Category Archives: Puzzles

Recent-ish Games

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Just as a quick catch-up, here are some more specific comments on games I’ve played in the last year or so:

  • Vampire Survivors: This game was a bit of a craze for a while, and I was late to the party, but I got addicted to it for a while as well. With a bajillion things to unlock, it has that just-one-more-run quality that has you realizing that you sat down to play it for an hour and it’s been four… I finally shook it when I got to a point where I can just get near-infinite upgrade eggs and brute force past any challenge, but it was still a good 70-odd hours of fun to get there.
  • Super Lesbian Animal RPG: Despite what the name might make you think, this is a pretty wholesome (PG-13 at worst, for swearing) JRPG story about a group of LGBT friends trying to find their way as young adults, prove themselves, and work out their relationships, while saving the world from an ancient evil, of course.

    It’s an RPG Maker game, with the limitations that implies, but the author’s put a ton of effort into customizing it and fleshing out the setting, characters, UI, etc. with her own work, so it doesn’t really feel like one. There’s a bit of extra depth to the combat where you have to build up ‘star power’ points to use more powerful attacks, so you can’t just unleash all your best attacks at the start of the fight. Which can sometimes feel a bit tedious because that generally includes multi-target attacks, so you have to spend a turn just getting the points to use one of those… But it’s not too much of a problem because it’s not very grindy overall; the level cap is pretty low and you only fight monsters by running into them on the overworld.
  • LOGistICAL: Earth: A kind of puzzle game where you have to unlock industries and roads around the world by delivering goods from sources to places that want them. And when I mean world, I mean the whole world, as it covers 50,000 towns and 590 different industries. It’s hard to get a good sense of progression with this one; you start out focusing on a few small areas, trading resources and unlocking industries and all that, but you can’t really “complete” a region because there’s a deliberate global interconnectedness to everything that forces you to keep expanding and exploring to find new industries and routes because you can’t satisfy everything locally, but there are also barriers to keep you from exploring until you figure out the ‘puzzle’ to deliver what they need.

    I’ll play in a region until I reach a point where I feel stuck and then switch to another one I’ve unlocked, and I’ve gone through probably a pretty typical sequence, going through New Zealand, eastern Australia, Germany and Scandinavia, the western US, South Korea, North Korea, and the start of Russia. It’s starting to feel like I’m running out of options though, and that the key to progress is hidden in some singular town or road or something that I’m overlooking because there are ten thousand icons on-screen. There’s a spot in Russia where I could break out if I just had Bricks, but I only have access to one truck and some sand, but I could turn the sand to bricks if I build the Brickworks there, but to do that I need to raise an existing Brickworks to level 3 somewhere, which I could do in Germany, except for level 3 I need Machinery, and I do have Machineworks somewhere, but they need Engines as an input and I haven’t even discovered them yet so they’re in some other country and who knows when I’ll actually find them and when I do I don’t currently have a way to transport them to Germany… It’s…still fun in its own way, but it also feels like it’s constantly on the verge of “okay, that’s enough, had my fill of that”.
  • Kitsune Tails: Haven’t gotten very far in this one yet, but it’s a very cute take on a Super Mario World-like platformer. And either it’s surprisingly difficult in some places, or I’m just getting old…
  • Thank Goodness You’re Here: This one has been described as a ‘slap-em-up’, since that’s basically your only way to interact with the world, by running around and slapping things. It’s basically an extended British comedy sketch, centered around you “fixing” peoples’ problems. A bit short at 3 or so hours, but very funny and well worth it if you like that sort of thing.
  • Balatro: eh, it’s alright

Those actually aren’t the games where I’ve spent the most time, but those will really deserve posts of their own…

(No, seriously, Balatro didn’t really grab me in the same way everyone else seems to be obsessed with it. *shrug*)

McTardy

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Coming out of another MMO stupor…  Today I tried both Bit.Trip Core and McPixel, two recent indie additions to Steam.

Bit.Trip Core is a lot like Bit.Trip Beat, with dots flying around that you have to hit, except that instead of hitting them back with a paddle, you shoot out from a center point in one of the four cardinal directions.  It’s tougher than it looks since your shot only lasts a split second, and it become hard to judge which dots will hit which direction’s center point first.  And much like Bit.Trip beat, it’s not really grabbing my interest.  Bit.Trip Runner is still by far my favourite of the series.

And McPixel is kinda like WarioWare for the PC, in that it’s a whole bunch of minigames where you have to figure out what to do within 20 seconds, or everything explodes.  It’s pretty random trying to figure out what the right thing to do is, but there’s a reaction animation to pretty much everything, and a quick breezy style to it that makes it kinda fun just to goof around and try things.  Definitely a keeper.

And I also played Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights Of Loving over the weekend, but they barely count as games and only took 15-20 minutes each to complete anyway.  An interesting experience and worth checking out, though.

Quite The Quandary

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I wound up putting a fair bit of time into Quantum Conundrum today, almost completing one of the three wings, so it’s not going to be a terribly long game.

