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Beating Gadgadsgame (without eating the fruit)


by asparagation

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Gadgadsgame is 100% the best game that you'll find on Mystery Island (sorry, Goparokko fans). In this game, berries appear at the top of the screen in groups of three, and drop down the screen until they can't drop anymore. Move the berries left and right with the arrow keys, and rotate them by pressing the space bar. You can also make the fruits drop faster by pressing the down arrow. The most important thing in this game is to try and group berries of the same colour together.

There are five different fruits in this game, and rather than refer to them by their real names which will confuse me, I'm going to refer to them as I do whilst I'm playing, which will hopefully not confuse you. The three fruits that appear from the start of the game are the orange fruit (Stramberry), blue fruit (Blobbule), and purple fruit (Plumberry). From level four onwards, fuzzy fruit (Gruish Melon) will appear, and the last type of fruit to make an appearance is the lemon (Lemwart) at level six.

By combining the same colour fruit, you'll end up with larger versions of the same fruit, which are worth more points when you clear them. A single fruit will score you one point, and it goes up exponentially from there, 2x2 (eight points), 3x3 (27 points), 3x3 (64 points), 5x5 (125 points), 6x6 (216 points), 7x7 (343 points), 8x8 (512 points), and finally 9x9 (729 points). I've personally never gone past 7x7, which is still a great amount of points. I highly recommend not trying for a 9x9 fruit, you'll more than likely lose the game in the process, even if you start your attempt as soon as the game begins.

To remove fruits from the screen and get points, you'll need to use bombs. As below, the bombs appear as a square around a smaller version of the fruit. When the bomb lands, it will highlight and remove all of the same type of fruit THAT IS CONNECTED to the bomb square. As you can see below, where the bomb is going to land, all of the orange fruit on screen will be connected, and so all of them will disappear. If there were an orange fruit half way up the stack of purple on the right, however, it would remain there.

The above screenshot shows my early game strategy. What I like to do is divide the nine squares at the bottom of the screen into three groups, and try and keep the fruits as separate as possible to begin with. Once I've bombed two of the original fruits, I focus on the third and keep as much on screen as possible, and deliberately avoid using a bomb until there is a huge amount on screen, which I'll then remove for lots of points.

A few levels in, two powerups will start to appear: a potion and a swirly thing (their real names, obviously). The potion will change all fruits of the type underneath it to a different fruit. In this case, if I dropped the group appearing next (left of screen) straight down, it would change all fuzzy fruits to a different type. Obviously in the above scenario that wouldn't be the best thing to do, as the swirly powerup will take action first.

The swirly powerup will also act on the fruit directly undernearth it, and will remove all fruits of that type, regardless of whether they're connected or not. So above, all fuzzy fruits will be removed from the board, even the two on the right blocked in by the orange fruits.

What I would do in the above scenario is rotate the potion so that it landed on a different fruit, so that you don't waste the powerup. The negative aspect of the morphing potion is that it can morph your fruits into any of the five fruits in the game, so may end up with a screen full of fuzzy fruit, or worse, lemons, right at the start of the game, and have no chance of getting a bomb for that type for a few more levels. In that case, just wait for another morphing potion and get rid of them asap.

When the game reached the later levels, it gets hard to group the fruits together. What I start to do then, is to move the fruits to the side (furthest away from where the new groups appear), and wait for bombs or powerups to drop in the best places. By doing this, it means that you have move space to move, better acess to the bottom of the board, more time to decide what to do, and no chance of fruits quickly stacking up in the middle and you losing the game early.

Throughout the game, a random assortment of fruit will randomly fall from above, which is, fun, I guess.

Remember at the start of this guide I mentioned how I said that Iike to bomb two fruit types and keep a third, resulting in larger fruit and more points? Well I do a similar thing at the end of the game. What I do is use the morphing potion powerup on as many different colours as possible. As each morph happens, more and more fruits will turn the same colour until you're left with almost all fruits being the same colour, as above. Bombing the blue fruit now will give me a huge point boost, and also pretty much clear the board, allowing me to get many more points.

By the time you reach around 1000 points, you're just going to need to get lucky. In the above screenshot I have used my morphing and start-at-the-side strategies to end up with a screen full of purple fruits (plus some pesky fuzzy fruits and lemons left), with some space left in the middle. Obviously in this game I wasn't quite lucky enough, but if I had received the swirly thing powerup a move or two earlier, I could've rotated it and gotten rid of all of the purple fruits on screen, which would again give me a few hundred points, an almost empty board, and of course more time to do this all over again for many more points!

Extra

You need to reach 1000 points for the avatar.

I realised halfway through writing this guide that the swirly thing is a twirlyfruit, but I haven't changed the name because I can't think of it as anything else whilst playing gadgadsgame.

If you're aiming for a trophy score, you'll need around 1800+ for a bronze trophy on reset.

As usual, the best thing for you to do is practice. Good luck!

 
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