Zeta Flow

Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking when they create levels.

This sweet spot took me about 20 tries to find:

ultimate match: red ship vs gunmaster 6000


This level is ludicrous, but it can be beaten. You just have to be careful clearing out a few guns and rocket launchers prior to sitting in that spot, killing random rockets, and blasting the core to bits.

I ended up having to kill 7 spread shots and 2 rocket launchers to get into the sweet spot. Everything else that ended up destroyed was only destroyed due to killing rockets as incidental fire.

My guess is that some of the people who make these levels really to make a good level but don't really know how. I can sympathize with that; good design takes a lot of thought. I'm also pretty sure that some other people are purposely trying to make impossible levels, for whatever reason. Most of those aren't particularly well designed, like this one, and aren't really impossible. I guess maybe some of these designers might be smarter than I give them credit for; maybe they actually mean to make a level that's really challenging but still playable, but just don't have a very good design sense. But that's a little hard to believe, considering how often we see levels like this.

The levels that really boggle my mind are the ones where somebody puts a lot of thought into a level that is truly impossible; take those three "U are a n00b and I am SO K3WL" levels you mentioned in Sunday's 12 o'clock shuffle. Why in the world would someone put that much work into something that most players are only going to see for a few seconds before they die? Do they really think people are going to keep coming back to a level like that? I'm even more puzzled because Jan Einar has made some pretty good levels in the past. (Though it's kind of funny that all ten of his levels named "unkillable" have a non-zero success rate.)

Back to this one, though. I usually don't bother playing spreader levels like this. The only trick is to find or make a sweet spot, which can be a bit of a challenge, but then they become totally boring; you might as well just lock your mouse button down and go get coffee or something. After seeing your post I went back to it and beat it, though I ended up killing a lot more of it before I locked my mouse.