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  Moxie’s Coffee Break

August 25, 2008

The heat is off

You might not think of Seattle as the setting for a withering heat wave, but it has been melty around here lately. And I mean that literally: Netflix is not going to be happy about the newly curved DVD I left on the dashboard of my car. I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but most homes in this city don’t have air conditioning. If it wasn’t for my patio, a lawn chair, and my laptop, I don’t know how I’d have survived the past two weeks!

On the upside, it did start cooling down again a few days ago.  With any luck, we’ll be back to our standard overcast-but-pleasant weather soon, hopefully with a bit of actual rain. Autumn is usually when Seattle lives up to its reputation of constant drizzle, and I’m quite looking forward to it.

So what’s the silver lining in our recent lack of clouds? One last huge blast of summer color in all the gardens around here! I can’t remember the last time we had such a magnificent display this late in the season: roses of every color, drooping fuchsias, speckly pink stargazer lilies, gladiolas twice the size they usually grow, huge white magnolia blooms… it’s absolutely amazing. If I ever win the lottery, I swear I’m going to buy five acres in the middle of nowhere and just cover it in flowers for every season.

In the meanwhile, I’ll have to settle for what I can grow in my window boxes. And my latest digital addiction…

Blooming good fun
Considering how obsessed I’ve been lately with flowers in the real world, I shouldn’t be surprised at my fondness for Flowerz. But it’s more than just an idle wish to be out in the garden; this free web game would be challenging enough to keep me playing even if the flowers were replaced with, say, colorful beetles or some kind of fruit. I had the opportunity to try Flowerz when it was still in development; I was already entranced with it then, but once I saw the final version… well, now I’m hooked.

In essence, Flowerz is a color-based match-three game, but it shouldn’t be confused with Bejeweled, Zuma, or others in the genre. Rather than shuffling or targeting objects already on the game board, you’ll be placing every flower yourself, exactly where you want it. As you’d probably expect, this makes it very easy to match a group of colors on the first couple of levels.

On later levels, though, when you have twice as many colors to deal with, it’s not so simple. Trying to separate the board into color-coded regions works only so long as there are enough places to set aside for new colors. Oh, and if your eye isn’t twitching already by the time you’ve conquered a few levels, never fear: some flowers have two colors, and matching the first one leaves behind a flower of the second color. Usually right in the middle of a bunch of other colors, unless you’ve been planning reeeeeally well.

In short, not only is Flowerz a lot of fun, but also a serious workout for the sorting-and-organizing side of your brain. If you’re a match-three fan looking for a new challenge, or a weekend gardener sitting in a cubicle somewhere dreaming of daisies, I highly recommend this game!

Road trip!
So, as of the last Coffee Break, I was quite gleefully making my way through Jewel Quest III, confident that by this week, I’d be long since finished and ready to enthuse about it all over again. After all, the Jewel Quest series has always been one of my big favorites. But as they say, the best-laid plans of, um, gamers and girls often go awry. Or something like that. In my case, what went awry was the appearance of the latest game in another of my all-time favorite series: Tradewinds Caravans.

If you haven’t played the Tradewinds series before, you might wonder what could possibly make me (even temporarily) abandon an enjoyable, well-designed game with an excellent story. The answer is an enjoyable, well-designed game with an excellent story and a great sense of humor. Geeky, referential humor is endemic to the Tradewinds games; if a movie, cartoon, television series, book, or anything else is particularly popular with the sort of people who go to science fiction or videogame conventions, you’re practically guaranteed to see it referenced somewhere in Tradewinds (or the Westward series, also by the same developers).

So yes, even my beloved Jewel Quest went on the back burner for a while so I could try my luck on the Silk Road. Rather incongruously, Tradewinds Caravans involves no actual trade winds: this time, the game is all about moving cargo overland by horseback and camel. Bandits replace the series’ customary pirate ships, and you can hire guards to keep them away from your goods as you travel. One nice change is the ability to “walk” your characters from one town to another instead of simply telling them to go there. This often gives you a chance to avoid bandit attacks if you see them coming from far enough away. As always, you can choose between several starting characters, each with their own storyline: I couldn’t help but pick the one that pokes a bit of fun at the classic Chinese epic, Journey to the West. I still have a long way to go before I complete the character’s main goal, but in the meanwhile, I’m doing quite well as a roving merchant!

Of course, I still plan to finish Jewel Quest III. But first, there’s a matter of 50 Mongolian ponies I’ve promised to deliver to a stablemaster in Tradewinds Caravans.

That’s a lot of ponies, and this could take a while.

Meet MSN Games!
This is an exciting month for us; we’re going to be at two public events in the next few weeks! We’re hoping to meet as many players as possible, give away some free stuff, and debut… *insert drumroll here* …our new game booklet, “Moxie’s Favorite Puzzles”! I’m so psyched!

Penny Arcade Expo: August 29-31, Seattle, WA
Look for the black Microsoft Casual Games t-shirts throughout the show! We’ll be handing out cool buttons and free Hexic download cards, and telling the world about the essential awesomeness of our games. Seriously, PAX is the gamer event of the year, so if you’re planning to be anywhere near Seattle that weekend, you should attend!

AARP Life@50+ Expo: September 4-6, Washington DC
Because there’s no such thing as “too old to play games” (and, let’s be honest, since Chicago and Paul Simon will be in concert there!), we’re making a stop at AARP’s 50th anniversary event this year. Look for the MSN Games crew at Microsoft’s retro-‘50s Diner, enjoy some ice cream, and pick up your free copy of Moxie’s Favorite Puzzles! If you solve all the puzzles in the book, there’s a surprise waiting for you here on the site… but that’s all I’m gonna say!

Tech Talk
Another gameplay tip for you this week, since a lot of folks seem to have trouble the first few times they play Desktop Tower Defense. The secret to success in this game is placing the right towers at the right time. Keep in mind that you can drop a tower on the screen at any time, as long as you have enough cash to buy it.

At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a list of enemy types, in the order they plan to invade. Keep an eye on this list as you play; if, for instance, a group of flying creeps is on the way, you may want to place an extra anti-air tower in their path before they even appear on the screen.

The two most important things to keep in mind, though, are that A) you generally need good coverage for both walking and flying creeps, and B) they’re prone to wander both above and below the center line of the desktop. So if you place an air-only tower on one part of the screen to foil the current invasion, try to place a ground-only tower in the same area as soon as you get the chance.

Good luck with the creeps, and I’ll see you next time!

Ask Moxie!
Do you have a question or comment? I’d love to hear from you. Just email me at zmaster@microsoft.com and I’ll do my best to answer in one of these Coffee Breaks! Oh, please make sure to include your MSN Games nickname, so I know who to list here if I quote you!
 
(And if you have technical questions or problems with a game, we’ll cheerfully answer those as well. Just submit them through the support section of this site!)

More Moxie!
Need a bit more Coffee Break? Take a shuffle through our archives.