One Player's Quest to Beat the Seemingly Endless 'Desert Golf' | Hacker News Reader

One Player's Quest to Beat the Seemingly Endless 'Desert Golf'

waypoint.vice.com

67 pointsjoshwa50 comments

It says in the article that he's been playing it for four years and has racked up 300–400 hours game time. That's a bit less than the 'obsessive' realm some people are placing this in, in terms of daily play.

  (400/(4*365*24))*100 =~ 1%

He could easily rack up that game time with about 20 minutes per day. Granted, to do that each and every day for 4 years is still quite some undertaking, but it's not like he's spending every waking hour obsessing over it.

(This only sprang to mind because I instantly compared it to my 160+ hours of game time in Breath of the Wild, a game I've only owned for a couple of months...)

(Edited for formatting of the napkin-math)

I'm currently at 292 hours on "Binding Of Isaac"[1] in a little over 18 months. I'm not sure he counts as "obsessive".

[1] (PC version; I've probably got 100+ hours on the Vita version as well)

Last year, I clocked in at 565 days spent in World of Warcraft (since February 2006). I have since stopped playing that game, unrelated to the time spent. I do not regret a single minute spent playing that game with my friends and family.

WoW always felt more like 1/3 video game 2/3 social network.

Off Topic... but what are you doing in Breath of the Wild?

I thought that game was 50 hours to beat. Are you going for 100% complete, or is the game more difficult game than I realized?

I'm not really going for 100% complete, but I am going for 'complete as much as I possibly can'. From what I've heard, 100% complete would really be a grind, but I'm still totally enjoying taking my time and discovering new things. Some days you want to fight, some you just want to explore the world.

For example, there's an element of the game where you photograph various animals/objects and attempt to collect an example of each and every one. Now and then I take some time out and just roam the landscape, honing my photography skills. The next thing I know it, hours have passed and I'm thinking to myself "what am I actually supposed to be doing again?" It's a game to get lost in, big time.

The game has a lot of content, especially if you're going for 100% completion or get easily sidetracked by open world titles. Those 900 Korok seeds take a while to find, as does getting and upgrading all the armour, completing 120 shrines, plus the Trial of the Sword, Champion's Ballad DLC, about 80 odd sidequests, beating the various overworld bosses (about another 100 or so), getting all the key items and finishing Master Mode. 100% completion could easily be a few hundred hours.

And it only gets more insane if you try self imposed challenges, attempt speedrunning, mess around with glitches or try out various mods for the Wii U version.

Yeah, it's not exactly the longest playtime you can have for a game. I mean, I've personally played Breath of the Wild for more than 500 hours across profiles, and various 3DS games (Luigi's Mansion 2 and the Mario & Luigi titles) for 200+ hours a piece.

And that's still nothing when you consider that many people play your average Pokemon or Animal Crossing game for many hundreds or even thousands of hours, or how long people spend playing MMORPGs or other multiplayer focused titles.

300-400 hours is impressive for a game like this one, but obsessive might be something closer to a World of Warcraft who's played the game for eight hours a day for six years, or someone whose entire YouTube career is based on being really good at a single game (like pannekoek or Stryder7x).

Example of impossible hole, that ultimately gets beaten by sheer persistence and luck:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%27Desert+Golf%27&atb=v83-1__&ia=v...

I remember reading how this hole was impossible to get past some time ago. They eventually did it!

I'm confused. The article says that, before the recent update, hole 14,758 was impossible. But I made it to hole 28,890 before getting stuck in mid-2016. [0] After the update, I resumed playing, and am currently on hole 31,923.

So either I got a different layout for 14,758, or it's not impossible. And obviously, I've also never encountered a level with endless water. Is it possible that the procedural generation is not identical across all devices?

[0] https://karlvonl.livejournal.com/8174.html

I think it's just that every player has different holes - so your 14758 hole was different the the impossible 14758 hole

But I thought that the game was at least intended to have consistent procedural generation across all devices; how else would the author's manual removal of impossible holes work? Or why would certain hole numbers be notorious for being difficult/impossible? All discussion of this game seems based on the assumption of consistency.

My reading is that levels were once randomly generated, but the updates ends this.

The update provides a fixed series of 10k hand-checked levels for everyone to play, regardless of their existing game state, so your game will end after hole 38,890.

It is a beautifully minimalist game. With such an economy of mechanics, features and elements, it can be at the same time relaxing, exciting, frustrating and rewarding. Every now and then there's a "feature" (a cactus, something unique) to remind you that the game could have more, but it doesn't want to.

Honestly, I'm always a little jealous at people who possess that amount of persistence at something. It would probably get boring for me after hole 23.

The most discouraging part is that counter showing every shot you have ever taken. It changes a foolish shot that you can laugh at into another mark on your permanent record.

I wish that the domain summary said 'waypoint.vice.com', since they have a very different style to vanilla Vice.

Much like the mother-focused offshoot of Vice, Vice Baby.

Semi-related, I'd highly recommend the game "Freeways" by the same game author:

https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways

Neat, I've been passively playing this game for the week or so, but I didn't realize it was the same author. I can also give it a strong recommendation.

I haven't played Freeway but it looks like similar'ish to Mini Metro[0] which I've wasted an indecent number of hours playing.

