| 
| | September 14, 2007
Back in the game
Much as I love taking vacation, there’s also an undeniable thrill to being back here at work, catching up on all the latest games! (Although I will admit that my Xbox gamerscore got a bit of a bump over the past two weeks. You didn’t think I could go that long without playing something, did you?) Anyway, it’s great to be back, and my typing fingers are just itching to rattle out a brand-new Coffee Break! | |
| Fairly Grimm tails
Once again, I have fallen prey to that oh-so-stereotypical female trait: I just love cute things! I loaded up Grimm’s Hatchery last week, and it took about… oh, thirty seconds, maybe, for me to get completely hooked on it. In this game, you’re the child of a local nobleman who has recently died, leaving everything to your evil step-brother. A caveat in his will, however, says that if you can raise 300,000 coins within a certain number of days, the castle is yours and your brother’s out on his butt. And through some unfathomable deductive leap, you’ve decided to make your fortune by… hatching and raising adorable little pet monsters. | |
| You start the game with one critter, a handful of coins, some food, and the key to an unassuming little hatchery in the low-rent section of the kingdom. Your total net worth? Something like 30 coins. From this, you must build your stock of eggs, buy and sell creatures, protect them from bigger, nastier monsters (and the occasional garden gnome or killer bunny, a la Monty Python), invest in new properties and weapons, and hopefully reclaim your birthright.
And did I mention that it’s cute? Yeah. It’s fluffy-little-griffons and stumpy-little-dragons cute. As you progress to bigger (and cleaner) towns, you’ll also be able to use the Pet Lab, where you can combine certain eggs to make brand-new monsters. For example, a green dragonfly egg and a blue dragonfly egg combine to make a green dragon. The better the monster, the more its eggs are worth! | | 
| |
| Anyway, it’s fairly easy to finish the game on Easy mode, but apparently there are three separate endings, so now I’m working my way through on Medium, and then I’ll try Insane. Not only do I want to see all the endings, but it’s so challenging to balance everything that I won’t be satisfied until I am the ultimate breeder of dragons, firebirds, and magical geese!
Hop It!
I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but when I was a young’un, our family took a lot of road trips. We traveled all over the country in the old family Buick, in search of historic monuments, scenic sights, and the occasional strange tourist attraction. As a kid, I had little interest in the destinations my parents had chosen – if it wasn’t a theme park or a camping spot, I was just along for the ride – but I remember with great fondness every stop at Stuckey’s along the way. Why? Well, it certainly wasn’t the food. But every table at this ubiquitous Southern roadside stop had at least one challenging peg puzzle! They were all variations on a theme: a group of holes was drilled in a piece of wood, and every hole except one held some sort of peg (usually a golf tee). The object of the game was to jump one peg over another one to an empty spot, and hopefully end up with only one peg left on the board. We took a lot of road trips, so I became really, really good at this game.
Okay, so fast-forward about 25 years. I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw one of these peg games. For that matter, I’m pretty sure that the majority of Stuckey’s have gone the way of the dodo as well (sad to say). But now the folks at Carbonated Games have released the closest cousin I’ve ever seen: Hop It! Of course, you can do a lot more things with a computer game than you can with a piece of wood and some golf tees, so Hop It! is a far more interesting game, with plenty of variation. But the basic idea is still the same: hop pegs over each other and try to remove all but one from the board. Now if only it was as easy as it sounds!
(And if only I was still as good at it as I was when I was younger! D’oh! Practice, practice, practice…)
Which reminds me, this month’s Casually Speaking feature is all about one of the Hop It! developers. Take a peek if you get the chance; it’s a fun read! | |
| Tech talk
Thanks to the members of the 1000 Badges Club, we’ve realized that some of our Mastery Level 10 badges are so difficult that you practically need divine intervention to achieve them. Obviously, that’s not what we intended! So our intrepid support staff have selflessly sacrificed their evenings and lunch hours for the past few weeks, playing these games over and over in order to determine the optimal achievable score. In the end, we revised the scores on more than a dozen of our games, in order to make Mastery 10 more a matter of skill than of luck. These are the games:
Diner Dash 2
Gem Shop
Hardwood Solitaire
Luxor: Amun Rising
Mah Jong Tiles
Poker Superstars 2
Puzzle Inlay
Rainbow Web
Ricochet Lost Worlds
Shape Solitaire
Slide Poker
Slingo
Sudoku Quest
Trivia Machine
Do you think that it’s much too difficult (or much too easy) to achieve Mastery level 10 in one of our games? Email us at zmaster@microsoft.com and we’ll check it out.
See you next time! | |