It’s common to compare it to Portal, as it’s the same kind of solve-a-puzzle-as-you-go-room-to-room, but with dimension shifting instead of portals.  One dimension makes things lighter, another one makes things heavier (and there are two others I hadn’t reached yet), and you might need to put items on a pressure plate and block a laser but you have to be careful about the order you do things in because the laser will destroy the item in the regular and light dimensions but you have to shift to the light one to move another item that would normally be too heavy, and fans will blow around items that are too light, etc.

The puzzles that require some thought are fairly interesting, but unfortunately there are some segments where you have to position items and then jump across on them, and the jump mechanics aren’t so good, making those segments a bit frustrating.  Overall though, I think it’s still good enough to come back and finish off at some point.

At Least It Isn’t Greensleeves

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Yeah, I’ve been slacking a bit, going on vacation trips tends to derail whatever I’ve been working on at the time.  So, to get back into the swing of things, I checked out English Country Tune today.  I knew it was a puzzle game but wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but it turns out to be basically an advanced version of those Sokoban-like games.  Push items around a block maze to meet a particular goal, except with twists like gravity making the items drop, 3D aspects to the maze, ‘whales’ that run away from you and have to be pushed off the board, and so on.

The keyboard controls are a bit wonky due to how the direction you go in suddenly changes in spots when you move to a different orientation, and it’s sometimes hard to see parts of the level to see where valid places to move might be, but it’s a fairly interesting and challenging puzzler.  I wouldn’t sit down and play nothing but it, but I could see knocking off a puzzle here and there.

Getting Wet

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Going for something a bit newer, I played a bit of Vessel today, and I’ll definitely come back to it.  It’s another puzzle-platformer, but it’s based mostly around fluid physics.  You’re either manipulating where water goes, spraying it yourself, or dealing with little creatures made out of water that can either help or hinder you, depending on the room you’re in.  Flip switches, open doors, move obstacles out of the way, etc.  It can require a decent amount of thought to get through a puzzle though, as it often depends on timing, the behaviour of those water guys, the order things happen in, etc., so it provides that nice oho-I’ve-figured-it-out satisfaction.

Getting Inside You

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Today’s game is Stacking, and it’s a rather…different…one.  You’re in a world populated by Russian nesting dolls, and you have to complete various puzzles by stacking or unstacking yourself with other dolls to gain particular abilities useful in solving the puzzle.  It’s not particularly difficult, but it’s a nifty aesthetic, and there are some other things you can do like search for unique dolls or find multiple solutions to the puzzles.  I’ve done the first ‘world’ so far, and I think I will come back to this one later on.

Game-A-Day

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I suppose I should actually say something once in a while…

I’ve recently realized that I might have a few too many games, and hardly any of them even get played at all. I’m therefore putting something into motion that I’ve intended to do for a while now — play a different game that I haven’t played before every day. It’ll only be for an hour or two to get a feel for it and decide if it’s worth playing any further. If so, it gets put on the short list to come back to later, otherwise it gets uninstalled.

So, over the weekend I binged a bit and started with 1000 Amps, which is interesting but not really grabbing me enough to play much further; Blocks That Matter, which had a similar reaction but it’s short so I might finish it anyway; and Faerie Solitaire, which I might keep around just as an idle time-waster.

Tonight, I played the first chapter of Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon. It has a lot of the same mindless shooty fun as the previous Xbox game, but it also has some annoyances too, like how I constantly get swarmed in ways that make it hard to shoot, the active reload is really hard to hit, and some enemies just take waaay too many hits to kill. Apparently there are only three chapters though, so I think I’ll keep it and just do one runthrough, not bothering to farm weapons.

Disk Space Unleashed

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Argh, I’m falling out of the habit of updating again… There was a stretch where I didn’t play anything since I was out of town, but there is still a bunch to talk about.

I finished off The Force Unleashed, finally freeing up the 30 gigs of disk space it was taking up. Some of the boss fights were fairly tense and I almost lost, even playing on easy, but otherwise it was still just a matter of slogging through it to see the story. I played the three DLC packs too, but they were fairly short and easy.

On a whim I finally played The Path, a rather artsy non-game where you wander around the woods as one of six girls in a weird take on Little Red Riding Hood. Around the woods you find items relating to the girls’ personalities, encounter their (oft-metaphorical) ‘wolf’, and then tour through a bizarre interpretation of Grandma’s house. I’m not sure I learned anything from it, but it was interesting trip if you appreciate surreality.

Now that I’m pretty much done with Picross 3D, my puzzle game impulse is being satisfied by Everyday Genius: SquareLogic. It’s Sudoku-like in that you have to make the rows and columns of a square fill with non-repeating numbers, but the squares are also broken down into smaller regions with their own specific requirements, like adding up to a certain total, all numbers must be odd, one square must be higher/lower than another one, etc. It looks tough at first, but the interface helps a lot in keeping track of everything.

I downloaded F1 2010 on Steam and played through a race, albeit on the easy and shortened weekend settings just to get a taste. It plays well though, feeling authentic enough, with a decent amount of control over things like your own career and R&D. I’ll definitely have to put more time into it.

EQ2 hasn’t progressed much, as I was gone for a week. I caught up on the faction grinding I missed out on, but another group member was missing this last week, so we just goofed around in the Cleft of Rujark dungeon off of Sinking Sands.

