I don't see why Kongregate hasn't released anything like this themselves. It's pretty obvious that they use a similar method for assigning Badges of the Day.
Here's a suggestion for preventing super-luck combos. When the number of tiles cleared as a result of a single swap goes above 4, blank tiles will start dropping in (one blank tile for 5 cleared tiles, a second for 9 cleared tile, a third for 12, a fourth for 14, and then one blank tile for every tile cleared). These blank tiles cannot create matches, and will remain on the board until the opposing player's turn. When control switches to the other player, the blank tiles will transform into regular tiles without creating matches, using a similar method to generating tiles on a reshuffled board.
@sordid1975 He totally does. I wasn't going to comment on it, until I saw that the ending was him flying off with the lake lady... while his family mourns him. "Well you know what they say, honey, 'till death do us part.' Later!"
I can't say that this game really lives up to the hype. I was expecting a tower defense where shooting or destroying notes was responsible for making music. All this amounts to is a standard tower-defense game with a music skin and a metronome.
Slain087: Outside of the whole number battle thing, not really. The absence of the Same and Plus rules take away quite a bit of strategy. (I'm part of the minority that actually loves those rules.)
Guys, the only reason any of you are having trouble playing this game is because you're playing it the way the developer expects you to. It's easy to get a ridiculously high multiplier in this game. All you have to do is pick the one game you're best at (for me, it's the "avoid 3 green bouncing balls" stage), and focus all your survival efforts entirely on that one game. If any of the other 15 games come up, just let it fail. Eventually, only the one game will remain, and you can continue to play that one game skillfully for as long as your patience allows. I managed to get a x10.8 multiplier in this way (or, I should say, a "x10." multiplier, since the counter that shows up during the game cuts off on the right. The developer clearly did not foresee this exploit.)
Okay. There is a way to cheat at this game, but as far as I'm concerned, it's necessary. In order to compensate for the lack of steering you get once you reach full size, use the space bar to open the pause menu. The whale will instantly lose all current momentum, and usually (though not always) it will continue turning towards the cursor for about half a second. If you place the cursor behind the whale, pause long enough to let it turn around, and resume, you can pull off hairpin turns. Hope this helps.
Here's a suggestion if you ever make a sequel: Use super-high resolution photos (like 3000 pixels each side). Since the puzzle is going to be several times smaller, instead of the pieces squashing and stretching, they'll instead squash too much or squash not enough. This will prevent misplaced pieces from giving themselves away by being visibly distorted.
While this game is pretty enjoyable, I have to admit that I'm also getting frustrated by the significant amount of lag. While I hardly ever encounter an issue with jumping, many times the game will too late in registering when I let go of a key, causing some of my jumps to go way too wide. Sure, a lot of the time, when I die, I know it's my fault, but sometimes I can tell that Mr. Runner is still moving full speed in a direction for about half a second after releasing the key. Needless to say, the deaths that aren't my fault are always the most frustrating. And then there's the fact that the game will frequently hang on a frame for a brief moment, which messes with my reaction time. All in all, it's a good game, but it suffers from some non-negligible performance issues.
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