
One Player's Quest to Beat the Seemingly Endless 'Desert Golf' - joshwa
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a3nnv4/one-players-21000-hole-quest-to-beat-the-seemingly-endless-desert-golf
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oneeyedpigeon
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)

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ghostbrainalpha
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?

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oneeyedpigeon
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.

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tromp
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...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%27Desert+Golf%27&atb=v83-1__&ia=videos&iax=videos&iai=R2TQcFk52JU)

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

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doodpants
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](https://karlvonl.livejournal.com/8174.html)

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

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doodpants
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.

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Jare
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.

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erikb
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.

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schnevets
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.

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

~~~
J5892
Much like the mother-focused offshoot of Vice, Vice Baby.

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

[https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways](https://captaingames.itch.io/freeways)

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teh_klev
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/](https://dinopoloclub.com/minimetro/)

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m_st
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.

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

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

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erikb
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.

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coldcode
I wonder how much the author earned from this game.

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corpMaverick
The question is how to detect an impossible game ?

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CobrastanJorji
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.

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Simon_says
What an utterly bizarre hobby.

~~~
sbergot
[https://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-vii-player-hits-
level-99-in...](https://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-vii-player-hits-level-99-in-
the-first-rea-1794171766)

~~~
nsebban
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.

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

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codeulike
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.

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Simon_says
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.

