Clockwords: Prelude

Words games are very popular right now. Almost everyone I know plays or has played Words with Friends. Clockwords: Prelude has a similar word making theme with very active, even frantic gameplay.

Well done art in the comic book like intro.

The story starts up with you taking the role of an inventor in Victorian London. Your rival, a fiendish man with a top hat and a mustache, sends mechanized insects to attack your safe and steal your secrets. The art and music of the game are very well done, and make the game that much better.

After watching the intro, the game teaches you how to play. The game is simple to learn, but the later levels become quite complex. The insects that are approaching you can be destroyed by your new invention that converts words into ammunition. Each letter of the word will do one point of damage to the insects. The dark colored letters such as the D in doctored below are iron letters. Each iron letter will do 5 damage per dot underneath the letter. So the D is worth ten damage in this picture. Finally, each word can only be used once. If you attempt to use the same word twice, each letter will count for zero damage, but will still take the time to shoot. The delay of the wasted letters could cost you the game in a panic situation. Adding an "S" is different enough to avoid the penalty, but if you get too many letter "x"s or "z"s, it can be hard to keep placing them.

At the start of the level only one tank (or one special letter) is available, but once you use it you will have two tanks and the ability to use two special letters in a word. If you use all the special letters in the same word, you will unlock the next tank, allowing you to make larger and larger words. Although the bugs start off with low amounts of life, they take more and more effort to kill on each level.

Additionally, if they reach the safe and are killed on the way back, the secrets will drop where they do, allowing the next passing insect to pick it up instead of going all the way down to the safe. The machine will try to fire on the closest insect to the safe, or the insect carrying your secrets, but it will often hit a bug between it and its target, so the best bet is to try and stop the insects before they reach the safe.

After completing a level, whether you pass or fail, you might find some extra letters you can use. Letters are placed into storage until you enter The Boiler, shown below. The boiler screen allows you to manage the special letters that will appear during the game. Letters are given dots based on how hard they are to get into words. The letter A only has one dot (5 damage) while the letter Y has four dots(20 damage). You can place two of the same letter in the green tank where the G is to create a random letter of the next level. (So two Gs might make a M). The trick is to make sure you have a good variety of letters in the boiler to be able to always have something to play.

Once you manage to get two iron letters to level five, you can transmute them to make a level 1 special letter. There are two types of special letters, Jade and Brass. Jade letters make all of your letters do more damage, and Brass letters cause all of your Iron letters to explode, doing damage over a small range. In order to level up the special letters, you'll need to wait until you have two of the same letter and same material. A jade/bronze and an iron will give you a different lettered jade/bronze of the same level as the special.

As you progress you'll be scrambling to think of new words and encountering stronger and more numerous bugs. Although you'll have some trouble as you progress, by continuing to work at your collection in the boiler, you should eventually be able to get past the level giving you trouble. With forty levels, there is a lot of value for your money. Speaking of money, another strong point in Clockwords: Prelude's favor is that it is available to play for free here!

With all that in mind, you should check it out, especially if you like words games.

Dungeon Raid

I actually found out about this game over a week ago and I have been attempting to bring this review to you since then, but this game is very addicting!  On to the review.

Dungeon raid is a puzzle RPG for iOS, but I have to stress, it is not like Puzzle Quest.  In a good way.  (I really liked Puzzle Quest, but the computer cheats.  End of sentence.)  Back to Dungeon raid, the basic game is a matching game, match at least three tiles and something happens.  To match you simply draw a line around the tiles.  As you can see above, diagonals are allowed, and you can even cross the line over itself on a diagonal if you need to.  Matching three tiles gives you the benefits of the tiles you clear, but every tile beyond the third one has a chance to give you an extra tile.  You can increase the percentage to 100% by leveling up in the game.

The catch is that after every match you make, any skulls on the screen attack you.  The skull in the screenshot has 3 numbers next to him from top to bottom that that is his attack, defense, and life.  The combined attack of all skulls on the screen minus your armor comes out of your life which is the red pot in the lower right.  

