The Impossible Dream

Once upon a time, long ago, in fifth or sixth grade, I sang the song "The Impossible Dream" in my elementary school choir, at Del Rey Elementary School.  They sent everyone to the choir teacher to audition, essentially, and I guess I could hit enough notes.  A couple of years later, I might have recognized it as a chance to spend time with a lot of girls, but elementary school was too early for that.

Anyway, this post is not about singing.  It's about a video game.  The game is called Zuma's Revenge, and The Impossible Dream is a reference to trying to beat one of the modes of Zuma's Revenge, the mode called Iron Frog.  This is my current quest.  I can remember at least a couple of other times that I set out to beat a game that seemed almost unconquerable at first:  the time I played through 199 of 200 levels of a game called Lode Runner one night, or the time I played to the tenth level of the old Microsoft pinball game, or maybe when I solved Rubic's Cube.  I guess I like the challenge.

So Iron Frog is really a silly, simple, weirdly addicting game.  Jackie started playing it a lot (unusual for her), and I played a little and decided it wasn't worth it, but then I went back and got hooked.  The main idea is to shoot balls out of a frog's mouth and match up the colors to make them disappear, eventually making them all disappear before they go down the drain and you lose.  Sounds silly, looks foolish, but in concept it's not all that different from some of the old shooter games like Asteroids, Space Invaders, or Blazing Lazers, which my brother and I used to play on the old Turbo Grafx system.  (Actually, it's too bad most people don't know about Blazing Lazers, because it's a good analogy.)

Zuma's Revenge has four modes.  The first is Adventure mode.  You play through 60 levels, beat six bosses, with some little wrinkles at the end, and you win.  Beating adventure opens up the other three modes.  Second is Challenge mode, which I don't care for, so enough about that.  Third is Heroic Frog, which is Adventure only harder.  The saving grace in Heroic Frog mode (and Adventure) is that it saves your progress every five levels, so you only have to beat each group of five levels one time, and you can eventually win.  And then there is Iron Frog.

The trick with Iron Frog is that you have to beat ten levels in a row to win, without a single loss, without saving your progress, always starting from level one.  Some of the ten levels are easy, at least now that I have spent around 120 hours playing this game, but easy does not mean trivial.  I can still lose on any level.  Math says that even if I could beat each level 90% of the time, which I cannot even on the "easy" levels, I could only win about a third of the time.  In truth, I have a lot of trouble with level 4, and I hardly ever beat level 6, so in reality I have played this mode 169 times and made it past level 6 only three times.  See what I mean about the impossible dream?

However, by coincidence (because I was going to write this post anyway), I made it past level 6 for the third time this morning, beat level 7 for the first time, beat level 8 the first time I ever played it, and died on level 9.  The Internet says level 9 is definitely the hardest, so I still have a long ways to go, but the impossible dream does not seem quite so impossible now.