Just a heads up that a lot of these will become redundant if the gravity on our planet changes or you go into space. Might not happen anytime soon but it was the first thing that came to mind.

Do love me some puzzles tho.

What if... gravity changes and all the puzzles become even more puzzling eh!?

Think a perplexus puzzle's validity would be the least of my worries.

Well by childhood probably mean tween/teenhood.

Man the crowd is way into this.

Those last puzzles are insane. I'd consider it a life's work being able to do one of those!!!!!

The odd shaped ones seem to be easier. I remember having an irregular shaped puzzle and getting nowhere with it.

davyK wrote:

ShabbyMcCrabby wrote:

Man the crowd is way into this.

I suspect the Japan vs China format is adding spice. There's the Tetris round in the puzzle head thread. The guy playing invisible mode and going for tetrises is pretty impressive.

Makes you wonder though. So many bone headed Westerners with short attention spans watching Cowell puppets and the East's youth are getting on TV doing this.

It's a TV show produced by Jiangsu TV in China called China's Biggest Brain. They basically have a load of people come on and perform amazing feats of quick thinking, memorisation etc.

They do all Chinese ones and then they also do international ones which take a Best of 5 format where 2 teams from China and another country compete. It's not an on running competition, as such, it's just people from 2 countries performing the same task head-you-head to win a point for their team with the winners just being the best team in that episode.

They've had UK teams before - I've watched those twice, and it was 1-1 overall.

davyK wrote:

Surprised that we have the wherewithal to identify them.

Yeah, I'm not sure where the participants are sourced from - as far as I know, it's not a show with a UK equivalent. A lot of these format shows - The Voice or Take Me Out, for example - have versions globally, but I've never heard of a "Britains Biggest Brain". Still, they have to get them from somewhere, and we've had some seriously impressive participants. I might try and find videos later, if I remember.

These look interesting.

And it’s stuck to the side of a wall!

Apparantly this is made of Loz Blocks.

Finished step 1 made up of 3 layers - you can see that in the foreground of the picture.

OK.

I've dusted off the Perplexus Epic. I never got anywhere with it when I first got it a few years ago - and setting myself a challenge to have it beat before Christmas - that's what - 11 weeks now?

Stated today and it's tortuously tough but I find it gives me the same feeling as playing an old school videogame with that infuriating try-try-try again mechanic.

I'm very fond of roll-em-up videogames too such as Monkey Ball and Kororinpa on Wii.

There are numbered checkpoints - 125 of them - got to 19 today.  ahem.

On a tangental note, I got a kick out of this...


amazing skills.

Outrun Donkey Kong?

Perplexus status report : best run : 45/125.

The basic design of the labyrinth is a set of really sticky obstacles with easier sections between. The easier sections become shorter as you progress however.
That design is similar to the original Addictaball of which this is the sequel. This encourages you and develops a nice sense of progression. It's very old-school-try-try-again-videogame-like in that respect which is probably why I enjoy these. This gets hard earlier than in the original and you have a longer way to go to the end.  

Apart from navigating certain obstacles, things more often go wrong in two ways. First is speed - go too fast and you fly off the track. This becomes more common as you get better and try and race through an early section and get sloppy. There are sections of track that only have one wall and the puzzle starts changing what sides the retaining wall is on depending on the corner. Thankfully so far the wall is on the outside of the curves. But the walls do not overlap so negotiating these changes on a twisty section can be tricky and going too slow is usually a problem here.

Then there are the transitions between one type of track and another - probably the most common time to fall off. They will often involve a change of plane or at least angle - so a combo of the right speed and alignment of the sphere are required and it's so easy to get one of these wrong. The really nasty transitions can involve a 180 degree rotation of the sphere along more than one axis whilst keeping the ball anchored against two walls.

There is a section of twisty track at point 8 in this puzzle. I got past it first time and dozens of times subsequently with no issue. Now it has become a bogey for me. When you get past something with no conscious effort you get bogged down trying to recreate the success criteria. Thankfully this bogey is early on.

There are 3 continue points I've found - little platforms off the track that you can start from again after falling off should you wish. There's a short cut at the start that lets you practice the latter part of the puzzle and I've gone past a restart practice point around checkpoint 30. Nice little feature but for now I'm eschewing these.

The sound of failure is the sound of a ball bearing hitting plastic.