And then there’s Minecraft. That’ll deserve its own post…

Just When I Thought I Was Out…

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I’ve been dabbling in another miscellaneous pile of stuff lately:

Right after I finished the Mafia 2 main story, they released the first DLC pack, Jimmy’s Vendetta, which adds a bunch of free-roam missions like you’d expect from a GTA-ish game. It’s unfortunate that they’ve chopped the game up like this, but I’m invested this far into it, may as well get a little bit more fun out of it…

I’m about halfway through it now, and most of the missions haven’t been very difficult, but Paddy Wagon must have taken me 20+ attempts before I could finally beat it. You get mobbed by so many enemies, many with machine guns, that just surviving the fights is difficult, especially with enemies approaching from multiple directions. I eventually beat it by luring a cop car along with me to the final fight, and they helped thin out the enemies.

Overall though, Jimmy’s Vendetta feels…soulless. The missions are fun, and it’s nice to have more to do, but there’s very little extra voicing (just some generic environmental responses), no mid-mission chatter, nobody ever comes along or helps you out, the mission intro is just a page of text… It just doesn’t feel right.

WoW surprised everyone by releasing a bit of pre-Cataclysm content with an event in Durotar about the trolls retaking the Echo Isles. No real challenge to it, but it was still interesting, and I did it on both of my 80s for the achievement (and my 40 mage, but he couldn’t do the final quest for the achievement).

I briefly played Puzzle Quest 2, but only long enough to get through the tutorials in the first town. Not a lot seems different so far, but it’s been so long since I played the first that I’m fuzzy about the minor details that might have changed anyway.

And tonight I took another shot at VVVVVV on my Mac and surprised myself by managing to collect the final two trinkets. One of them wasn’t really that bad — I just hadn’t bothered to spend the time on it before — but the other was the infamous Veni Vidi Vici one, and it must have taken me over 200 attempts tonight to get it, not including all of my previous failed attempts. You have to let yourself fall through a bunch of spike-riddled screens, bounce off a platform, and fall all the way back through them, and it took forever to finally get the timing right. Getting the timing right on one screen isn’t really that hard, but you have to chain those successes all in a row to get through them all. Oddly enough, the return trip seemed easier than expected; the problem was mainly getting past that bounce successfully and consistently.

And that’s probably all I’ll do in VVVVVV, since the things still left over like the time trials and gravitron are just crazy-difficult.

Not-Yet-Made Man

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It’s been a while since the last update, but I haven’t really been playing a lot either. Well, I’ve played a bunch of games, but haven’t really put much time into each one…

I probably played Picross 3D the most, picking it up and knocking off a puzzle here and there to kill time, and a couple days ago I finally finished the last tier of the hard puzzles. I didn’t get 100% of them though, as you have to be some kind of savant to finish enough of the hard ones in time to get three stars. And I’ve still got a bunch of downloaded puzzles to keep me busy for a while yet.

I picked up a game called Puzzle Dimension on Steam out of sheer curiosity, and it’s kind of interesting. You roll a ball around a tiled map (it’s actually turn-based, with discrete moves), picking up the flowers on the level, and getting to the exit. Complicating things are squares that can only be traversed once, icy blocks that you slide on, fire blocks, gravity effects, jumping, etc… I’ve completed the first couple of ‘worlds’ so far, but there’s still plenty more to come.

I caved in and bought Victoria 2, though I haven’t really played a proper game of it yet. I did my usual introductory game as Hawaii, watching how the rest of the world unfolded, and it was actually a bit more challenging to keep things together as you couldn’t just set up the sliders and then do nothing the rest of the game. There were weird things afoot in the rest of the world, too, as Britain wound up swallowing up all of China, Egypt got picked on by nearly everyone and eventually eliminated, the US never even tried to get California back from Mexico, the UK never released any of its dominions… There’s still a lot of rough edges to it like the rebel hordes that run amok and the crazy ways that capitalists (mis)manage factories, so I’m putting this off until another patch or two.

Not much has happened in EQ2 as people have continued to be unavailable. I did at least hit level 55 and can finally use the nice reward charm I got for finishing all of the Lavastorm collections (20 to all stats, 100 health and power, and a healing proc).

Worms Reloaded was released, and I figured I may as well give it a shot. It seems to be a decent successor to Armageddon so far, though it’s a bit disappointing that teams and players are limited to 4 each. Some nice new weapons though, and I’m about halfway through the single-player campaign, though I haven’t tried multi yet.

I started playing Mercenaries 2 as my potential next game, but it’s still kind of early to judge. The graphics are a bit poorer than I expected, and the interface a bit awkward, but I’ve only done a few missions so far. I’ll give it a bit more of a chance to grow on me, at least.

And when I finish that, or it doesn’t work out, I think Mafia 2 will be next after that. I never played the first one, but it got decent reviews, and word-of-mouth on this one is pretty good so far. It’s apparently not as open-world as, say, the GTAs, but I’m okay with it being somewhat more linear and shorter. I’ve still got plenty of other games waiting…