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Of the other sites having AB strats and scores, the only one I am aware of that is still up is http://www.theater333.com. According to that site or Poached Eggs 3-1, the cut to make it into the top 10 (in Massachusetts!) was 69370 as of February 2011 (but the video presented there does not make the cut). Such scores would make it into the top 50, so at that time it must have been a doable level, but how? (The set-up suggests luck rather than skill must be involved, but to me it’s not even clear where that luck should come from; some lucky collision toppling the stack maybe?)

Looking through the top-50 of PE 3-1, I recognise roughly a quarter of the names (typically the ones having played a lot, as can be seen by their status), and also that (and those names) suggest top scores were reachable in early versions of AB.

The highest player in that top-50 I recognise, is thee-michelle. I had some nice exchanges with him on Seasons in the past. He is a genuine player (e.g. he’s #5 on Star Wars 2) and iirc he played on android. Don’t know whether he still plays, but you can ask him? He used to give great answers, but his English was sometimes hard to follow for me (he’s Japanese; my Japanese is way worse than his English though; 残念). Other good players there are birdjo (topped the Mighty Hoax leaderboard at some moment) and bastieroxxor (topped the overall leaderboard for quite some time and made the Guiness Book of Records because of it; should be around 2014; the more impressive since he played on a phone). Again, you could try to contact them. Granted this was all a long time ago, 10+ years, so they may have moved on (not respond) or may not recall the strat for PE 3-1 (but some players were quite systematic, taking notes of their strats and how they obtained their high scores, I recall being surprised to learn).

I vaguely recall some acrimonious exchange  (should be still in the comments sections) between murash and the powers-that-be at the time (I would guess with their resident mathematician amslimfordy, who did a lot of great moderation work), over some of his scores being not accepted because of being platform-specific, or going without proof, but that was for another level (I know how the level looked like, but am too lazy to search for it; there’s no easy way to do that on ABN).

In any case, good luck.

 

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need not be suspious. murash held the overall top score in poached eggs for quite some time, and comfortably so, before levels were improved iirc.

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Daisy Ridley ?

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Not to mention England 8 Netherlands 2 (Huddersfield 1946). Still feel the pain ofc. (The only games I attended in 1996 were Ghana 3 Italy 2, and some Bayern München home game in the Olympiastadion.)

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BTW Tried to learn English by writing down Supertramp lyrics in my youth and what do you know ended up in both England and logic, but you’re right I still have no clue about the hidden layers of meaning in English songs; climbed up to Solsbury Hill to check (three times even; completely flat though nowadays), but no city lights, watch kept on ticking, no eagle …. Portishead 2nd best on the page, after Teddy Scholten.

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in baume kerve is idd nie onschuldag. as ut dan toch mot geif mè maah y tú qué has hecho da’s teminste poeties.

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Another of my long-held trophies (186,990 in BP-6-15) gone, thanks to @desperate-dan . Congrats to @anton249 for getting the trophy; to me on a par with his country (Land der Berge, Land am Strome…) winning eurovision. Overigens volkomen terecht dat Teddy Scholten won destijds, als je het mij vraagt, dat Engelse lied was niets. Ook niet verwacht hier een video in het Nederlands te zien (gepost om een reactie uit te lokken?).

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now read a bit about atticus finch, the mini-schnautzer. wonderful (though downs are wonderful, i really miss hiking in the mountains here in the uk). already wondered how you had come to the idea to walk the equivalent of some appalachian trail (can’t remember the details).

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my guess would be that there’s a programming error in the code for randomly generating levels. as the meaning of code / programs is just mathematical, there’s typically no need for discussion.

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if i had my own calendar, i would also stand and stare at the nr of views it was getting.

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@desperate-dan why don’t you play jurassic pork levels? i’ve wondered about that for some time, since you’re (relative to your other episodes) quite far off; replayed JP-37-8 just now and to my surprise quickly (within 5 minutes) increased my score for it (to 252960 / 3; see my album), to up my total score to 10304950. Tristan da Cunha I only know from playing worldle; at roughly that latitude i did have my purest.trunk.memory and a trio.extra.intent .

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more due to using something like a multilevel queue for scheduling my tasks, with ab being of low priority, than due to being in a wormhole i guess (can’t exclude the latter, as I know nothing about wormholes). that sounds like a good explanation of the SHG, consistent with the phenomena; someone really committed to the game would reconstruct rovio’s server (spoofing the relevant part of its behaviour), instead of simply giving up. another three today: shire, spray, scrum. learning that to prepare for a pub quiz one should go on a cruise, now booked one (stena calls it a ferry; amsterdam sounds exciting).

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i know of the santa hat glitch, but never played a version of seasons having it iirc. though i am interested in maximising scores (and to that end even wrote an ab-playing program; see the old, 2014ish, comments), i lack motivation to hunt for old glitchy versions.

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indeed, disappointed as i had scored two’s the previous two days (very lucky; sometimes i also start with shire if i’m in a polite mood and don’t want to offend). not keeping track of streaks though as i don’t have an account. found my english vocabulary is rather patchy in the 5 letter word range; not infrequently, even if i do get the word (just because it looks / sounds like it could be one) i have to look up its meaning. (my vocabulary is better w.r.t. words of 45 letters and longer).

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shite. cheek. check.

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AB Free was free and meant as a teaser for AB. Each time a new episode for AB came out, AB free would be updated with 3 new, original (and often quite interesting), levels in the theme of the new episode. Once AB turned out to be a big hit, this (and the fun) stopped and Rovio switched to sneak-preview mode,  just including 3 levels selected from new AB episodes, before decommissioning AB Free altogether. That’s my perception of its history; would have to ask Rovio about the real history. Would be surprised if they would revive it, but on the other hand never understood the motivation for making games stop to work (having grown up with arcade games, I love MAME), especially if they are offline single-player games (virtually no security risks).