Here are the different types of tiles that you can match:

• Skulls, matching three or more skulls does your base damage to it. (The number below the skull at the bottom of the screen or 4 in the screenshot)  Skulls are only cleared if you do enough damage to bring its life below zero.  When you clear a skull experience is added to the green bar at the bottom of the screen.
• Swords, by themselves do nothing, but when matched with a skull they add the weapon damage to your attack for each sword in the match. (Weapon damage is the number below the sword at the bottom of the screen or 2 in the screenshot above)  So two skulls and two swords would hit both skulls for 8 damage following the numbers from the screenshot.
• Potions, these restore your life when you match them.
• Coins, which fill up the coin box in the lower left.  When the box is filled you can select one new piece of equipment, which will typically upgrade maximum armor, health, or weapon damage.
• Shields, which replenish you armor to make you take less damage from monster attacks.  Any shields that you pick up when your armor is full start to fill up the blue upgrade bar at the bottom of the screen.  Once this is filled you are able to upgrade one piece of your equipment.  There are many different types of upgrades, including the possibility to upgrade any stat, add life stealing to your attacks, counterattacking the monsters, and more.

As you clear skulls and build experience, you'll level up which will let you pick skills to use.  The skills don't cost anything to use, but after they are used you need to wait for them to become ready for use again.  Picking the same skill multiple times during level ups will reduce the cool-down time by one turn.

The stats on the skulls slowly increase as you play so you need to try and get the most out of every turn or you will be overwhelmed.  The bonus tiles you get from the larger matches will add up quickly into more upgrades, levels, and equipment.

To make things interesting, every so often a super skull will appear with special powers.  These powers range from nice things like being worth tons of money but running away after a few turns, to bad things like freezing tiles so they can't be cleared, to really bad things like preventing damage to all other skulls until its dead, or turning one sword into a skull each round.

Killing these boss skulls can drop trophies which will let you unlock new classes and level up classes.  Classes add a lot of replay value to the game.  Each class has a specific perk and flaw that they start with, a special skill that only they can use, and a new race.  Each race has an ability, and a mortal enemy (One of the special skulls that gets additional powers).  As you advance the class's level, you unlock the ability to add in other class' perks, flaws, and skills.  

Skill choice screen.

The class select screen is shown on the left, and the perk select screen is on the right above here.  As you can see the rogue is level one right now, so I don't have the option to customize anything, but he does get +10% bonus gold chance that the default adventurer wouldn't get.  Unfortunately 3% of the shields that appear will be broken and worthless.  The starting race for the rogue class is very good, and you need to level the class to five to unlock the race to be used in a different class.  The last tab is the skill tab.  The skill showing in the tab is the classes' special skill, it will always appear on the first level up, and cannot be replaced with another skill.  You can unlock it for use in other classes by leveling the class to level 10.  You can also customize which skills appear in the game by dragging them up from the lower bar to replace the ones on the grid.  You gain this option every other level up in the class.

The game has four difficulty levels for you to go through as you become more skilled in the game.  It also has a very through tutorial mode right off of the main menu.  With ten classes, perks, and flaws, and a lot of skills, you can really play this game many different ways.  It is easy enough for a non-gamer to pick up and love, but the harder modes will provide a challenge unless you get a strategy down.

My current favorite strategy is to combine collection skills with Treasure Chamber.  Treasure chamber makes it so that any new tile that falls down is a coin until your next move.  Collection skills pick up all of one type of tile giving you credit for the tile and bonuses, but do not count as a move.  This can lead to getting multiple screens worth of all coins, lots of upgrades, and a good chance of surviving that next Assassin skull that drops down.

Those four skills combo very well.

Summary:  This is easily the best game I have played on my iPhone.  If you play games on your iPhone you should try it.  There is a lite version that you can play for free as well as the full version which costs $2.99.  If you get half as much play out of it as I have, it is worth several times the asking price.  Go get this!

Battleheart

There are an amazing amount of iPhone Games, but most don't end up on my phone.  Battleheart is the first new game (or app) to make it onto my phone in several months.  One of my friends recommended it to me, and I have to say, it is the best iPhone Game I've played this year! (so far) (sample size is also 1).  Without further ado:

Battleheart starts with a little intro on how to play and than its off to the first level with a knight and a healer. The game-play is fun and simple; drag a damage dealer to a monster to get them to attack, and drag a healer onto a party member to heal them.  When a melee monster is hit with a melee attack he will change targets to whoever hit him.  You can use this to keep them from killing off your magic users.  Ranged attackers are uncontrollable, so should generally be taken down first.

After the first level you can use the tavern to hire more party members up to a maximum party size of four.  As you go through the map, your characters gain gold and experience.  The art is very nice, with everything including the monsters looking fairly cute.  Each character also starts with a skill that you can activate by clicking on them and tapping the icon in the upper left corner of the screen. 

