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Caravel Forum : DROD Boards : Holds : Figure Or Ground (Within lurks insanity...)
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8.1/10 (22 votes)
σ 2.07
Author Name:Jacob
Submitted By:Jacob
Hold Name:Figure Or Ground
Theme:Within lurks insanity...
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Number of Levels:2
Number of Rooms:19
Number of Monsters:216
Version:DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold
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Hold Karma:7 (+7 / -0)
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File: Figure Or Ground.hold (13.9 KB)
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A new hold from Jacob
Playtested by: Alneyan, Tim, Wallu, Stefan and TripleM
02-05-2006 at 08:42 PM
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Ezlo
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OH MY GOODNESS! I don't even know where to begin! I'm assuming the first room you can clear is 1E, but I don't even know how to do that! But this looks like an infinitly better maze than KDD's. So I'm going to give it a high rating.
02-06-2006 at 11:19 AM
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Doom
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Ezlo wrote:
OH MY GOODNESS! I don't even know where to begin! I'm assuming the first room you can clear is 1E, but I don't even know how to do that! But this looks like an infinitly better maze than KDD's. So I'm going to give it a high rating.
Do you think you can judge a hold fairly by looking at like first few rooms? I think not.

Rooms have more than just the appearance. I've not looked at this one yet, but I would definitely wait until playing at least most of the hold before saying how good it is. Also, difficulty =/= overall rating. (Which, I think, a few people forget sometimes)
02-06-2006 at 11:43 AM
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Tahnan
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Wow. I've rarely been so stuck so quickly. I feel like I know what the first step is, and I can't even execute that.

So I'm giving this hold a low rating no, no, no, of course I'm not. Frustration =/= low rating. But man I wish I knew what to do. :-)
02-06-2006 at 05:28 PM
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Blondbeard
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Oh, man I'm so impressed.
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02-06-2006 at 07:12 PM
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Hikari
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:-O I solved... one room. I managed to cross another without getting killed once. And then I got stuck, completely.

...

Good. That means this one'll last me a while ^_^ Kudos on the artistic side of things on the whole... er... six rooms I've seen. I'm liking this one so far, at least. I foresee many, many pleasant hours of delving ahead.

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02-06-2006 at 11:39 PM
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eytanz
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Do you mean stuck in the sense that you are unable to do anything (i.e., stuck and have to restore to continue)? Or stuck as in you have no clue what to do?

Those are rathe different situations as far as my opinion of the hold will go...

(I've just started it).

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02-07-2006 at 12:33 AM
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Tahnan
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eytanz wrote:
Do you mean stuck in the sense that you are unable to do anything (i.e., stuck and have to restore to continue)? Or stuck as in you have no clue what to do?

I'm stuck in the latter sense.
02-07-2006 at 05:33 AM
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Jacob
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Ezlo wrote:
I'm assuming the first room you can clear is 1E, but I don't even know how to do that!
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02-07-2006 at 12:32 PM
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Briareos
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"And now for something completely different..." :lol

Great hold - I'd rather not try to think about how you might have planned that thing... :)

np: El-P - Squeegee Man Shooting (FanDam Plus (Disc 1))

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02-07-2006 at 07:16 PM
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Doom
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I thought the rooms were okay, but there was way too much needless backtracking and generally too many tunnels, that made the level look messy and difficult to navigate.

I never enjoyed KDD L13 and I'll propably never enjoy maze levels unless they're built to avoid heavy backtracking and aren't full of dead ends. Tunnels and room edges just make it worse by making it more difficult to spot those. There were some nice shortcuts, like passing through 1S after completing it, but some areas were still hard to reach even after visiting them earlier.

It's not a bad hold, but I spent more time with it than I would've wanted to. And that's not because the puzzles were too tedious. (Btw, thumbs up for confusing me with 1S1E :))
02-07-2006 at 07:29 PM
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Jacob
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Fair point. However, my thinking was that since (a) the maze is only made of 9 rooms, (b) most rooms are immediately accessible, or at least only require one room completed before they are and (c) each room has deducible objectives (e.g. dropping green door/dropping red door/getting to a specific exit)...that would mean that the solution to the rooms and the maze as a whole could be deduced, requiring minimal trial and error or backtracking. Of course, just because that was my intention, it doesn't mean that's the way it ultimately worked out.
Well done for completing it, by the way.

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02-07-2006 at 09:22 PM
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martz
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A very enjoyable little hold. I didn't find the maze overly confusing, certainly the different coloured tiles helped in that respect. There were a few "this is impossible" moments, but the satisfaction of working them out just adds to the enjoyment of the hold.

I look forward to playing your future holds.

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02-08-2006 at 12:03 PM
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Mikko
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This is the best hold I've played for quite some time. Not that that's such a big thing as I've only played a few of the newer holds. The difficulty level is just right for me, and I actually liked the maze structure. Ealry on,I had to use the restore screen to look where to go. By the time I had completed the ordinary rooms and went to look at the secret ones, I could navigate quite well from memory.

I'm not as fond of the other level, though. It's not bad by any means, but lacks IMO the fun factor of the maze. I've completed three of the rooms there so far.

