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In other news, I finally finished playing Women’s Murder Club 2 – A Darker Shade of Grey. Yay me! As always, a good game mystery usually sends me off to the bookstore to pick up a few more of the more old-fashioned variety, and it occurred to me that one thing I’ve never done with this Coffee Break is recommend some of my favorite whodunits! If you love a good, well-written mystery, you might want to try one of these the next time you’re at your favorite local bookshop:
Steven Saylor – the Roma Sub Rosa series
Magnificent historical mysteries set in Rome at the time of Caesar. The background tapestry of ancient life is so detailed and compelling that you’d think the author had access to a time machine.
Susan Conant – the Dog-Lovers’ mysteries
Fluffy mystery novels in both senses of the word. They’re light, fun reading, and the often baffling crimes are framed by tales of life on the dog-show circuit. It’s kind of like watching Westminster, but with a murder or two to make things more interesting.
Rita Mae Brown – the Mrs. Murphy mysteries
Murder most foul, tinted by the quirky politics of life in a small, rural town. Half the fun of these books is trying to figure out the mystery; the other half is seeing what your favorite town oddballs are up to this time.
Of course, if you’ve managed to miss any of my classic favorites – Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters, and Rex Stout – then you should really give them all a read. There’s more than enough to keep you going until the next good mystery videogame comes out!
And speaking of videogames…
Oooooo, shiny!
About once a year, I can’t help but ramble on about Text Twist and how I still play it almost every day. I guess you could call it my default game: if I have ten minutes between a couple of meetings, or I’m waiting for my carpool to pick me up, I tend to indulge in a quick round or two. So, when one of my colleagues asked if I’d seen Wild Word Garden yet, and said it was “a lot like Text Twist”, I couldn’t resist checking it out.
First things first: yes, it actually is quite a bit like Text Twist. (I was surprised. After all, I’ve heard that line before, but nothing’s really been close.) The goal is to make words from a jumble of letters at the bottom of the screen, and the possible solutions for each jumble include at least one word that uses the entire set of letters. The primary difference between the two games, though, is that Wild Word Garden only wants you to find one word of each length: in a six-letter jumble, you need to find one three-letter, one four-letter, one five-letter, and the six-letter word in order to clear the round.
Wild Word Garden also offers a definition for the longest word in a jumble, so if you’re stumped you can ponder what words might fit that definition. As a result, the hardest word to find in a jumble becomes the five-letter combination, which is just long enough to be tricky and doesn’t have a definition. For extra challenge, each round contains a bonus category, and at least one available letter combination will be a word that matches the category. After a few games, I found myself obsessing over making sure I got the bonus word… as if I was somehow less of a gamer if I couldn’t figure it out! All in all, it’s a lot of fun.
One tiny caveat, though: if you’re as much of a word geek as I am, you may encounter a wee bit of frustration with the game’s dictionary; in one round alone, it refused to accept either “anima” or “lamia” as real words. But after the initial grumble of dissent – “of course it’s a word, you silly program!” – I started to regard this as an extra challenge, and now I’m taking it in stride.
I still love TextTwist, of course, but Wild Word Garden is very similar, has a bit more depth to it, and is all shiny-new, so I suspect I’ll be playing it instead for a while. At least until I’ve seen all the possible jumble combinations. Given that I haven’t had a duplicate yet, that may be quite a while indeed!
It’s a word-wrangling double feature
As if one new free word game wasn’t enough, along comes Paradise Island to further consume all my free time. (Woot!) This one’s a little different than most: instead of making words out of individual letters or dictionary definitions, you’re building them from scattered syllables. At the start of each round, you’re given a topic and a whole bunch of half-words. The trick is to make words that match the topic out of all the bits and pieces.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It looks easy as well. After all, each word only has two syllables, so it’s just a matter of matching them up! Ohhhh, but then you see some of the topics. Mathematics. Geology. Some of the most wonderfully obscure or technical words… I love it! And once you’ve managed to clear a board of all its truncated words, you get a bonus screen that makes things even tougher. In the same category as the previous round, you’re given a group of nearly blank word spaces and a bunch of letters: this is your traditional jumble, but with multiple words to fill in from only one pool of letters.
I’ll say this up front: Paradise Island is not a game for anyone who gets flustered in the face of scientific names or archaic words. If the Scrabble dictionary gives you fits, you’ll probably want to avoid this one. But if you salivate at the notion of using some of those odd words you’ve occasionally read but never once heard used in a spoken sentence (along with plenty of the more prosaic variety, of course), this game is definitely for you. It’s certainly for me. I love having to actually think!
This probably won’t be a surprise…
…but I really love cats. Not “crazy cat lady” sort of “love cats”, but I’ve had cats since I was a kid and I’ve always found them to be wonderfully appealing. It might be the purr; it might be the way they want to curl up directly on top of whatever you’re reading so you have to pay attention to them; it might even just be the hours of entertainment they can get from a loose feather or a wad of tinfoil. But I really can’t imagine living without them.
Even if I am mildly allergic. And have to hide them from my landlord. And am down to three tea saucers from a set of eight thanks to feline late-night countertop rampaging. But I love the little nuisances anyway.
Okay, so maybe that does qualify me as a crazy cat lady. But that’s not the point. The point is that I am a sucker for all things cat-related, and that includes games: Granny in Paradise, Pet Shop Hop, and now the very cute little Cat Walk. This is another one of those games that at first seems much too simple, but as soon as you start playing it, you get hooked. The idea is to get a bunch of kittens from the bottom level of a house up several flights of stairs and into the litter box. The trouble is, they’re kittens. And like kittens everywhere, they have the attention span of a mayfly, plus a contrary streak a mile wide. So convincing the entire group of them to go all the way up the stairs in the time allotted – without being distracted by paper airplanes or each other or just their own random minds – is, well, it’s like herding cats.
Quick story only tangentially related to gaming: years ago, when I was in Tech Support, I was on a long-distance call with a man who was having real trouble getting his favorite game to work with the new version of DOS (I told you it was years ago). One of my coworkers had brought in his brand-new kitten for the day and was carrying it around the office to show it off. He put it on my desk, and in less than two seconds, that kitten had leapt straight onto the buttons of my telephone, disconnecting the call. I had to go through our records to look up the man’s phone number and call him back, and to this day, I doubt that he believed me when I told him that it was a kitten who hung up on him…
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