hacker.org

Are we actually supposed to play these by hand?! I was thinking that you might have to automate them, but they're under "Misc".

They're pretty damn hard

The challenges are beatable

Which challenge did you beat to get to breakout extreme?

So, did you actually do it, or did you write a program?

It comes after Lazy Maze.

there are a lot of different ways to solve these, i think. i can think of at least four approaches. i made these two, and bok has solved both, incidentally. definitely doable =)

adum

You could play those by hand if you've got very good hand-eye coordination and a lot of patience. However, I recommend to lazy people, like myself, to find a way to 'cheat' the game. There are several ways to do that. Looking at which language the game is implemented in might help you figure out which tools could help you do that.

Mhmm... I figured out plain Breakout shortly after adum's post. Its just a matter of sitting down and trying to figure out x-treme

Ah, I got the X-treme version!

Even though I've ported stuff from Java, I've never gotten around to actually learning it. Fun challenge, even though my solution was pretty WTF-y

Mhhpf I disassembled it, but I couldn't find the password (generation) so I'm playing by hand now and waiting to reach the end of the game. I'm now at level 12, if I fail, I'll ' prog a Bot^^

I played breakout and breakout extreme. Although, I wasn't able to beat the last level of breakout extreme. I just guessed for the last letter for that answer

Its possible to play them, but might be easier (if you know how) to disassemble and change the game to be very easy to beat, or discover the answer itself.

...I´ve played that game until I got bored... and now I´ve got 11 characters in the "The answer is:'xxxxxxxxxxx" inline print. Then I´ve disassembled the whole thing and searched in there for at least 5 different things. I´ve resized the complete applet and just can´t figure out how that "misc"-!"§!"§$!% works...

Thanks for any furthere hint... please... I´m frustrated... ^^

Kjellski

I guess it is too much information how many lvls this "game" has right?

And btw. I personally think the category is a bit confusing...

Greetz,
Kjellski

I would second that, if there would be just 3 or 4 levels. But try to calculate the possible solutions! The web server prevents you from trying too many times in a row and adds delays between the tries. So it's okay (well; possible) to guess the last one character (this is what I did after playing most of the levels). You won't get lucky trying more than 2 characters

I can't get past level 1 in Breakout because the applet freezes after I finish it. It shows "Level 2" and "Lifes Left: 4" but no blocks are displayed nor does pressing any keys have an effect. Is this part of the challenge, or is there a bug in the applet or my browser installation?

Both challenges were working when I solved them (well, actually, I played them).
I checked Breakout Extreme a few moments ago and reached level 2 without problems.

'Breakout' just froze at Level 5, when I was zapping away at the stones with the Gun extra. Are we sure that the game is not buggy? Since I don't seem to be the first person for whom the game crashed.

Great, and now it resets to Level 1

EDIT: Yes, the game is definitely buggy. Just now I was on Level 8 and had the Sticky Paddle extra, I was at the very left of the screen and the ball was on the left of my paddle - and then it vanished completely. I also did not lose a life, but I cannot continue in this level - no new ball would appear, even though I have lives left.

I appreciate that you are giving us all these challenges, but when you already did not have to program the game itself (because you used Sean Bridges's sourcecode), you could at least have put some honest effort into testing it. I know that there are other ways to get the solution, but still: This sucks.