1 vs 100 - First Experience

Time: 10:04pm
Games Played: Quordy, Klonoa, Fathom, Persona 3, Textropolis, 1 vs 100
Drinks Consumed: 1 Sugar Free Rockstar, 2 Glasses of White Wine, 1 Sugar Free Red Bull, 1 Guayakí Yerba Mate Pure Empower Mint, 1 Guayakí Yerba Mate Pure Endurance, 1 Odwalla B Monster, 1 Guayaki Yerba Mate Nonsweetened Mate

So I took a break from Persona 3 to play the live beta of 1 vs 100 on Xbox Live.

I love trivia. I play it every night at a bar here with a group of friends. And this was fun too. Several of my Xbox live friends were on and it was great to see how idiotic the actual players were. I also learned that the lyrics to the LL Cool J song are "Mama said knock you up" and the lyrics to the Bon Jovi song are "Whoa, oh, sitting on a chair."

It was pretty fun, though I would have been much more bored if I wasn't chatting with Xbox live buddies. I imagine the chance to actually be part of the real mob (if not the one) was pretty miniscule.

Back to Persona 3. I'm on 1/25!

Textropolis - More Word Games

Another break for dinner and dog walking and it gave me some time to play another recent iPhone obsession of mine - Textropolis. It's a pretty simple game where it gives you a city name and you have to form as many words of four or more letters as you can out of it. For each word you make, you get points (the population of the city increases) and at certain intervals, your city gets an additional star. Getting two stars unlocks the next city. It's a very simple game, but it's word games and I love 'em. Now to get a little more Persona 3 in.

Quordy - Waking up the brain

Time: 11:27am
Games played: Quordy, Klonoa
Drinks consumed: 1 Sugar Free Rockstar, 2 Glasses of White Wine, 1 Sugar Free Red Bull, 1 Guayakí Yerba Mate Pure Empower Mint

Amazing my dog let me sleep in until 11am today. I guess I must have kept him up late with all my cursing at the final levels of Klonoa. It's a bit later than I wanted, but I awake refreshed and ready to take on a new day.

It's still pretty nice (though hot) today, so I took him to the park in the morning and while he was running around, I woke up my brain with a nice game of Quordy. It's a good way to get myself going in the morning. Now I just need to grab a "breakfast" sandwich and then I'll be ready to go.

Quordy - I rock

Time: Friday 4:09pm
Games played: Quordy
Drinks Consumed: None

I decide to begin my game-playing extravaganza with a nice warm-up: Quordy for my iPhone. Quordy is basically Boggle, but renamed to avoid trademark infringement. It is also awesome (and better than the other high profile Boggle game for iPhone, Wurdle). It has a great interface and allows challenging friends and playing against them online. Until I started writing for The Tilt, I didn't bother putting any more games on my iPhone because Quordy was all I needed.

I also rock at it. I have an opponent who I play regularly, but my record against him is 84-34 so yeah. I'm pretty good at word games.

Adventures of Lolo - Finished the Game

My only complaint about Adventures of Lolo is that it was too short. It really had a great take on the moving on different tiles and pushing block puzzles on many other different games and even the few bits that rely on action and reflex are handled quite well. The ending to the game is truly epic with the best boss fight ever.

The other thing about this game that sets it apart from others is that you can take half-steps. That is, you can be half between one tile and another. This means that the solutions to many puzzles are different from other similar games and that you have to wrap your mind around new ways to do things. I must admit that it felt a little wrong every time I solved a puzzle using half-steps though I only had to do it about four times so maybe I just never got used to it.

Anyway, I'm quite surprised by how good this game is. Definitely recomended for logic puzzle fans.

Adventures of Lolo - Floor 9

This was one of those series that always looked intriguing to me back when it came out on the NES, but that I never got into. I'm kind of glad I didn't, because at age nine, I don't think I would have appreciated it.

Adventures of Lolo is a puzzle game where on each level, the screen is divided into a grid. Your character, Lolo, starts on one square of the grid and the other squares are populated by environmental objects like trees, water, and desert, enemies of various sorts, and items like emerald framers, heart framers, and the treasure chest. On each level, you have to figure out how to collect all of the heart framers and the jewel from the chest without being killed by enemies or trapped by either enemies or the environmental objects. Since enemies always behave the same, the game requires logical thinking of how to block them in/avoid them so as to get everywhere you need to go. A lot of the game is block-pushing puzzles (like Sokoban), but the addition of the enemies adds a new and more interesting element.

