This is my "miscellaneous" page; basically, I'll be putting things here that don't quite fit anywhere else. "Things" include anomalies I have seen, questionable high scores, interesting stories and so forth.
So on 12/20/00 I was playing some cubix on my laptop while sitting on the couch also watching TV. I was playing in pay-to-pay mode (using credits), and everything seemed to be going along quite normally when I noticed that I seemed to be using up credits faster than usual (I almost always play only for a single credit at a time).
Sure enough, I indeed did have my credits set to "1", but I watched my credits next time I started a game, and at the start of the game, 2 credits were taken away instead of 1! I played the game through, and at the end of the game, I still only received an amount of prizebucks as if I had only played one credit.
I didn't have many credits left at this point so I didn't bother trying to reboot or reload the game console; I just continued to play, and the game kept taking away two credits per game instead of 1.
Then, when my credits remaining reached 0, I happened to be watching the credits left area and in front of my eyes the credits jumped from 0 to 14!
So I continued to play in this mode; at one point I won an instaprize of 2 game credits and I was awarded 9 game credits instead!
Pretty bizarre behavior indeed!
Moral of this story: I generally don't worry about losing a game credit here or there. I know that computers can screw up, the internet can screw up, or any number of things can happen to cause you to lose some credits or prizebucks and I'm not typically one to complain. I urge all prizegames.com players to be equally as patient.
There was one night when I was playing chain links 20 credits at a time; at the end of one game, I did not get credited with the 1000 prizebucks I had earned for that game. Oh well, there are enough other creative and free ways to earn prizebucks so no point in complaining!
Usually when you play in free play mode, if you click on the instaprizes button, you'll get a message like: "Instaprizes are not available in free play mode". But occasionally I have noticed that while I'm playing a game in free play mode that the instaprizes will actually be listed instead! Sometimes the instaprizes are listed but don't ever appear during game play, but other times, I have been able to earn instaprizes in free play mode!
I don't know if this is a bug in the server or a programming
error, or if prizegames might have just been offering instaprizes
in free play mode to promote a game, but there was a period
of a couple weeks in August of 2000 when instaprizes were
available in free play mode for the game Super 11's. Naturally
I took some advantage of this!
I not only spent time earning as many free instaprizes as possible,
but I also learned how to play Super 11's pretty good!
Moral of this story: Keep your eyes open! Maybe instaprizes will be available for a short time for a particular game.
High scores that are impossible or unrealistic and therefore likely not produced legitimately are becoming increasingly common. As a consequence, skilled players are being penalized. Some effort should be made as appropriate by prizegames.com to determine (a) how such high scores are occurring; (b) how to prevent these scores from occuring in the future; (c) disqualifying clearly bogus scores that occur in the progressive contests.
I believe through a few brief email conversations with the prizegames.com folks that prizegames is aware of these problems and is addressing them (thanks, prizegames).
I consider myself a good player for lots of the games on prizegames.com, but not a great player. But there are some players who seem to consistently seem to score very high and therefore they beat me out for those precious bonus prizebucks!
No problem, right? I just continue to play, maybe I'll get better and perhaps I'll be lucky enough to get a top score on one of the progressives someday.
HOWEVER, I occasionally notice some VERY suspicious high scores. I'm going to show you what I mean by this now:
Typically a progressive top 10 list will look something like this one in which I believe all the scores are perfectly legitimate (these images are screen shots from mid-December 2000; click on the image to see the larger version):
However, you'll sometimes see a progressive top 10 list that has a couple suspicious high scores, like this (look at the top two scores here):
Now, I'm not the best Super 11's player in the world, but I know *DARN WELL* that there's no way even the best player in the world is going to score in the millions in this game.
What's going on here? While I'm hesitant to blatantly accuse these players of cheating, I also find it hard to believe these are legitimate scores. My best guess is that probably these folks may have found some way to slow down the ticking of the clock in this game, which will result in a highly exaggerated score and allow them to win the top prize in the progressives.
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS, FOLKS! It's not fair to the rest of us who play hard and strive to get our names in the top 10!
Now here's one that's even stranger still. Check out the top two scores on this list from 21 For Fun:
Those of you who (like me) are very familiar with this game know that it is impossible to get an extremely high score that ends in a "50" (as opposed to ending on a "100"). Again, I don't want to accuse anyone of cheating, and I have no idea how these folks managed to post these scores, but believe me when I tell you that if you play the game in a completely fair manner, you can't get a score that high that ends in a 50.
I was angry enough about this that I sent an email to memberservices@arcadeplanet.com. I have not yet received a reply, but in my email I included detailed information on why such a score is not possible. I'm including the entire text of the email I sent here:
From CFKman Wed Dec 20 10:46:38 2000
To: memberservices@arcadeplanet.com
Subject: Impossible scores in 21 For Fun progressive lists (complaint)
Hello--
Some of the top 10 scores in the current progressive (ending 12/20/00)
lists for 21 For Fun are suspicious to me because they are impossible
to achieve. The scores in question are:
--------------------------
21 For Fun (pay)
1 Kostan4 --- 483,650
2 masha0105 No 470,150
--------------------------
21 For Fun (free)
1 masha0105 No 495,850
--------------------------
The reason these scores are impossible is because in order for
a score to end in 50 (as opposed to ending on an even hundred),
at least one of the three rounds must have resulted in a "Win"
multiplier of 50. And the maximum score you can achieve that
ends with 50 in a single round is 4,950.