[0]: https://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/

It's impressive how this game spread. I've first read about it in Grubers iPhone X article on daringfireball.net. Then suddenly it was mentioned by xkcd and now appears in other news and finally HN. Great marketing strike. It's also a fine game with a fair price. To be recommended.

It was on three of Giantbomb's guest top 10 GOTY lists of 2014, meaning it was quite popular (at least in some circles) around then. Your explanation might say why it recently resurfaced though.

And as an aside: Patrick Klepek who wrote the article worked at Giantbomb at that time.

I'm not sure I would pay for such a game. There are similar depth but more beautiful games for free.

For those of us who are less informed, could you recommend a couple of them?

Sorry, can't provide more details. My relationship to these kind of games is Ruby Tuesday like, come, have a little fun, go. But usually it's just a few weeks until the next friend suggests such a game. I incorrectly assumed that would be the same for everybody.

I wonder how much the author earned from this game.

The question is how to detect an impossible game ?

I would approach it the opposite way. Create a battery of random shots, pick an "interesting" one using some heuristic, and then put the hole there.

What an utterly bizarre hobby.

Playing a game?

Interesting thought. Yes, to some degree if you play a 150 different games for 10 hours each it actually produces the same amount of community value (zero) and may relax you just as much.

Not sure what you mean here. The guy I replied to said it was a strange hobby. But the article is just about some guy who played a game. And gaming is not a strange hobby at all.

The article is about a guy who played a ridiculous amount of a game that most people wouldn't. And that is what the commenter (not me) considered a weird hobby. Playing the same game over and over. And I thought that was quite simple to see and your reply was a nifty indication that there is not much of a difference between playing 10k hours of one repetitive game or playing 10 hours in 1k different games.

I liked that thought.

Do you not see a difference between how this guy is playing the game and how most people play games? This is veering into 'strange hobby' territory, that's all.

Yes if you want to be reductionist and just call this 'playing a game' then no, 'playing a game' isn't a strange hobby. But that's like calling BASE jumping, 'just jumping in the air.'

Look at the Guinness World Records book, finding strange hobbies to master is a very common hobby.

But he isn't playing it any different. It says in the articled that it took 300 to 400 hours over 4 years and that he played it when he had some minutes to spare, like on a bus or the toilet. That's how most casual games are played.

The only notable here is that the game is seemingly repetitive, but even there each level is different and requires a new way to hit the ball.

People have played Counter Strike on de_dust2 (a specific map) for almost two decades as this point. They play the same map over and over again, is it repetitive? Maybe, but each time there are new people so it makes it a new challenge each time.

People have played solitaire for their whole lives, again the dynamic comes on each "level" (i.e. new shuffle).

I am 100% sure that the play time of these people dwarfs this guys play time many many many times over.

Yet the article states he was only the second person to ever "beat" it. Clearly most people are not nearly as dedicated to beating this game. That is what makes it a strange hobby.

Probably because it is a pretty unknown and niche game (?) that won't grab most peoples attention. I don't think that makes the hobby (gaming) strange though. I wouldn't play most games for minutes, yet people spend years in them.

https://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-vii-player-hits-level-99-in...

The Final Fantasy series has spawned a lot of "stories" like this one over the last 30 years.

A notable one being related to the MMO Final Fantasy XI, with the "Maat's cap" item being created by Square Enix to praise a player who achieved the maximal level on every job available in the game. Which back then needed hundreds of days of slow and frustrating grind.

I've heard of grinding but this is something else entirely.

One detail in the video that amused me: https://youtu.be/APqQo8r-_UQ?t=55m17s

He says he saves multiple times (he mentions that he usually does it "at least three times") which I thought would mean that he uses multiple different saves but instead he seems to only have one single save that he overwrites multiple times. So in the end he just increases the wear of the underlying flash and has no backup. Not to mention that it increases the change of having a save being interrupted in case of power failure. That's bold.

Frankly the fact that he doesn't appear to have even a single backup save on what appears to be an otherwise empty memory card makes me question the authenticity of that whole ordeal. On the other hand I guess I shouldn't presume to understand the mindset of somebody who's willing to go through something like this.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Seems to me like it's trivial to detect that a hole is impossible/really hard.

Right. I don't know how you would write a reasonable procedural generator in the first place without that kind of sanity check.

With that heuristic in place you just generate mostly random stuff and throw out what doesn't work. Writing a generator that works about 99.9% of the time must require painful tweaking.

How is it trivial?

How would you do it then? Run every possible sequence of hits? That's not going to work, too many possibilities. Level 17509 was reckoned to be impossible for a long time but then someone did it.

Actually, I did this for a 3-D minigolf game I made about 20 years ago. The algorithm isn't hard. You have a rather small parameter space of possible hits (direction plus velocity). In my game it was a 3-dimensional parameter space. For his, it would be a 2-dimensional parameter space. The output is the distance from the hole to the ball when it stops moving. This is just a minimization problem. Try a bunch of experiments and refine the better ones. Worked for me.

It is technically true that it's possible there might be a solution that your search won't find. But I never found an example of that occurring for my game. So if you follow this, you may inadvertently throw out a hard level that has a solution, but you'd never present the player with a level that has no solution.

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