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| | December 14, 2007
Let it snow, let it… d’oh!
Well, we almost got a snow day! The white stuff was flurrying down mightily about a week ago, piling up on parked cars and making the roads slippery; unfortunately, though, it didn’t last the night. So sad! If there’s one thing I love about this time of year, it’s the chance to ignore all responsibility, curl up in my comfiest chair with a mug of hot cocoa, and watch the swirling snow. | |
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If there’s two things I love about this time of year, it’s that plus holiday cookies. And if I get to pick a third thing, it’d be sneaking up to Whistler for a bit of skiing. (Until I put some new tires on my car, though, that third guilty pleasure is off my to-do list.) Now, why do I mention this at all? As a roundabout way of explaining why I dragged my computer table halfway across the living room so that it had a view out the window: much as I love watching the snow, I’m also really enjoying a couple of recent games. And you know me and games.
And of course, after I’d gone through all the trouble of hauling pity-only-knows how many pounds of furniture and hardware from point A to point B, untangling all the cords, disentangling the cat from the cords (about twenty-seven times), untangling the cords again, trying to remember which plug went to which piece, and then scouting up a spare rug so the desk chair wouldn’t scratch up the floor, the snow didn’t even have the common decency to stick. Curse you, snow!
Come out come out, wherever you are…
I’ve been playing a lot of hidden-pictures games lately. I’ve been on a bit of a kick; not sure why, since playing them for several days straight tends to give me a perpetual squint. But I just love the challenge. It’s also interesting to see how the games have evolved over the past couple of years: of course, the images themselves have gotten better and more detailed, but more to the point, the designers seem to be ever more devious in how they hide the images. Yesterday I spent most of a 15-minute level trying to find a wrench that was literally 1/4 the height of the screen. I’m sure you can guess how embarrassed I was after I finally found it, heh.
Anyway, my two favorites out of the recent hidden-picture releases are Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor and Amazing Adventures: the Lost Tomb. You can probably guess by the names that the first one has a sort of haunted-mansion theme to it, and the second is mostly Egyptian archaeology scenes. They both follow the now-familiar formula of “find all the hidden items, then solve a puzzle to advance”, and yet they still manage to be very different games.
In Spooky Manor, all the items you need to acquire are broken up into pieces: if you thought finding a whole owl in a mostly brown-colored scene was difficult, try finding just part of an owl. Each item has at least three or four pieces, and you do need to find absolutely all of them. Once completed, items become part of the overall puzzle: you can use them to complete partial collections on each level (for example, a saucer missing its cup, or a group of Russian nesting dolls with one missing), or to affect the scene in some way.
Lost Tomb is a more standard hidden-puzzle game, with the added coolness that the levels are all very distinct from each other. From the Arabian-Nights-style colorful decadence of a desert tent to the gloom of an abandoned mine, the dim blue realm of shipwrecks to a closeup of a brilliant golden mask, the scene design is absolutely the best part of this game. The end-level puzzles on this one range from jigsaw to memory matching, not extremely challenging, but definitely enough to keep your brain in high gear between levels.
I’m about halfway through each of these two games… one of these days, I really need to learn to play one thing at a time and pace myself! And if my gaming life wasn’t complicated enough already, I also heard that we just launched Little Shop of Treasures II. I’ve been looking forward to this one for weeks, so it looks like I’ll be in the hidden-pictures groove for a while yet!
Winnin’ in a Winter Wonderland
Well, I can’t win, but you certainly might! The MSN Games Winter Wonderland Sweepstakes just started, and the grand prize is something special: an HP Pavilion HDX Entertainment Laptop PC, plus a whole year of GameSpring! A new computer and all the premium games you can play for 2008. Is there really a better way to start the year? Oh, and you can enter every day, if you want to increase your odds!
A little holiday magic
Remember that Thanks-gaming sale we had a few weeks ago? 50% off every download game on the site? Apparently you do, since we’ve been positively swamped with letters saying “do it again!” Well, of course it would be ridiculous for us to have another massive sale so soon after the last one, but then, ‘tis the season for talking snowmen, flying reindeer, and Holiday Chicken Invaders 2, so improbability is pretty much the order of the day. Not that I’m implying anything, of course, but you might want to keep your eyes on MSN Games… say, in the next week or so.
And happy holidays!
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| Tech Talk
Well, I was all set to discuss some unexpected disconnects and “Unspecified Error” messages in the Bridge lobbies, but that’s a moot point now: Bridge is offline for maintenance. I know the tech folks here are working their collective butts off to get it taken care of as soon as possible, and they wanted me to pass along their apologies for what they know is an inconvenience to the regular Bridge crowd. I know they’ll get it back up and running as soon as humanly possible (they’ll post any new info about the process here), but in the meantime, if any of you feel like playing a little Hearts, it’s always nice to see new faces – or, at least, nicknames – in that game.
See you next time! | |
