Zuma Deluxe level 8-4 ??

[parlarsson]

Difficulty all of a sudden went through the roof. No real point in even attempting it for me unless I do 8-1 through 8-3 flawlessly.

Advice?

[parlarsson]

Arright. Beat it after about 4-5 hours.

1. Play from 8-1 through 8-3 until you get lucky and get to 8-4 with all your lives left.
2. Immediately quit so that it becomes the saved game.
3. Now you can restart that level from the main menu with full lives fairly quickly and you'll start to get the hang of it.
4. As soon as it starts you have to know what color ball you have and if there's any 2's or 3's coming in at speed, try to shoot them on the fly.
5. Concentrate on the left side of the main 'V', since if you worry about stuff on the right, you might miss or not be able to deal with it again until too late. If you set something up on the left you'll have another few seconds to deal with it by the time it's over on the right.
6. You WILL have to get lucky. Luck is another name for random chance. If you learn the map and play to the absolute best of your ability then sooner or later you'll have a bunch of random things go in your favour. Yay!
7. Coins. Double-shoot them - as in, if you know you have a chance at having a gap right in front of a coin, double-click to launch two balls without waiting to really line up the shot or checking what colour ball is loaded.
8. It's also possible to double-shoot and get rid of both loaded balls:
a. if both loaded balls are the same colour and you have a 2 or a 3 or more to shoot at, double-click to launch both balls as quickly as possible. The second ball will land in the explosion and be destroyed ...most of the time.
b. if you double-shoot at a 2+, then the second ball might just pass harmlessly off the map, this is useful sometimes when you don't like the second loaded ball's colour
c. if you're shooting at a 1 with two balls of that colour, you can just blaze away
9. Knowing you simply can't win without a huge dose of luck means it's not that big of a deal if you don't have a good start, just concentrate on getting better and once in a while you'll have a round that starts off bad and then just becomes crazy good. There's no real need to care much until you have that stroke of luck.
10. Make a sandwich and don't play for so long that your mouse-hand and click-finger start to hurt.
11. As soon as you beat it and move on to 8-5, save the game by quitting.
12. Peripheral vision is key. Use it.
13. The 'work on left' thing only applies if you don't have anything easy to explode on the right.
14. You will have heartbreakingly close defeats. Once you start getting to "ZUMA!" every 3-5 games or so it's just a matter of time.
15. Don't forget that you can shoot off the map if you don't like a ball colour. This can be especially useful in the later stages of a map that has a bunch of tunnels.
16. I don't recommend shooting blind while the balls are still spinning onto the map, but it's funny when you do it accidentally and it pops something.
17. Every time you advance a stage and beat the first map of a new stage easily, just quit and then restart by pressing "Play" down in the lower right corner of the title screen - this will set you up with another set of lives from scratch.

Let me know if you manage to do 12-4 without one (or two, rather) good explosions. Or you can game the system by hitting space to pause every time you know you have a good initial seed or on the harder maps - every time you make substantial progress - then quitting (saves game) and restarting to nickel-and-dime this thing. Useful for people with OCD who just have to beat the game somehow but don't mind a little creative use of game mechanics. 14 hrs total.

Killer good game btw, hat's off to Popcap.

[Redboy]

I stuck on 8-4 too ill to play again...

[deneb]

I knew it's hard,wait to get the final level.that's real hard

[Lavie]

11. As soon as you beat it and move on to 8-5, save the game by quitting.

Don't help at all here... if you lost for example the 8-6 the game restart at 8-1 not 8-5.