Every 5 levels you can assign them a new skill at the Academy.  The skill that the character starts with and the skill at level 25 are chosen for you but for every other skill point you can select one of two choices.  Usually, but not always this is a trade off between damage or support.  One of my favorite parts of the game is that once you make a skill choice, you are *NOT* stuck with it, you can change it at any time and without fee at the Academy.  I cannot stress enough what a welcome change of pace this is from Blizzard's draconian skill policies of the past.  (I'm looking at you Diablo II, World of Warcraft and all the imitators of both)  Moving on.

The money you get can be used to hire new characters at the tavern, buy equipment at the merchant, or upgrade equipment at the armory.  The armory is also where you equip your characters.  Each character can equip a weapon, armor and two accessories.  You can upgrade weapons or armor to the next best item of its class, but it is massively more expensive than buying it at the merchant or finding it after a map.  (You always find one item after each map.)  The only thing is the merchant sells a random mix of items that changes after every battle, so upgrades might be your best bet anyways.

The game has over 30 stages, in which monsters attack you in waves.  These are for the most part easy, until you get to the last 8 or so which are a huge step up in difficulty.  There are five boss fights, and these are anything but easy.  First they are immune to any support skills, they have area of effect attacks in addition to a punishing close range attack, and they all repeatedly call regular monsters in to back them up.

There are also arena stages where you can fight to win rare items.  In my experience this is a waste of time.  If you are having trouble beating a stage, replaying a normal stage will get you gold, experience, and an item.  An arena will only get you an item unless you clear it, and lasts much longer than a normal stage.

One thing I didn't like is that the later stages and the boss fights were very hectic.  (The only thing that comes to mind as a comparison was raiding in World of Warcraft, except you are playing all ten characters yourself.)  At times you need to be moving and using skills with all of your characters at the same time.  And while I found that you can use multiple fingers to do this, my hand makes a better door than a window.  I was a little frustrated with losing a stage due to not being able to input commands fast enough.  A Balder's Gate style combat system (real time but with the ability to pause to enter commands) would have been nice.

No achievement system is in the game yet, but real vampire hunters don't do it for the points.

Final Thoughts:

It took me about 12.5 hours to complete the game and almost all of it was enjoyable.  For four out of the five bosses I had to grind some levels in order to beat them.  Still, it is as I mentioned a lot of fun, and the large amount of characters give the game some replay.    It only costs $2.99, but is a good price for the amount of time it entertains.  Most console games are around 20-30 hours for 20 times the price.

Untitled Monstrosity

This really was supposed to be a post on my favorite Christmas movie.  I'm not really sure what happened, but I apologize anyways.

You may have noticed, but almost certainly did not care that there hasn't been a blog post around here for quite some time.  Originally I was planning on skirting this issue; hoping that a shiny new blog post about my favorite Christmas movie would distract you from my apparent laziness in much the way that shiny things distracts me from updating my blog... wait scratch that last part.  Since you take the time to read this nonsense, I thought I owed it to you to let you know what is really going on here.  The truth is far more terrifying then the pleasant fiction I created in this paragraph, so only continue if you are not easily frightened.

Last month I participated in nanowrimo, which is a fancy word for writing a novel in a month.  Their definition of a novel is any work of fiction of at least 50,000 words.  Nanowrimo is actually a ton of fun, and I highly recommend doing it, but that's a story for another day.  As the month went on, I found it difficult to keep up with the hectic nanowrimo schedule and write here at the same time, but I knew that I could finish the project and come back here.  Or so I thought...

After finishing nanowrimo I proudly printed out what I had written and looked over it.  It needed to be proofread and edited, but I would work on that in January.  Right now I thought I had earned a month off, but I had thought wrong.  In my haste to finish and move on with my life, I had forgotten an important principle Friedrich Nietzsche mentioned: Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.  From this it follows that if you write a book, the book also writes you!  By writing the book I had told it what its world was like, and opened up the door for it to tell me what my world is like. Slowly but surely that manuscript began to exert control over me.

I cursed my blind ambition as the book started controlling my life.  While I longed to tear up the carpet and install a hardwood floor down there, my new overlord would not permit anything of the sort.

"I'm not writing any more words for you this year!" I shouted at it defiantly.

