An Unseen Challenge

Vying for the avatar, I thought that it would be just another game: a little bit of practice, read through some gaming guides should I need the extra help, and then continue in my conquest to get a high enough score in order to get the avatar. I proceeded through the beginning levels, one by one, as thoughts surrounded me that soon the avatar would be mine, another trophy in my growing collection of such avatars. I approached the game and initially found it to be quite easily, or so I thought... I soon came across the one level... That one level that always seems to be break or make different games, it is the one level that people often struggle with because it provides a transition that reveals the true nature of a game.

Well, that level for me initially seemed to show that the game was about to get a whole lot easier, which is not natural for any game. This level had what appeared to be slorgs of only three basic colors coming through the map (they actually turned out to be slorgs of a billion colors: orange, red, green, and a few other colors that I won’t attempt to identify, for my own sake), a step down from the beginning levels. I thought for sure that slorgs of another color would come trickling down the line as more slorgs came into the map, but no, they only came out as the colors I saw them as from the start of the level. I thought that I would have the avatar in no time at all. I did not know just how wrong I was. I could not explain to myself why the slorgs refused to disappear after I had matched them up into what I thought were matching groups of three.

When I kept unexplainably losing the game, I thought for sure something must have been wrong with the game, after all, I thought that I had been doing a wonderful job of matching up the slorgs by their respective colors. I kept playing, starting over, starting over again, and then over again... I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t beat that one level! It was ridiculous! I didn’t even think about being colorblind and how that might affect my gaming experience. I tragically wasted a whole bunch of time, time that could have been spent gathering other elusive avatars to add to my collection, getting to that level only to fail. It was embarrassing enough to fail so many times, thinking I was actually playing the game correctly. I looked through TONS of guides for the game, looking to see if I was missing some crucial piece to the game that was keeping me from winning, and from getting my avatar. It took my younger brother to point out that I was playing the game all wrong, mixing all sorts of different colors together, thus bringing about my doom each time. By that point I had decided, with my pride only hurt a little, to give up and skip the avatar and to move on.

Never, in all my games of Destruct-O-Match or Faerie Bubbles or etc., have I ever encountered any problem whatsoever with my colorblindness. It is kind of haunting to know that there may be other games out there, similar to Attack of the Slorgs, waiting to prey on my weakness. Everyone knows what the feeling is like to have a game that is “nice” to you, or to be “mean” to you on the flipside, but I’m not sure how many people understand what it feels like to have a game that, in my experience with Attack of the Slorgs, finds pleasure knowing that it has an upper edge on you.

If anyone knows what it’s like to be colorblind, surely they understand the ground that I am coming from. I can honestly say that I have now found the hardest game in all of Neopia, and I hope that I don’t find another like it any time soon. In my quest to obtain more avatars, I still hope that it takes me another long period of time before I find a game that presents a similar challenge, as does Attack of the Slorgs, in the Games Room, but for now, I will be happy to continue in my search for more new avatars. And I know that from now on, I will pay more attention to the guides that I read, and the information about game play that is presented in the game instructions. As a conclusion to this rant, I can offer the advice to either be happy, knowing that you don’t have to worry about being colorblind next time you play a game, or, if you are colorblind, to steer clear of Attack of the Slorgs and the menace that it secretly is.