How does this work?

[ttomm46]

From a review....Never tried this....On the fly?

"The game encourages you to form such combos on the fly, but the streams move so quickly it can be difficult to react in time. Even if you do, you then need to have the composure and steadiness of hand to manipulate the blocks quickly using the click and drag technique. Too often I found myself frantically (and randomly) ‘scrubbing’ the screen with my mouse pointer."

[keith.lamothe]

I presume they meant:

1) Starting a stream.
2) Direction changing blocks that were directly above the blocks linked by the stream (and are thus about to fall when the chain clears), so that they will in turn chain with other blocks.  In theory you can do this direction changing even as the blocks are actually falling, though that's not for the faint of heart.  I'd say "on the fly" is a good description of that method.

In my experience I do a little of that, but it's much better to do the secondary direction changes to set up the combo before you start the first stream.  Some boards move too quickly to allow much planning ahead, but I tend to prefer something a little slower than that.

[dumpsterKEEPER]

The idea is that even while a chain is running, you can still be moving the orientation of blocks.  Once you start a chain, this allows you to either continue that chain further, or set up additional combos once the active chain completes.  This does take some practice to get accustomed to, however

[x4000]

Quite true.  Even while streams are actively moving and chains are being completed and combos are happening, you can be dragging arrows around as much as you want.  If you're quick and have a certain amount of experience with just seeing chains instinctively rather than with active top-level-brain-function searching, then you can set up all kinds of things after your streams have already been emitted.

That said, not everyone will want to do that, and certainly not everyone will have to, either.  But if you ever find yourself just sitting around watching all the pretty colors moving and exploding... and wish there was something else you could be doing to affect all of that stuff that's going on... you certainly can affect it to an enormous degree.

All that said, we try never to encourage the fast-clicky style of play over the more slow-paced Zen type of play, so certainly you can play in whatever style suits you the most.

[dumpsterKEEPER]

As an addendum, I find this skill particularly helpful in Frenzy mode where you:

• Typically need to clear blocks as quickly as possible
• Aren't penalized for having multiple streams active

There's a number of levels I've encountered on the adventure so far that I don't think I could have beat without at least some level of on the fly rearranging.  When I first started with the game it was one of those "how in the world are you supposed to do that" concepts, but with a experience it becomes second nature to recognize patterns in the blocks even as they are falling.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I don't think you could successfully complete all the adventure levels without some degree of on-the-fly direction changing, it is intended as a valid mechanic and all that.  But it shouldn't be twitch-gaming (let us know if you find a level that you think requires that degree of it), and if for whatever reason a player doesn't like levels that require any degree of that mid-stream activity, they're quite welcome to skip those levels

[x4000]

And for players that want a slower experience, and/or are playing with a disadvantage like using a trackpad instead of a mouse, the handicaps can be used to balance that out to an appropriate speed, too.

[keith.lamothe]

Ah, right, I had forgotten about that

I'm on a touchpad 99% of the time and haven't found it to be a problem, but I can see why others would want a bit of compensation for that.

[x4000]

I think it really depends on the touchpad, too.