Only wanted to express that my interest in high-scores is derived from my interest in strategies; they are essential to validate a strategy but otherwise they do not hold (old comments elsewhere on abn express the same sentiment).Atm not motivated to try my hand on new AB games (but who knows), happy to occasionally revisit some old level, follow abn from the sidelines, and absorb bsc; have some puppets at hand, e.g. Statler and Waldorf (never mind they hail from New Amsterdam), if reenacting is in order.

 

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ah, the blissful ignorance of abn-youth thnking i never posted scores: i went through double trouble, first posting all my scores (and strats) upon joining the nest (in 2011), then deleting them again (for the reasons mentioned; then found that one can’t delete comments). in the interim i was top-runt for several games. first for ab-free (since 2012, score never surpassed), then abo (around 2014, after manu malin and bastieroxxor and before asher and desperate dan), and finally a few abs episodes (e.g. tp, iotes, sh, gggl). i get the most satisfaction out of thinking of strats and making them work. finding the top-scoring strats for ab-free 15-1 till 15-3 (see under archived boards under leaderboards) felt like ab-epiphanies and started it off. nowadays, just like with other games i enjoy (football, chess, rubik’s cube,…) i follow abn mostly at a distance also for bsc,  british sub-culture, as i wrote.

i take your word for it, so have the fall replace tommy cooper at the top of my bsc list (i always thought tommy cooper to be the pinnacle of bsc, as it was one of the few british shows on dutch television at the time).

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@briann i stopped contributing because of imo overzealous rule-enforcers pushing long-standing top-players out. since i’ve moved to greener pastures (the uk; last year), the bp has become my go-to place for immersing myself in british culture. e.g. i knew hardly any of the videos / songs posted, didn’t know that one should start wordle with “shite”, that apostrophes need protection, etc. (looking through old archives also makes me sad though, Rat, Kathy, …).

having dusted off my old ipad / ab end of last year (for reasons related to moving to the uk) i tested' it by breaking 10.3M in jp (through 36-1; see my album). As Desperate Dan is the top-runt I nowtested’ it again on one of his recent levels. (despite yesterday getting the message that the picture failed to upload I now see it is in my album?).

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bad piggies 22-3. went from a hard earned 140k to 150k with little effort (since i improved on that previous best twice within the first three attempts, first to 141k, then to 144k, i decided to continue playing a bit longer). hadn’t played this level for a long time, so no idea when this change took place, but i did notice i had dropped out of the top-50 (today it’s the daily challenge), so it must have been some time ago already (maybe even before this list was created, but anyway).

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@bonneypattycat a 0-birder was possible on PE 1-3. never `played’ for it, since from what i understood it was already extremely rare back then (a few years ago); don’t know whether it’s still there.

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i think you can add ham’em high 12-9 to the list as well:
terrence slices through much differently (more easily) now;
could easily improve to 110k (up from 106k before, which was
obtained then with a lot of effort) and with some effort
got a 117k 1-birder.

i updated to V5.2.0. played some BD levels without noticing anything different from the previous version (in particular cake 2, 18-12 still teleports). reloading seems to be quite fast (but maybe i only notice that because i just have played some seasons level, tropigal paradise 2-13, to test a hypothesis of dronnord).

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hi @dronnord , your remark on tropigal paradise 2-13 made me curious. i updated to the latest version of AB Seasons (V5.2.5) on my ipad, and have revisited that level just now. maybe gameplay is a bit different (just from memory: the right structure seems a bit easier to destroy and the left structure a bit harder), but i got two 235k+ scores in 45 minutes of play (and many 220k+ scores), by playing the (4-bird) strategy i had posted, so i don’t think the level has gotten much, if at all, harder.

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thank you @kathy for the nomination

i got the picture from internet by searching in google for `calandria uruguay’,
since i knew them from uruguay. here’s the link to the original picture
and some explanatory text to go with it (in spanish):
http://www.avesuruguay.org.uy/avesuruguay2/articulo.asp?f=calandria&d=guia

sorry that neither is it a hoot owl nor was the picture taken by myself;
it would have been a bit much to travel to the americas just for
taking a picture for my avatar.

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looking at the mail i received i noticed a typo wrt abo: the sequence for 26-12 should be for 27-12 (and uses 27-10 not 26-10). anyway, checking it for the latest (birdday 5) update just now i think it doesn’t work anymore; even stronger, the right structure seems to have been stabilised: it never moved in the 20 resets i did, whereas before it moved a bit almost every reset (but fully collapsed only infrequently).

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@mvnla2, thank you for referencing me as ‘her’, but it should be ‘him’. wrt self- destruction sequences: i guess that any level having self-destruction at all does have such sequences. this is based on several assumptions, eg that ab uses a random number generator with a fixed (upon restart) seed value to set up levels, that this generator is really random in the sense that every possible setup will eventually be generated, and that the physics engine used is deterministic, … each and all of which may turn out to be false (eg the last seems to be false for bubbles,tnt,… maybe they have real-time aspects?). in general these sequences are device dependent, will be hard to find, may be long, and some may be better than others wrt follow-up shots, but in case of strategies relying on partial self-destruction it may pay off to search for ones that are relatively short and good, providing one with a good and fixed starting point for further play in that level.

edit: to test the above hypothesis briefly looked at level 5 11, and on my first try stumbled on: enter 5 11, leave 5 11, enter 5 10, leave 5 10, enter 5 11, reload. on my device this will not only give 80pts but, more importantly, make the stone slab slide down exposing the tnt for an easy 70k+ 2-birder (not the best of scores, but enough to provide support for the hypothesis).