One Player's Quest to Beat the Seemingly Endless 'Desert Golf'

It says in the article that he&#x27;s been playing it for four years and has racked up 300–400 hours game time. That&#x27;s a bit less than the &#x27;obsessive&#x27; realm some people are placing this in, in terms of daily play.<p><pre><code> (400&#x2F;(4*365*24))*100 =~ 1% </code></pre> He could easily rack up that game time with about 20 minutes per day. Granted, to do that each and every day for 4 years is still quite some undertaking, but it&#x27;s not like he&#x27;s spending every waking hour obsessing over it.<p>(This only sprang to mind because I instantly compared it to my 160+ hours of game time in Breath of the Wild, a game I&#x27;ve only owned for a couple of months...)<p>(Edited for formatting of the napkin-math)

Example of impossible hole, that ultimately gets beaten by sheer persistence and luck:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=%27Desert+Golf%27&amp;atb=v83-1__&amp;ia=videos&amp;iax=videos&amp;iai=R2TQcFk52JU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=%27Desert+Golf%27&amp;atb=v83-1__&amp;ia=v...</a>

I&#x27;m confused. The article says that, before the recent update, hole 14,758 was impossible. But I made it to hole 28,890 before getting stuck in mid-2016. [0] After the update, I resumed playing, and am currently on hole 31,923.<p>So either I got a different layout for 14,758, or it&#x27;s not impossible. And obviously, I&#x27;ve also never encountered a level with endless water. Is it possible that the procedural generation is not identical across all devices?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;karlvonl.livejournal.com&#x2F;8174.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;karlvonl.livejournal.com&#x2F;8174.html</a>

It is a beautifully minimalist game. With such an economy of mechanics, features and elements, it can be at the same time relaxing, exciting, frustrating and rewarding. Every now and then there&#x27;s a &quot;feature&quot; (a cactus, something unique) to remind you that the game could have more, but it doesn&#x27;t want to.

Honestly, I&#x27;m always a little jealous at people who possess that amount of persistence at something. It would probably get boring for me after hole 23.

I wish that the domain summary said &#x27;waypoint.vice.com&#x27;, since they have a very different style to vanilla Vice.

Semi-related, I&#x27;d highly recommend the game &quot;Freeways&quot; by the same game author:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;captaingames.itch.io&#x2F;freeways" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;captaingames.itch.io&#x2F;freeways</a>

It&#x27;s impressive how this game spread. I&#x27;ve first read about it in Grubers iPhone X article on daringfireball.net. Then suddenly it was mentioned by xkcd and now appears in other news and finally HN. Great marketing strike. It&#x27;s also a fine game with a fair price. To be recommended.

I wonder how much the author earned from this game.

The question is how to detect an impossible game ?

What an utterly bizarre hobby.

Seems to me like it&#x27;s trivial to detect that a hole is impossible&#x2F;really hard.