A Game of Luck, Chance, and a Disembodied Hand

Scared yet? Good, you should be. However, I fear that I am getting ahead of myself. Allow me to first provide some background information. High up in the Virtupets Space Station there are many mutant abominations. Among them is an unfortunate Chia named Florg. Florg's days seem to revolve around food. And between his temper tantrums he is presented with a table full of petpets to munch on. Only problem is that apparently none of those 20% tax collections Dr. Sloth has been charging have been allocated to hiring waiters. No, instead that role falls to a lonely, despondent, and disembodied hand I like to call Chuck. Chuck's job is to make sure those nervous petpets stay on the table, in range of Florg's long, articulated tongue. Seeing as Chuck has no eyes, it is the job of Neopian gamers to help position Chuck and ensure maximum petpet consumption. Sounds easy enough... right?

Wrong! As I have said before, this is no action game. It is a game of chance. You see, the petpets are not deposited in any pattern, any rhythm. Instead they are dropped in random directions that leave the gamer hoping they get a lucky break. The first petpet given to you is easy enough to manage; just keep twirling Chuck 180 degrees and you should be fine. However, once the second petpet drops, your first roll of the dice begins. If you get lucky, then the petpet will be running in such a way that it allows you to keep both petpets on the table. If you are unlucky, then you will be torn between two petpets reaching opposite ends of the table at the same time. It is at this point that most Neopians become frustrated; they ask why it had to be them. But this is just the beginning. Soon a third petpet drops, then a fourth. By now the aforementioned newbie has gone from an attempt at mastery to an attempt at survival.

But do not despair! There are strategies that can be used to tame this game. To begin with, let's break down the possible petpet configurations. When the second petpet drops, you will see it is going slower than the one which you have already blocked with Chuck. This disparity in speed can mess up your attempts to gauge which petpet will reach the edge first. The only way to counter this is to practice, to learn from experience just which petpet will make it first. Once you have this determined, you can then move in to block it. Once that petpet has been blocked, you want to immediately rush over to the second petpet and attempt to block it as well. If you succeed in keeping both petpets on the table, you have what I call manageable twins. This is a pair of petpets that can be kept on the table indefinitely (provided you are accurate enough not to miss). If you can't reach the other petpet in time, you have what I call unmanageable twins. Your only hope to keep that extra life is for Florg to nab the lost petpet with its tongue before the poor creature falls. Florg's tongue is yet another aspect of the game where luck plays a massive role.

Now let's assume you are graced with a manageable pair, and are now happily racking up +1s. Soon a third petpet will enter the fray. At this point you will once again be at the mercy of luck. If chance favors you, then you will be given manageable triplets. This is three petpets that are in perfect relative orientation so that you may hold all three on the table indefinitely. More likely, however, you will be given a petpet that cannot be saved without losing one of your manageable twins. In order to help make this choice between which petpet to save, it is best to look at a further breakdown of manageable twins. There are two such subdivisions, one called the precarious twins and one called the balanced twins. In balanced twins, the two petpets are close by each other (in both timing and location), allowing you time to slow down in between rotations and still manage to keep the pair on the table. If you have precarious twins, then you have to madly dash back and forth to keep a petpet from dropping. Going back to the scenario above, you must choose which of the three petpets to let drop. If your current manageable twins are precarious in nature, then you should abandon one of them and hope to pick up a better set of twins using the third petpet. If the manageable pair you had was balanced, then you would want to abandon the third petpet and let it fall. This may seem a bit confusing at first, but once you begin looking at the table in terms of manageable twins, then the points necessary for an avatar will become attainable.

Speaking of that avatar, there is another strategy that can be used to help achieve your goal. In Feed Florg, you start out with five lives. Thus, as a useful measure of how well you are doing in a given game, you should see what your score is each time you lose a life. If you have 4 lives, then you should ideally have scored around 50 points. At 3 lives you should have around 100. At 2 lives you should have racked up at least 150 points, and so on from there. This system is meant to be used as a basic way of evaluating your progress. It doesn't mean you should quit a game just because you have less than 150 points after that third life is lost. If there is anything I have learned from playing Feed Florg, it is that with a little luck, anything is possible. I once went from 130 points to 230 points with only a single life remaining.

In conclusion, I would like to say that Feed Florg is clearly incorrectly categorized. It should not be an Action game, but instead filed under Luck and Chance. This is because for all the fancy pairing and analyzing you can pull off, your success is still at the mercy of randomly dropping petpets. Look up at the high score board. Are those players any better than you? Any more skilled or disciplined? No, those users simply won it big at a game of luck, chance, and a disembodied hand.