The book stared at me and I was reminded of an unfunny joke I had heard as a child: Where does a 50,000lb  gorilla sit?  The answer is anywhere it wants.  The novel had accumulated a similar bulk and started throwing its weight around to dictate policy.  The untitled monstrosity gave me an ultimatum; if I was not going to update it, then I could do nothing productive at all!  I was forced to play video games, watch movies and catch up on my web comics.  Whenever I would think about defying it, a horrific manifestation of its presence filled my mind, threatening me with its countless words and its endless punctuation marks.  So many words that a mind might break!

I drew a picture of it here so you can see why I have been living in fear of it.  As you can see, an evil face appears to have formed on the back cover.  To intimidate me, the book has placed the skulls of several small horned creatures that it has already killed.  The message is clear, mess with it, and I would be next.  Finally, the book appeared to have a blazing inferno behind it which makes it seem very menacing.  In retrospect, a raging inferno is probably not a good thing to stand in front of if you are made out of paper.  I valiantly shoved  my evil creation into the fire, buying my freedom.

I still cannot sleep soundly, knowing that I must one day complete the manuscript, and print out that dread tome once more.

Doodle Devil

It was brought to my attention that the creators of the Doodle God game has a new game out for Halloween, Doodle Devil.  According to its advertisement in the store, this game will let you destroy everything you created in the Doodle God game.  Well that sounds like a change of pace from the tough element creation plaguing the end of Doodle God.  Let's check it out.  It should be noted that this costs the same amount as Doodle God, $0.99.

Spooky

Does the promise of a new type of game play interest you?  Well don't get your hopes up, because by destroying the world what they actually mean is creating a bunch of new elements.  These elements you are a assured will destroy the world for you.  Gotta watch out for nasty things like Friendship and religion, they will apparently destroy the world.  The point is, if you enjoyed playing the original game, you'll likely enjoy this.

The game play is clicking two elements to create new ones.  Some are logical, such as computer and computer creates internet.  Some are attempted social commentary such as television and human creates zombies.  It does prove that you are better off using the internet than watching television though, you still become a zombie, but you get friendship too!  Some combinations only make sense in hindsight such as human and copyright gives you lawyer.  Some don't make any sense to me whatsoever.  Rat and air creates dove.  I've heard pigeons are the rats of the sky, but I never heard doves lumped into that category.  Hints are obviously really useful in this game as a lot of the combinations did not seem logical to me at all.

Additionally, there is currently as of 11/8/2010 a bug with the hint system.  When I only had two elements left, the hint that shows you some of these elements may combine brought me to two categories full of elements, none of which reacted to form new elements.  I dutifully kept at it, eventually testing them all.  It put me to brute forcing the last combinations though, which isn't a ton of fun.

This game is not connected with an achievement network yet, so there is no way to show off your progress.  You can, however, spam your element creations on Facebook, if your are seeking a way to get your friends to hide your status updates. Clicking extras will let you download two images to your phone.  Under credits you can donate an additional 0.99$ whenever you feel like it.

Final Thoughts:
If you love Doodle God, and want to play what amounts to one chapter of the same game for the price of four with no mini-games or achievements, then this is for you.  In their defense they have promised to update both games, but as of right now, I say just stick with Doodle God.  The mini-games and quests are needed to avoid boredom from setting in.

epicurious

I like to shop for groceries.  I know that's weird, but I enjoy picking out healthy foods that are tasty, and trying to get a good deal as well.  Maybe its the challenge.  In any case, sometimes I get excited and buy food without any clear idea of how I am going to prepare it.  In this example it was Bluefish.  As you can see Wikipedia left me hanging.

Epicurious is a free application to help you find recipes using things you may already have at home.  The recipes are mostly taken from Gourmet magazines and websites including Gourmet magazine, Bon Appetit, and more.  They are all tested out and most of them are reviewed by your peers.

When you first launch the application you'll get some seasonal recipe suggestions, my recommendation is to click the big find a recipe button below these.  This will bring up epicurious' powerful search engine.  You can search for meals by Main Ingredient.  You can search for meals by course which is shown in the picture to the right.  Options include Appetizer, Breakfast, Brunch, Buffet, Dessert, Dinner, First Course, Hors D'Oeuvres, Lunch, Main Course, Side, and Snack.  You can choose by cuisine which will allow you to select every type of food you've heard of, and a few I'm sure you haven't.  The Dietary Considerations can be amazing if you are having guests over that can't eat certain foods.  It lets you filter the recipes gluten free, low sugar, low sodium, kosher, Vegetarian, Vegan, Low Cal, and several others.  Dish type lets you select from Sauce or Soups, Stuffings or Vegetables.  If you are looking for special Valentine's Day or Halloween recipes, Season or Occasion can help.

