DAILY CHALLENGE
Q*BERT
Pyramid · Hops · Q*bert (Gottlieb, 1982)
Paint all 28 cubes of the pyramid without falling off or letting Coily catch you.
Free play does not count for the leaderboard: it keeps your best on this device only. Today's challenge is one run per person.
HOW IT PLAYS
A pyramid of 28 cubes. Q*bert hops diagonally from cube to cube and every cube he lands on changes colour; once all 28 show the GOAL colour (the little cube at the top right of the scoreboard) the round is over. Hopping off the pyramid means falling, unless a disc floats in that gap: the disc carries you up to the top, and nothing can touch you while you ride it.
The colour rule changes every round and repeats every four: in round 1 one hop is enough; in round 2 it takes two (the cube passes through an in-between colour); in round 3 one hop paints and another unpaints; in round 4 it takes two hops and one too many sends it back to the in-between colour. Red balls bounce downhill, and the purple one turns into Coily when it reaches the bottom and chases you. From round 2 Slick and Sam appear, unpainting whatever they land on, along with the green ball; from round 3 Ugg and Wrongway climb in from the bottom corners. The longer a round lasts, the faster everything hops.
CONTROLS
The d-pad is turned, as on the Atari 2600: UP hops up-right, LEFT up-left, RIGHT down-right and DOWN down-left. One tap is one hop; hold it and he repeats every time he lands. On a keyboard, two arrows at once hop along that diagonal. There is no action button.
On screen: UP/LEFT CLIMB RIGHT/DOWN DESCEND
HOW POINTS ARE SCORED
TO SCORE MORE
· The disc is your only defence against Coily. Wait for him near the edge and hop on when he is one or two hops away: he goes where you went, jumps into the void after you and pays 500. Used without Coily on your tail it only saves you: you lose those 500 and the 50 an unused disc is worth at the end of the round.
· Red balls only go down: one that is already below you can't reach you, and new ones drop from the sky onto the two cubes just below the top. When you lose a life you come back on the top, right above them: get away during the 2 seconds you blink.
· In rounds 3 and 4 (and 7 and 8...) landing on a finished cube spoils it: plan the route before hopping and don't go back over what you've painted.
· Slick and Sam undo your work cube by cube: catch them as soon as they show up, they're worth 300. The green ball freezes everyone for 3 seconds and while they blink they're harmless: that's the moment to cut straight through. And don't wander: every 20 seconds the round gets tighter.
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