The maximum one can possibly score on the *other* two rounds
(assuming zero time goes by on the clock) is 200,000 per round.
Therefore, the maximum possible score you can get ending in a
50 is:
4,950 <--- round 1
200,000 <--- round 2
200,000 <--- round 3
25,000 <--- bonus
-------
429,950 <--- total
But of course this maximum possible score is ridiculous because
it assumes zero time passes on the clock. Realistically, one could
possibly score about 170,000 for 2 rounds and a maximum of 4,250
for the third round (the one that must end in a 50) for a more
realistic maximum score of:
170,000 <--- round 1
170,000 <--- round 2
4,250 <--- round 3
25,000 <--- bonus
-------
369,250 <--- total
So realistically, any score ending in 50 that is higher than
369,250 is likely bogus.
Regardless, the three scores I mention at the top of this email
message are clearly impossible to achieve in 21 For Fun, and I
therefore strongly suspect some sort of cheat is happening here.
(I have no idea HOW cheating at this game would be possible, but
the evidence shows impossible scores).
If you wish to confirm this, you could look at the current top 300
lists for both pay and free play for this game: out of these 600
scores, only 10 of them end in 50. I believe the top 4 of these
10 (the ones over 369,250) were somehow produced unfairly.
As someone who plays hard but fair, I felt I had to complain
about these clearly bogus high progressive scores. Thanks for
your attention to this matter.
("CFKman")
If someone disagrees with me and can tell me how you can have a score that high that ends in a 50, please fill me in!
UPDATE: 4/10/2001 I noticed tonight that the high score on the 21 for fun free play list was 548,600 by a user named jacquie920. Note that this score ends on a 100. It is therefore also bogus, in my opinion. In playing 21 for fun, if your score ends on a "100", this indicates that you MUST have had one round that was not a perfect round. The highest possible non-perfect round ending in a 600 is 117,600 (this assumes a time of 98, which is not practical; the most practical non-perfect high score ending in 600 is 99,600 which you can achieve with 83 clock ticks remaining). So following my logic above, the highest possible score one could achieve ending in a 600 would be 170,000 + 170,000 + 117,600 + 25,000 (bonus) = 482,600. The more practically realistic score ending in 600 is 460,600.
It really ticks me off! that cheaters are stealing our hard-earned progressive prize bucks with bogus scores like this. On this particular night, I got a truly awesome score of 398,600 which should have gotten me first or second place; instead I'll have to settle for 3rd or worse because of folks who cheat. PLEASE do something to defeat these cheaters!
Until recently, I generally only played prizegames games on my desktop computer, a 350 MHz PII with 96 MB memory. But I recently found that I enjoy sitting on my couch and playing some games on my laptop instead while I'm also watching TV. My laptop computer is a 450 Mhz PIII with 64 MB memory.
Interestingly, there are discernible differences in playing some of the games on these two different computers! I'll describe the differences I see here:
Sure enough, on my laptop computer I can move the picture tiles around quite a bit faster than I can on my desktop computer. I can generally complete round 1 with 9.7 ticks left on the clock on my laptop, but can't seem to do better than 9.6 ticks left when playing on my desktop.
Because the tiles move slower on my laptop, less time ticks off the clock. As a result, I find that I can get higher scores when I play Cubix on my laptop!
I don't know why this is! I can guess: certainly there are speed and memory differences between the two computers, and likely the way each computer deals with complex graphics such as you see in the prizegames.com games is also quite different.
But what really puzzles me is why one game (cubix) runs SLOWER on my laptop, while the graphics in switcharoo run much FASTER (more smoothly)!
If you can figure out an explanation for this one, or if you have your own story about how prizegames.com behaves differently on different computers, please let me know!
I don't claim to never make mis-spellings or typos myself, but I have nonetheless been somewhat amazed to find some spelling errors in the word-oriented games like Find 'Em and Word Master. (And since I'm being picky about this, I've seen some spelling errors in the help pages too.) Here's a table showing some of the errors I've seen:
| Should be... | ...but prizegames spells it as... |
|---|---|
| Seinfeld | Seinfield |
| Light Years | Lights Years |
| Darth Vader | Darth Vadar |
| Mark McGwire | Mark McGuire |
| capital letter | capitol letter |
Occasionally, prizegames will use the timer for a particular game to adjust average points in a game up or down. This can come as a bit of a shock if you're not used to it: for example, around November of 2000 the timer for the game Chain Links was slowed down so that average scores became higher (they also changed the points to prizebucks table for that particular game). So whereas my personal high score prior to that date was around maybe 500,000, it suddenly became fairly easy for me to score over 750,000 regularly.
In January, 2000 the timer for the game Find 'Em was increased a bit (time goes by faster). Where I was once able to easily score over 300,000 points nearly every game, now it's much more difficult to get a score over 300,000.