Author: Leprekawn

Mobile gaming.  In my new paradigm for gaming, I’ve allowed mobile games to have some of my money.  So I’ve been through Puzzles and Dragons, Fallout Shelter, a very sparing amount of Alphabear and most recently Dragonvale and Crusader’s Quest.

PAD is among my favorites for it’s puzzles.  It gives you a collection system for gathering various monsters, doesn’t require any cash investment and the gameplay is among the best features.  At once “Bejeweled” but with adventure elements and your turns aren’t timed so you’re working to make awesome combos.  Limited Time events, a calendar rotation of special dungeons and a normal progression that will keep you challenged for months, PAD ranks as #1 on my “got time to kill on your commute” list.

Also, if you’re the research intensive gamer as I am, here are two sites that can help you get a grasp on what you’re looking at.

Puzzle and Dragons database

PADherder

In fact, here is my updated PADherder page, a wall of trophies if you will.

PAD on Google Play

PAD on iTunes

Crusader’s Quest is my newest addiction.  Gameplay so reminiscent of old Super Nintendo style that I’ve found it wholly distracting.  Coupled with minimalist gameplay, its easy to pick up for a single area and then put it down again while you stand in line or wait for the bus.

on Google

on iTunes

That’s it for today.  I picked up Battlefield 4 recently, Premium Edition is on sale at roughly 20 bucks.  Some of my other friends are playing, notably Katie of katieplays.com and we team up for hijinx and mayhem as occasion allows.

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I have the worst luck.  Off traipsing across the countryside in Minecraft semi-aware of my own mortality looking for rare flowers and roots.  I’d actually found several when I fell into a watery hole I couldn’t escape.

..I nearly threw my mouse across the room.  That’s the hazard of a wireless mouse.

 

In other news, I’m trying to organize a guest blog about Witcher 3.  We’ll see what happens.

 

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..nearly the end. At least for my Minecraft server. I was plagued by problems I couldn’t seem to resolve. I spent most of this recent Memorial Day weekend troubleshooting an odd amount of CPU lag that resulted in terrible gameplay performance.

It was Mystcraft. And while I shall miss it, the adventures it was sure to provide, I won’t lose any sleep over it. The server runs much better and I’m nearly back to where I was Saturday evening when it all came apart.

For the interested I’m running these mods under Minecraft 1.7.10

Ars Magica 2
Thaumcraft 4
Bibliocraft

These mods are additive and provide an alternate course through the normal Minecraft progression. Ars Magica being focused around spells you carry with you in a spellbook and various boss monsters you can summon. Thaumcraft is more about Alchemy and Artifice and about combining elements to create new bits. Golems, enchanted lanterns and powerful staves are to be found here. Together with Bibliocraft I have things to build, discover and collect and a means to keep them. Bibliocraft on it’s own is quite enjoyable as it gives you bookcases and potion racks you can see your items stored upon.

Biomes O’Plenty for the plethora of additional terrain features. Treecapitator for a quality of life upgrade.

Thuamic Tinkerer and Forbidden Magic are addons for Thaumcraft adding some elements to the system I’d played with before and that I really liked. Chickenchunks as it lets me setup a farm that will cook over time while the server is running. If you play single-player this isn’t useful at all. Antique Atlas as it provides a classic “old-time” book you can build that is immediately better than the ingame map (and for less effort). There’s some tweaks for making it work with Biomes O’Plenty but that’s a discussion you can follow on the official minecraft forums.

I’ll finalize this with one of my more favorite mods in the collection, Butterflymania. This is pure personal interest. With over 200 butterflies of varying rarity and biome requirement it’s there as a rainy-day “Let’s just run around and do whatever” focus.

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It was delving into Tekkit around day 3 that I started to see what this was about. Some mods focus on automating tedium of mining, collecting, refining and producing. Operating within FTB’s “Magic World 2” there were so many chests in my fortress, you almost needed a map to know where things were. But it was an adventure as each little extra bit of the mods asked for another resource I hadn’t stocked up.

Tekkit added a lot of materials to build, a lot of technology to improve upon the experience. But to me, Minecraft has always been a magical journey. A world wracked by strange forces.

So I started thinking about an earlier idea. Building my own modpack.

I did it and so I once again construct a fortress of solitude. Though this time I can husband Bees and collect Butterflies.

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I decided to fire up another minecraft server. Poke around with some high-tech stuff, see how it compares to the magic I experienced in another modpack. Almost immediately I found a portal to a netherspace where I encountered a big red eye and spent 10 minutes falling through Limbo. I found my way out, but I experienced a sense of loathing and fear I hadn’t had in a long time.

Actually, the fear I hadn’t felt since my first days play Dying Light. An experience I’m not interested in revisiting.

I haven’t actually built anything tech-related yet. So far it’s “Build a house, start a farm, fend off zombies”.

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I’m almost a sucker for 4x games where I can manage a space empire and conquer worlds with earth-shattering weapons. So it was by this personal problem I picked up Star Ruler 2 and StarDrive 2. We’ll talk about both today, for they each have traits I find appealing.

I’m a fan of long-winded space strategy. If I can manage my empire, colonize moons and asteroids, build star-rupturing bombs and harvest space-dust into new worlds then I’m in my happy place. For that reason I still play Space Empires for time to time.

Star Ruler 2 caught my attention in one gameplay review when at 4 minutes in the reviewer was looking at ship design. Your ships are single modules with an amount of space attached to it symbolizing the size/power of the module. For example, you could have one big engine or many small engines pushing you around the map. Research is managed through a large flat development map where your research points are spent to buy a project (as opposed to the usual “Invest until complete” model).

Notably Star Ruler 2 plays in realtime and plays like an RTS with each planet being a resource hub, colony ships being deployed as a tiny train to the destination planet. It plays like some other stripped down 4x games and while It’s got some really neat elements (I like ship design and research) I’m less fond of the fleet management model. It has elements that make me think it’s still in some form of development and for that I hold onto my interest in case it matures into a game I inadvertently spend 100 hours in.

StarDrive 2 came up because I have StarDrive 1 and rather liked other parts of it’s design. It plays on a turn-based direction and features a micromanaged ship design where you select a component, it’s size and then have to place it in the limited amount of space for the ship you’re working with. It features alien races referenced from popular media in cluding one Mythos-inspired “tentacle face” alien culture. This game feels the most polished but it uses an interesting research approach where you have the choice of several categories and in each category you have several options. Once you research one of those options that category updates to new options and you are unable to research the old options any further. This does force you into some interesting strategic choices but leads to some frustrating ones.

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Cities isn’t hard. Some people will tell you this. You should politely tell them it’s not hard, it’s just that SimCity is easy.

And it is. I don’t really have to consider population education level when growing my city in SC.

Now let me tell you about a little offshoot of new industry we’ll call “Can’t hire enough people stupid enough to work here”. It was a Problem.

Then I crossed the magical 7500 people mark and presto, problem solved. See, I had a mess of old-industry holdouts that were properly staffed and had no problems. So when I converted them to Offices the system of Education balance corrected itself.

Now I can’t seem to stop growing.

It’s good, Get it. It’s leagues better than SimCity. Leagues.

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