Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Doodle Me This

     As many of you know, Google frequently changes its logo on its home page.  Generally, these changes correspond to an occasion, holiday, anniversary, or other event.  I even accidentally adopted this style when I started changing the logo for my store, Booknotes, for its indoor display.  (I used other web browsers back before I went with Google.). I still do so for my "Making the Video" series on YouTube and elsewhere.  For the current Tokyo Olympic Games, Google did more than just a cute logo.  They had a link to a series of mini-games based around characters and figures from Japanese folklore and mythology, not to mention tropes from anime and manga as well.  Each of the seven mini-games was based on a different sport:  skateboarding, synchronized swimming, archery, rock climbing, table tennis, rugby, and a marathon (although the in-game length was closer to 500 to 1,000 meters). I found skateboarding to be the easiest one; all I had to do was randomly push buttons in a pattern to win.  The synchronized swimming was a rhythm button-pushing game similar to Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution pushing the buttons in time to the prompts and music.  I didn't play with the sound one, so I found this one a little harder to beat.  It wound up being the next-to-last one I won on.  Archery was mostly shooting at moving targets while the opponent did the same for right behind you.  Not that hard, but not easy either.  Took me a few tries.  Table tennis was basically moving to where the ball would be and timing the return.  That is until your opponent started shooting multiple balls, up to at least four at a time.  Still found a way to win.  For rugby, you were put on a team trying to get the ball to the other end of the field without the other team taking the ball back.  The other team were oni, ogre-demons from myth.  At least there were power-ups to help you out, such as super-speed or invisibility.  They were crucial for winning.  The marathon was just staying on track an avoiding the random sea creatures that would be crawling on the beach course.  This one took a few tries to, but I won.  I found rock-climbing to be the hardest.  You had one minute and twenty-nine seconds to reach the top of the mountain, while dodging snowballs being thrown down on you, while jumping from three types of handholds (stabile red, moving blue, and unstable green that would fade after a few seconds after being grabbed).  It took me multiple tries before I beat this one, and I had already finished all the side-quests as well.  See, this was also a mini-RPG where one earned trophies for various accomplishment.  Five of them opened up more difficult versions of the mini-games.  I didn't even know that there were trophies until a searched online for tips in beating the games.  I then unlocked the trophy house and found out that I was over halfway to finding them all.  The final trophy was to find the previous trophy-master.  It turned out the it was the mascot for a previous doodle game Google had done.  The mascot was playing the current "Doodle Island Champion" game that you were actually playing.  Turns out the mascot had played the original game as well, meaning that each one was playing as the other online at the same time.  Yeah, very meta of Google.  After finishing, I posted my accomplishment of Facebook.  Unfortunately, the game was taken down a few hours later, before I cold see if anyone in my social group were playing it too.  Before it was taken down, it looked like team red was winning.  I was team blue, of course.  I managed to go over the entire game, except for the team headquarters for the other three teams.  Supposedly, each team experienced minor changes in gameplay, but none that would have effected how to win the overall game.  Now I wonder, what will Google do next, and why they didn't keep the game up for more than a week?

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