Legend of Grimrock. I wish I could say that this was the only game I've played this week - it's certainly the only thing I've played for the last three days. Glorious, if you have any sort of fond memories of Dungeon Master.
Games of note this week:
1 - Legend of Grimrock
2 - Starcraft 2
3 - Batman: Arkham City
4 - Waking Mars
5 - Rows Free
Rows Free
Do any of you follow Tom Cutrofello's blog? I consider it to be the authoritative word on iOS puzzle games. Tom loves no-nonsense puzzling, and Rows Free is one of his recent top picks. The game is very similar to solitaire SET - so if you've been interested in working that part of your brain, it's a great choice. You get 4 tiles, and have to place them on a 6x6 grid. If you get combinations in a row, diagonal, or 2x2 group, they are scored and removed from the board. The trick is to anticipate how likely each group might be to complete, and keep open spaces in the right areas. You get 200 points for an all-different group, 300 for 1-same 2-different, and so on.
This means that, for the most part, you always want to shoot for "all-different" groups. There are 5 shapes, 5 numbers, and 5 colors. So if you have 3 all-different tiles, then there are 8 possible tiles which will complete that set. If you have 3 tiles which are 1-same, 2-different, then there are only 4 possible tiles to complete it. Half the chance for 50% more points is NOT a good bet. Also, it is very possible to score multiple groups simultaneously, especially if you always go fo "all-different" groups.
The game is free, and though it's not perfect I'm really liking it.
Waking Mars
Here is an interesting beast - a physics Metroid-style gardening puzzle, set on Mars. I like the controls and the ambiance, but the game has been pretty trivial thus far. I know I'm way to the "complexity" favoring side of game players, but I keep seeing opportunities for more depth. Hopefully I'll find it as I keep playing? Biggest gripe about the game is the fact that I can't load my game without re-starting a new game and watching the intro cutscene every time. Ugh.
Batman: Arkham City
I thought I was done with this one, but on a whim I went back and finished all the Robin achievements. Nice.
Starcraft 2
Now that my Protoss and Terran games are solid, I'm enjoying Random plays with strangers more. Baneling play is still my weakspot - whenever I get burrowed Banelings they do great things for me, but I only get them in about 10% of my games. What's wrong with me? I also played a few epic 3v3 games with my regular Monday group - had a game where I attacked and destroyed one player's 5th expansion (it was a VERY long game) with all my drones. Epic.
Legend of Grimrock
I don't know if I should say a lot about this game or a little - obviously I'm a huge fan of Dungeon Master, and this game is basically a love-letter to people like me. But I think the game totally holds up as a contemporary game - even with all the strange interface conventions from 1990 in place. Hoarding meat from your enemies to feed your players - collecting skulls for your Minotaur - learning new spells and casting them with glyphs during combat - everything in this game is epic. I worry that I won't have enough time to explore it fully during one play-through, so I've already started several. Most fun? My all-ninja team which started with Evasion scores around 30 across the board.
I really wish I could auto-load thrown weapons when my current stack runs out - my Throw-master is awesome, but after just a few attacks I have to grab a new stack of throwables from my inventory. Ammo stacks are automatically picked up after battle - which is AWESOME - but juggling multiple stacks seems like a waste of my time, since Dungeon Master had that problem solved back in 1987...
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