I do have one small complaint. The checkpoints in 1N1E of the maze are badly placed. There are unnecessarily many in the central chamber. I would instead have wanted one NW of the orb near the first entrance.
02-08-2006 at 12:06 PM
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Doom
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On another thought, confusing might not be the best word to describe what I thought of the maze. None of the rooms were hard to figure out and it was usually clear where to go next. The problem was generally looking at the restore screen to find out how to get into the next destination. The paths cross room boundaries a lot, which makes it slower. I might have picked some inefficient routes that have to do with these thoughts as well. It's just repeating to have to go through the NW-part of 1W for the ~fifth time. Also, minimap is pretty much useless in maze levels full of 1-tile passages, unlike in most other holds. So restore screen is the only way to go without trial and error (which I did some too, because I got tired at looking at the restore screen again and again)

I see the rating of this hold dropped recently from 8.7 to 8.1. I hope my complaints didn't have much to do with that big change. That's just a personal opinion and you are allowed to disagree with it.
02-08-2006 at 12:51 PM
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Rabscuttle
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File: groundmaze.html (850 bytes)
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I'm always amazed at how Jacob manages to cram about 50 rooms into a 3x3 square.

To help navigate, I made a little webpage map (attached). If you're going to use it more than once, I'd suggest resaving it as a "complete webpage" or however the browser does it, just so you're not redownloading the images all the time.
02-08-2006 at 04:36 PM
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Doom
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Rabscuttle wrote:
I'm always amazed at how Jacob manages to cram about 50 rooms into a 3x3 square.

To help navigate, I made a little webpage map (attached). If you're going to use it more than once, I'd suggest resaving it as a "complete webpage" or however the browser does it, just so you're not redownloading the images all the time.
Oh my... I had the exact same idea. Except that mine is a huge single 4MB in-game resolution using PNG image :yes
(1.47Mb as a JPG and 1.23Mb as a RAR'ed JPG. Still pretty big)

I don't think I need to post it here, because you can just use Rabscuttle's link or manage it without a map. And I propably should resize it a little smaller anyway, because it's close to 2500x2100 pixels.
[Last edited by Doom at 02-08-2006 04:51 PM : additional data]
02-08-2006 at 04:41 PM
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Blondbeard
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Hmm... I donīt know how to rate this holds. The rooms where superb, but I did get very tired at all backtracking. I suppose that this is a very good hold if you donīt mind running around in a maze. Otherwise itīs just good ;)
02-08-2006 at 11:59 PM
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Jacob
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Rabscuttle wrote:
To help navigate, I made a little webpage map (attached).

That's really cool. I should've made something similar, it would've made it a whole lot easier to make the hold.

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02-09-2006 at 12:10 AM
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Chaco
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I tested one of the earlier versions of this hold.

Admittedly, I couldn't even solve 1N, so I wasn't actually all that useful. :?

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02-12-2006 at 03:34 PM
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key-smiter
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Rabscuttle wrote:
To help navigate, I made a little webpage map (attached). If you're going to use it more than once, I'd suggest resaving it as a "complete webpage" or however the browser does it, just so you're not redownloading the images all the time.

I'm just now gettin' around to maneuvering through this hold, and tried to use this map . . . but the images weren't found by either IE or Firefox. Is this behavior experienced by anyone else, or am I somehow special?
06-30-2006 at 12:59 AM
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Briareos
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File: groundmaze.html (886 bytes)
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From: Rabscuttle's post in this thread
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key-smiter wrote:
I'm just now gettin' around to maneuvering through this hold, and tried to use this map . . . but the images weren't found by either IE or Firefox. Is this behavior experienced by anyone else, or am I somehow special?
Nah, it's just that with the new server the URLs used in the HTML file have changed.

Here's an updated version.

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06-30-2006 at 08:16 AM
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bandit1200
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Sorry to say, you ain't special. ;) Opera doesn't find them either. They were probably lost/misplaced during the great forum crash of 2006
06-30-2006 at 08:25 AM
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key-smiter
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Briareos wrote:
Here's an updated version.
This is, like, so totally excellent. Thanks!

EDIT - although this is helpful, I still can't find my way around quite right. I've completed the entrance and 1N, and now that I've retraced my steps over and over I think I've determined I can only go where I've gone before. This is odd indeed . . . assuming there's a proper order for rooms, what's the next one I should be striving to attack? (Assuming, of course, that there's a way out of my stuckness.)
[Last edited by key-smiter at 06-30-2006 01:55 PM]
06-30-2006 at 01:38 PM
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jbluestein
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What an awesome hold!

This is a beautiful, evil, mind-destroying hold. And I love it.

Very difficult in places, but some of the challenge is just getting there.

Jacob has outdone himself on this one.

I give it 7.5 brains and a 10 rating.

Jacob also gets my vote for Evil Genius of the Year. Although I reserve the right to sub in Larrymurk and Doom. Maybe they'll just have to be a trio.

Josh



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[Last edited by jbluestein at 08-04-2006 09:08 PM]
08-04-2006 at 09:06 PM
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Canadian_Army
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I must say I cant even figure out where to begin!!
Please help!

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08-05-2006 at 09:40 PM
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Ezlo
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I believe the first room is
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08-06-2006 at 03:11 AM
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masonjason
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This is a pretty good candidate for the title of best hold I have ever played. 10/10

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09-30-2006 at 01:37 AM
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Ezlo
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Well, now that I have finished the hold, I can change my rating to something that's fair. :smile To think I was that stupid back then.

Well, anyway, this is my favorite hold so far, EVER. I'm giving a 10/10 fun/overall rating, and 7 brains.
09-30-2006 at 04:06 AM
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disoriented
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Ezlo wrote:
Well, now that I have finished the hold, I can change my rating to something that's fair. :smile To think I was that stupid back then.

Well, anyway, this is my favorite hold so far, EVER. I'm giving a 10/10 fun/overall rating, and 7 brains.

Enjoyable if mind-boggling hold. Jacob is officially my favorite architect.

And it's nice that there are still some #1 score opportunities in a hold as old as this. :thumbsup

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05-23-2009 at 04:25 PM
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