, description-reading individual who made it to the last installment and the bottom of the description field. Pat yourself on the back and accept my ...questioning of your mental stability.