This is nothing but a pure button masher... just hit the keys real fast. Use a strategy of "shaking" e.g. hit left,right quickly in succession a bunch of times to fill the board followed by a "circle" e.g. up left down right a bunch of times. I really don't like hating on a HN submission, but either this game is very lame or I am missing the point entirely. :P
It's kind of absurdist humour. HN has been full of responses to the rather clever 2048 game lately -- 2048 in HTML5, 2048 in the smallest number of bytes, the 2048 AI solver, 2048 in Brainfuck, 2048 in Latin, etc etc etc. This is amusing to me because the subject line looked almost like one of those obnoxious Bitcoin transaction posts, thus bringing together HN's latest fad with its eternal obsession, in my mind at least.
Now, complete this sentence: 2048 on HN will jump the shark when someone posts...
The logical conclusion to this sequence is somebody making the polar opposite of this entry. Namely, a game called 2. It's a 1x1 grid, and you begin in the winning state.
game = new GameManager(8, KeyboardInputManager, HTMLActuator, LocalScoreManager);
setInterval(function (){ for(var i =0; i < 100; i++){game.move(Math.floor(Math.random()*4));}},1000)
I find this interesting because it hooks into the obsession many gamers have with constantly increasing (large) numbers in games like diablo or other RPGs in order to feel accomplishment. The original game was significantly more clever, but had an end, and would turn off a lot of people due to it appearing difficult.
The question is if you wrapped this up as an RPG instead of a puzzle game, would people play it?
After hammering on my keyboard (somewhat) coherently for a long time, I would conjecture that the board is too large. So I tried to us down and either left or right alternately and switching left and right when a position would not move anymore. At least until 8192 and ~200k points, random fluctuations seem to clear always enough stones that the board was never more than half full.
It must have been a while since you played tile based games. I had a similar experience a year ago when I made a simple tetris game and tested it non-stop for a day. Since then I can't achieve the same effect. But before that I haven't played such games in years. It really shows how persistent out memory is. One day and you're good for years.
DynDNS is painting with an unavoidably broad brush. It's a student page at the CS department of NTU -- National Taiwan University. I'm sure the server has hosted something unsavory at some point, but this particular page is hardly threatening.
