Achieving: Slide Puzzle Domination on the Vita

I AM THE TOUCH MASTER! No, not the master of the DS game Touchmaster, the master of the Vita’s generic, built-in tech demo “game”, Welcome Park. It’s a collection of sterile, mostly disinteresting minigames designed to show off the features of the hardware… but it has trophies!

To achieve this miraculous S-Rank I had to confront my lifelong nemesis: the tile-sliding picture puzzle. I’ve always been really bad at them but Welcome Park has several trophies that require finishing increasingly complex ones in less and less time. The advantage here is that you get to take the picture and it wasn’t long before I realized I could make a spreadsheet of numbers and take a photo of the monitor.

With the numbers now on screen the next hardest part was figuring out how to line up 15 tiles in 50 seconds, a feat that I thought was out of reach even after I looked up the trick to these puzzles. I tried it numerous times Friday night and got it down to the last six tiles that needed aligning but always took too much time. I was crushed when I finally finished the puzzle and found out I’d done it in 51.836 seconds. As is often the case with troublesome spots in games, though, I completely crushed it on my very first attempt the following morning. One try and 36 seconds later I’d done it and gotten the gold trophy for getting all the other trophies. PlayStation games are weird that way.

Achieving: Tales of Pointless Self Reward in Games retold in brief posts whenever we feel like it.

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