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Before Elite Darts, we here on the Zone staff weren't big darts players. Our previous collective experience amounted to a few '01 rounds at a karaoke bar, in between turns at the mike. (We aren't great singers, either -- well, except for Clan Chick -- but that's a different topic and we're not going into it.) Anyway, maybe you can keep from making some of the mistakes we did.
First off, we went straight to the training video, which is pretty good, and the narrator's got a nice, soothing voice, but it took us ten minutes to figure out how to throw the dart without dropping it half the time -- and that's nine and a half minutes longer than it should have. We tended to thrust hard with the mouse, which would cause the ball to lock up and the dart to go nowhere. Actually, this game is calibrated for a pretty narrow range of motion, so you don't have to hyper-extend your arm to throw. Just push quickly but SMOOTHLY forward an inch or so.
Once we got the throwing down, we were basically set, except that we really didn't know how to play the games. Here are a few tips that will make regular darts players smile in smug superiority but that we sure as heck could've used:
Overall:
- Okay, the scoring area of the board is like a sliced-up pizza, right? The double scoring area is the thin strip around the outside of the pizza; the triple is the strip between the outside of the pizza and the center. We think this is counterintuitive -- it's harder to hit a double than a triple, and at least with a triple if you go a little high you still hit in the scoring area. You're outta there if you shoot even a fraction above the double. Sheesh.
- Normally, the outer part of the bull's-eye is called a single bull's-eye and worth 25 points, and the inner is called a double bull's-eye and worth 50. We always incorrectly referred to the double bull's-eye as a "real" bull's-eye. You can turn off the double bull's-eye scoring so that any bull's-eye is worth only 25 points. We think that a double bull's-eye should be worth a hundred points, at least, or automatically win you the game. I mean, who ever hit a double bull's-eye?
Cricket:
- By default you don't have to close out the numbers in order. But you do if you have the "descending order" option enabled.
- If you close out a number, you can ONLY score on it until your opponent has closed it out. Then it's completely done.
- The person with the highest score, or the one who closes out the most numbers in the event of a tie, wins.
'01:
- The numbers at the bottom of the scoreboards aren't the points scored by each player; they're the '01 number MINUS the number of points -- in other words, the number of points each player has left to score to get to 0.
- There's no 201 game. Don't even look for it. The games are 101, 301, 501, 701, and 901.
- If you go below 0 -- that is, score more points in a round than you need to hit 0 -- then you go "bust." This does not mean you lose all your points for the game; it means that you lose the points for THAT ROUND ONLY.
Baseball:
- What kind of wonky game is this? Actually, once we figured out what it was about, we liked it most of all, at least when we were using the Pitching option. If you're using the Pitching option, you've got a pitcher's turn and a batter's turn. If you forget whether you're pitching or batting, you'll seriously screw up the game! As a pitcher, you try for bull's-eyes, but the bull's-eyes don't give you any points; instead, they give you a scoring multiplier in the top right of the screen. This is the number you multiply the batter's points by. If the number is 0, the batter doesn't even get a turn. If you pitch a high multiplier and the batter doesn't score any hits, all your great pitching was in vain. The moral of this story? If you're good at darts, don't waste your talent by teaming up with a Zone staffer!
- Okay, any moron can get the idea that you try to hit a 1 in the first inning, a 2 in the second, etc., but even geniuses like us can get confused when we hit a 9 on the ninth inning and only score 1 point instead of 9. Well, don't get confused. You get 1 point per hit in the normal scoring area, 2 points in the double area, and 3 in the triple area, regardless of the inning number you're on. See, it's like runs in baseball. Hey, wow, maybe that's why they call it Baseball!
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