Wall of Memes

In the library today. Hope you're doing good on your finals. (It's finals week for most CSU people, but it's the 2nd week of summer school for me.)

Note: Not a viral picture. A better quality image (taken a day later) can be found here.

Calamari Chaos

Calamari Chaos is the name of this week's board. A flip version of the Crossroads board, I start to conclude the levels are more towards showing off artistic style instead of creative ball path design / raising the level cap as well as putting perks from reaching mastery.

Speaking of design, The Long Goodbye is full of it. It's one of my friend's projects btw, I'll put a review of that here when it comes out.

Also, someone forgot to tell the frog that it's a trap...

TIP: Multipliers / Time powerups. (don't use fruit power due to hard to reach) That's it. (I think, for any board, time/multiplier/fruit powers are the only things you'll need for high scores until they introduce epic powers.)*

If you actually look at the image you notice a gap being made on the lower right side... the most effective way to get points. (My high score here with no powers is a bit over 1.2 million.)

Ripple Effects

I managed to finish this semester up with a decent GPA (3.4). After this summer, I will be moving over to grad school.

Board Name: Splish Splash. The board resembles more like a bamboo textured water slide, with a new strat for double gaps. Yes, I am underleveled here.

TIP: People who just pursued mastery might go for cannon balls if multiplier / chrono balls are not available yet. Just make sure you create a hole in just the right place. Additionally, they can also be used to grab fruit in the corners, which is typically covered with two or three layers of balls.

Fun Fact: Post title is called what it is because 'Ripples' is its internal name, and how one of my personal blog backups and posts can change things. An example of my post to one of my friends (and my classmate) eventually propagates over to his tumblr at the time of writing. (link to post)

STC Revisited

#112E: Visit a friend’s house, apartment, or dorm in another city. (Goal Completed - the overnight stay prior to this event)

Event: Spring Training Conference 2011 (STC 2011), North California

If you know what she means, you'll get the general idea of this workshop. *(She's actually referring to the strength of a club relative to its size).

Guess what the icebreaker was called.

I've always thought that the second time at an event is better compared to the first time. I was right for one. Likewise, I am strongly considering going for a committee position in CKI. After all, you only get to live a college experience once.

This year, most if not all of the workshops that I attended were helpful. Scrapbooking workshop was a bit short, but I was given justification on that. (Yes, I am planning to apply for historian for UOP CKI next year. There also might be a newer graphics related project on this blog coming soon.)

Question of the Day: I know quite a few people in my album of my two-day coverage, but only around 61% of them are listed as friends. Should I tag people who are not yet considered friends, or should I delay my album / video postings until I get more confirmed friends?

Results: Album tagging delayed by two days, total of 21 people who I've decided not to tag, 10 tagged with black text*, 20 people tagged normally.

Finally managed to make it to a million...

Finally managed to make it to a million points in Mastery Mode. At this level it's pretty difficult to get this score since you have to rely on no powers and no extra score from critical hits / increased point value of fruit (They're around ~60% of value compared to lvl 80).

In my opinion, I think that being a master just for 'bragging' rights doesn't feel like it's good enough. For most people, there needs to be a good incentive to reset, such as powers usable when you reach certain levels of mastery, because they will be at a huge disadvantage pointwise compared to those who don't reset. After all, if you're a master, shouldn't you have better rewards?

(I'll make my own power: Time Master. Adds 9 seconds per time ball, cost is 10,000 mojo, 12 hour cooldown between uses. Requires 2nd Degree Zuma Master.)

Welcome to the Boneyard

Remember the Aqua board posted a few months back? It looked like an iron frog board. Well this week's board is the real deal. Check back on the aqua board for a few other pointers for this board. And don't get carried away with the curve clears when using sun frog...

If you looked on the Zuma Blitz page (not the app itself) you will notice a free 12-game 24 hour x3 mojo potion for use on May 8 (Sunday).

This will be the last board that I will be on level 80 for a while. At this point I will mastery reset and distribute 20,000 mojo.

By the way I checked my site stats and surprisingly enough searches (99% of the time) lead to either the level up table, the tips page, or the scoring mechanics page. Just saying.

I'm actually looking for a few more unique boards rather than flipped repeats, so...

Question of the Day: If the devs introduce a board with triple rollouts, will you find it too hectic? (Example of such a board)

90 Degrees - 4 Million Score Run

Board: 90 Degree Nightmare (90 Degrees)
Score: 4,094,150 (multiplier / timelord), lvl 80
Specifics: 2,520,320 x45 gaps, 622,200 x7 fruit, extra time 1:28

Notes: In order to save mojo, I decided to ditch out the Epic Fruit powerup. Maybe I should've used it...