Spot -- Options, Level 2
0So I guess suffice to say that I didn't quite get my fill of this game in just one part, and for that matter I felt quite unsatisfied with what little I could summarize about it in a single scant serving of under 5,000 characters.
I mean, that's kinda how puzzles and board games are, right? You have simple enough rules forming the baseline scenario and lets players know how and what they can do...but the real draw behind them is the complexity that just rather runs wild when the free radicals of player actions and interactions and counteractions and all that good stuff.
But of course I'm getting just a tad ahead of myself...
Anyway, I decided to give a brief look into the options menu, which is...really extremely simplistic, only basically leaving you the choice of opponent difficulty (either can be set to Human or levels 1 through 5) and an optional move timer. I set it to 5 seconds on the AI player just because I knew it wouldn't have an impact...but it's just a little extra thing that it doesn't hurt to show off.
Five seconds is a bit short for a player to fumble across the board at the game's more complex stages, so I wouldn't really recommend the minimum...and the game doesn't take all that long to play even if both players are thinking humans with unlimited time, so I probably won't use it again.
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The game is quite simple...though not incredibly so, as there's a little room for confusion (and maybe even a little optical illusion as you adjust to the paradigm) as to the basic movement, particularly when it comes to visualizing diagonals and orthogonals being considered equal in terms of distances, but the patterns and tactics that emerge are rather decidedly complex because of all that freedom you get to enjoy on account of having up to 24 moves each (8 clone targets and 16 jump targets), although obviously it's very unlikely that any single piece will have its full gamut of possible moves left entirely unobstructed.
At its core, the game has a finite limitation placed upon how long it can continue, because an empty space on the board is consumed every time a clone move takes place, and there are only 49 spaces on the board, minus the initial four already occupied at the start. It's highly unlikely that the game will actually end in only 45 moves, but it's also highly unlikely that players won't want to clone whenever possible, if only for the sake of picking up that one "free" extra space under their control while taking over whatever pieces they can in the process.
Anyway, I'm not really an exceptional player at this game...particularly because it's been years since I've played it at all. But it would be accurate to say that it's had a profound influence on my thoughts about head-to-head puzzle, board, and strategy games ever since.
That said, I can still recognize patterns and choose moves that seem like the best I can make...at least at the time, anyway. It would be safe to say that I make gut impulse plays a little too often and it's not like there's any danger that a single game would take anywhere near fifteen minutes if I just took a moment every so often to think through my moves a little more here and there. Although I will say I'm a little surprised that it took even six for a relatively simple game.
The Level 2 AI managed to push me hard enough that I had to play a bit more conservatively than last time, and I really wasn't sure if it was going to give up any ground after I managed to make a few costly mistakes along the way.
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In this case, I used the Game Boy Color's palette that's entirely gray monochrome. In theory, it's exactly like playing on the original Game Boy, except without the green-tinted screen...although I guess in that sense, it's exactly like playing on a Game Boy Pocket.
Anyway, it avoids the issue of the layers getting colorized such that they end up with the pieces and player turn indicators don't match...but something feels inherently off-putting about the all-gray appearance. I think in reality, any other color choice for the monochrome would have felt a little better...but I'm not really a designer by any stretch of the imagination except by intuition and personal response, which isn't really going to explain anything. "It feels wrong!" (Enlightening, isn't it?)