No tickets, but a hell of an effort. My plan was to do this in the week between Christmas and New Years with a little careful planning... but it took over 3 months. The acceleration at the end was planned but came from the fact that after I'd worked out a good method I often didn't play it (especially when I was a long way down). Basically this meant I invested a lot early and also focused on levels where I'd gain few points, but they'd be very hard to take back in a hurry. In the past I've targeted quick gains for a jump and grab plan to get number one but it didn't last long.

And I must say i took a lot of patience since it was very tempting to play "easy" levels where I knew I could gain points so I could visually see reward for effort. Some other strategies were to first expose taking level sets that seb was not on! For example taking Tropical early (which would have been very very hard anyway) could have sparked a new flurry of game play from asarkila, seb and DREAM ... and may have meant it was impossible for me to take or hold the number one ranking (or at least I'd need to focus on that set and have no time or energy to climb in others).

And along the way I have notes. Many notes. I now have a source repository with notes on each level across all level sets (missing a few in sets 5 and 6). It also contains all recorded games associated with those notes; variations on what did and din't work, recordings of each, score and yam information, and the keys for achieving a higher score or faster time for that level. The summaries of these still show 4 levels on tropical, 4 on reef, 5 on mountains and 4 on farmlands for which I have methods I haven't executed yet. Based on my final fling yesterday these were the hardest to get... and I did settle for 2nd place a few times yesterday with the aim to achieve what I set out to do, but wasn't sure if I could. Still, done now. And you can ask asarkila how paranoid I was about the tickets he held! As for me I checked in the ticket with a few minutes of getting each score only playing offline for latency reasons.

Almost patient enough: Well I did make a mistake on level sets 5 and 6 which should have been easy to achieve number 1. Asarkila saw me take these too early and discovered there was some untapped fun and challenge there. Originally I had not planned to take these (they don't count right) but the page you have linked to just wouldn't look right.

Along the way it's been fun, but I am completely spent. I've also worked out quite a few basic methods and still think that bd4 is mostly about experience. Well, other than reaction time and ability to be brave and take on luck. Oh, the other strategy was to take levels involving luck early one before you guys noticed what I was doing. And doing this just after asarkila became a father was bound to give me a little more chance/time. Still, I did managed win a rogaine, not sacrifice work and get engaged during the period.

It won't last but it is done. It may be fun to see how badly I defend the position, but at least I now knew I've played every level in every level set, so anyone who knocks me off a level set is clearly the number one (well, except for farmland, forest and possibly mountains and fruity were the levels have not been played so competively).

Now it's time to get bd4 back in order. I've just converted the highly procedural main loop of bd4 into a object orientated structure in Java which will allow more easily changing it and adding the new objects. That version will have the editor attached and make for a more integrated web site (edit, play in browser, one click to play on local version, etc). More in other forums as that happens!

And finally, the page as it currently exists, well the important part of it.

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