Those Blasted Blue Screens

As with all the other days, the first episode of day six is a dream. Like the other dreams, this dream contains Blue Screens of Death or BSoDs for short. The Blue Screens of Death is the screen that appears when there is a problem so severe that Windows can not continue running. Back when I was writing C/C++ programs for Windows, BSoDs were something that I encountered far too often. Most people are not programmers, and do not write low-level code so they probably don't have the dread of the BSoD that the main character in the game would have.

In this dream, the BSoDs are in space and are approaching your space ship. To win this episode, you must simply blast away the blue screens. Of course, things are not that easy as whenever you hit a BSoD, it spits into 4. The four smaller BSoDs can also split into 4. The even smaller BSoDs will also split into four. The tiny BSoDs will finally vanish so there is an end to the madness.

Shooting is not the only thing you are able to do. Movement is also possible. Remember that you are in space. This means that Newtonian physics comes into play. In particular, because there is no air or other form of friction to slow you down, once you start moving you will continue to move in the direction of movement until a different force is applied. Thrusting in a different direction results in a new movement vector based on the current direction you are moving in and the applied force in the new direction. To come to a complete stop, one simply has to apply a force in the opposite direction that they are moving in equivalent to the momentum at which one is currently moving in.

To win the episode, one only needs to shoot all of the BSoDs. There are two strategies that I have used to do this. The easiest strategy to use is the blasting strategy. In this mode you simply hold down the space bar and keep blasting. The problem with this is that you can quickly be overwhelmed with the number of blue screens that appear. A more difficult strategy, though more effective once you get the hang of it, is the snipping strategy. Movement and precision shooting are required for this method as the goal is to eliminate one big blue screen and its siblings at a time.

If both of these methods prove ineffective, there is always the easy way out. Every time that you die, the game gives you an option to make the game easier. This is done by reducing the number of starting blue screens. If you die often enough, you can even get the game to only contain a single starting blue screen. The cost of this is in the maximum score that you can get, but if you don't care about your score then this is an easy way at winning the game for the less-skilled player.