I'm generally a huge fan of logic puzzles and this game is very fulfilling in that regard. The ramp up in difficulty is very nice. Each floor has five rooms and, once learning the pattern of how enemies work, I didn't really have much trouble until floor 6 or so. After several hours of play, I've managed to get up to floor 9 where I couldn't immediately solve a room and took a break.

In all, I'm really surprised at how awesome this game is. I guess it holds up well since the game is mostly puzzles, but this will definitely make it into my Top 50 NES games list whenever I decide to make a new iteration of that.

3 in Three - Review

I've joined a motley crew over at gamespite.net, the website of 1up.com's Jeremy Parish. He has a vision to make the site a game encyclopedia. My first piece that I wrote for it was a review/retrospective of the Mac game 3 in Three. Anyway, I'll be linking from here to any piece I do there, so here goes:

3 In Three

For those who like numbers, I probably would have given it a 9 out of 10.

Sonic Rush and Puyo Pop Fever - Two Player Versus

One of the great things about portable systems is that you can play them in line. Every time I line up an hour (or more) ahead of time for tickets to a movie or concert or show, I always bring my portable system. It helps kill the time and, it a friend has one, is lots of fun for you. Of course, if other people are around, they may get annoyed, but screw them - you're playing a fun game.

Anyway, this morning my friends and I got in line for the Best of Fest tickets for the Sundance Film Festival. Another friend had his DS. We were without Tetris DS or Clubhouse Games, but we both had Sonic Rush, so we decided to give that a try.

Without looking at the instructions, the only two-player game we could see was a race through the level. Since I hadn't played Sonic Rush yet (and neither had he, I believe) only the first level was available for racing. Apparently, I am quite bad at racing through a Sonic level. My friend beat me twice and then he passed the DS to another friend who soundly beat me.

The racing, and especially only on one level, didn't hold our attention too much so we moved on to one of my favorite action puzzle games, Puyo Pop Fever. I'll be honest and say that I may even like this game more than Tetris. I first played it as "Puyo Puyo" on my Mac (I think a friend from high school showed it to me) and then as xpuyo on my university's Suns. If you are unfamiliar with the gameplay, two connected blobs of various color fall down the screen. Once they get to the bottom, they stop and other connected blobs fall, all stacking on top of one another. Unlike Tetris, their connection is week so if you rotate the blobs horizontally and place one on a tall stack of blobs, the other blob will detach and fall down until it is directly over another place blobs. If four or more blobs of the same color are touching, they disappear and all the blobs above them fall down. This can cause other groups of four or more touching blobs, and thus chains or combos are created this way. When playing against another player, clearing blobs sends special gray blobs to your opponent's side, clearing a lot of blobs and especially chaining combos sends even more. Just like Tetris, when the screen is filled up, you lose.

I have played this game quite a bit and consider myself pretty good at it, so I was not surprised when I won my first game against a friend who had never played it before. I then handed my DS to another friend to play. It was his first time and I watched him as he just simply connected the blobs. His opponent was doing the same thing, so neither's board was filling up. Then, suddenly, he went into Puyo Pop Fever mode where his screen he was working on was replaced with a new screen with blobs set up for big combos and a blob-pair dropping to take advantage of the built-in combos. This lasted for a few seconds and he built up a trully staggering amount of gray blobs to send to his opponent who quickly lost.

I then attempted to play against him and was doing pretty well - but then he got in Fever mode again and just killed me. Another friend tried it. Again, they started pretty slowly. Then the one who had been winning got Fever mode. His opponent got it quickly after him, so I figured this would stay close, but no, my original friend won again.

Finally, I had enough and vowed that I would beat him to show just how much I rocked (I mean, if I can school everyone at Tetris, which I am not nearly as good at, I have to do well with Puyo Puyo). So, I tried my hardest, setting up as many combos as I could and filling his screen as high as possible. It looked liked I had him... and then he entered Fever mode. So I tried my best to keep up and survive all the crap he was dropping on me. And I managed to basically shut down his fever mode by dumping a crapload of gray blobs on it. So then when he got out, his board wasn't so high, but mine was pretty open as well. And then I entered Fever mode. There was nothing he could do and I made short work of him. Ah, that was glorious.

Anyway, even though it has seen a million iterations on every console since at least the 16-bit generation, Puyo Puyo (or Puyo Pop, or Kirby's Avalanche or Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine ) is one of the best 2-player versus puzzle experiences you can have.