At the very bottom is a search box, which you can combine with any of the above categories.  I type in Bluefish, with Dinner selected, and peruse the three entries  I find one with a good picture that was rated 96% would make again based on 25 reviews.

Looks Good to me!

Next I click on recipe to look at what ingredients I need to make it as well as how long it takes to make.  I can also read the reviews by clicking reviews (shocking).

Since I like this recipe, I click the plus button and add it to my shopping list.  This gives me a checklist of everything I need to make this recipe.  You can put more than recipe in there at once.  Once you have the information on the list, you can check off the things you already have to prevent double-buying confusion.  You can also email the shopping list to someone if you can manage to get someone else to do the running around for you.  I have never gotten to use that feature myself.

I don't think I need to do Pros and Cons for this one.  Basically its a free application that is really useful.  On the negative side, I've heard some stories of random crashes, but my wife and I have not seen any yet.

Final Thoughts:
Epicurious has a very simple to use interface that connects you with over 25,000 delicious recipes, most of them with pictures and reviews.  Everything that I have made off of this thing has been delicious, and it is very easy to organize shopping trips with the shopping list feature.  Yes, there are ads, but they allow you to get all the above for free.  If you never knew how to prepare a certain ingredient, want to impress guests, or are bored of eating the same old thing, check this application out, because it is great.

Halloween Candy

It was requested that we take a look at the nutritional value of all the Halloween candy you just earned or had left over.  This then will let you know which candy bars are going to give you trans fat, and which have no fat. Also, see if you can guess which candy has as much saturated (bad) fat as eleven strips of bacon.

No you can't you greedy Pirate!

Starting with not-going-to-kill-you-if-you-eat-one and working down, here is a list of my favorites in the Halloween candy field.  I tried to keep my comments and comparisons with steak to a minimum.

Starburst were one of my favorites when I was a kid.  They are tasty and individually wrapped, which can possibly help you control the amount you eat.  Of course each chew is 60% sugar, but one chew is only 5 grams, so if you limit your portions, then you aren't doing too badly.  Another point in Starburst's favor is their complete lack of fat.

A fun size package of Skittles while having 20% of your vitamin C and being coated in insect secretions, also contains 15 grams of sugar in a 20 gram serving equaling a candy that is 75% sugar.  No wonder the rainbow tastes so good.  Skittles are a low fat food for what that's worth.

The miniature Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are only 7grams.  1 gram of that is saturated fat, 3 grams are sugar.  So not great for you, but if you only eat one small one, its a fairly ignorable offense.  You do get 1 gram of protein as well.

Butterfingers never really appealed to me as a kid or an adult.  I hate the sensation of the candy getting stuck in my teeth.  An 18g fun size bar has 8 grams of sugar and 2 grams (10%) of your saturated (bad) fat for the day.

Kit Kat bars taste pretty good and they were at one point my favorite candy bar, but I overdid it on them a long time ago.  Looking at the minis which you can have 5 of, or the snack size, of which you can have 3 (2 bars each), they are both about 42 grams of candy, giving you 210 calories.  Which is a lot, but then we are looking at candy not at granola bars.  One serving has 21 grams of sugar so it is exactly 50% sugar.  They do however contain a large portion of saturated (bad) fat.

Rolo's are a candy that I did enjoy, but they manage to be 60% or more sugar by weight, and they have 35% of your daily saturated (bad) fat.  The ingredient list shows Trans fat as well.  Why do the ones we love hurt us?

Snickers are another candy bar I never really cared for.  In this case not a bad choice.  Snickers fun size bars are 15 grams of which 8 grams are sugar.  They also contain Trans Fat, so steer clear.

My favorite candy is of course the worst candy you can eat, Twix.  As much as I love these bars one 57 gram package has more than half of your days saturated(bad) fat and has the deadly Trans Fat as well.  Twix bars taste great for sure, but ounce for ounce they have more saturated fat then Prime Rib!  Not that I have the option, but I'd rather have the steak, especially since I can skip the trans fat and the 28 grams of sugar.   Apparently you should stay away from caramel in candy bars.

Final Thoughts:
Candy is not healthy, but you should be able to have it in moderation... unless you are eating a Twix bar.  In that case you are better off eating ten strips of bacon because that would have less saturated fat.  (Seriously)  Make sure you read the labels and avoid anything with Partially Hydrogenated anything.