PixlBit

Mobile is great for little puzzle games that you can pick and put down at any time. TanZen, a collection of tangram puzzles, is a great example. Tangram puzzles consist of seven geometric shapes cut from one large square (as you can see in the app icon to the left) that are rearranged into other various shapes. It's a Chinese thing lol. In TanZen there is a solid dark outline that you try to completely fill with the seven shapes. It's a simple concept but can be difficult to figure out. Some nice, relaxing new agey/Oriental music should help you keep your cool. I've done quite a few of these now and there have been a few so far I haven't figured out. That's no problem, though, because there are plenty more puzzles to move onto. Over 550 in total! I have a feeling this game will be on my phone for a long time.

 There are a lot of endless runners on the App Store. I mean, there's a frickin' ton of them and Worm Run falls into that group, technically. But a few things set it apart from similar games. First of all, your character doesn't run automatically. Swiping left or right sends your little guy in that direction and swiping up (including diagonals) makes him jump. You also have a little boost you can do several times in the air that recharches when you touch the ground or a wall.

There are only so many kinds of things and eventually everything falls into an established category (barring a game changer, of course). The physics puzzler on the App Store has proven very popular and a good fit for mobile, and Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage falls firmly in that category. It's similar to Cut the Rope but instead of trying to get a piece of candy into the mouth of an adorable monster, you're getting one or more Vikings into a little Viking barge (whatever those are called) with the power of slicing with your finger. While you do cut ropes sometimes, you mostly cut through giant blocks of ice, hence the name.

Games Beaten

Another year down! Which one was this? 2007? 12? Oh yeah, 2014. I still have a hard time believing it was 2014, let alone that it's over. But let's get on with this, shall we? First up are all the games I beat this year and then how many I bought or somehow acquired (don't worry, I don't list those specifically). Be sure to stick around for the Golden Hippo Awards after that!

First of all, Happy New Year! But let's talk about last year. December was a super busy month. Between December 1 and Christmas Day, I worked about 200 hours...which is really pretty crazy. Nice paychecks though  So I didn't do a lot of gaming, though I did finish one thing...

Hey, everybody. I know I've been pretty much MIA except for the odd comment. November was a busy month and December is even crazier. I just finished a 60-hour week at work and have two more of those to look forward to. That's why we're nearly done with the first week of December and I'm just now posting the November recap. Let's get to it!

Games Beaten

Man, the week+ since my last blog has been very busy. New baby, going back to work (plus an overtime day), and my wife has had some trouble with her stitches (she tore a little during the birth). I've played a little Monster Hunter on PSP but that's about it. Been reading a lot of comics lately (courtesy of the library, of course) because that's so much easier to do than play a game. I finished Sandman 3 and it was really good. I've started vol 4 and it looks like we're back to main story again (vol 3 was just unrelated short stories, though very good ones). I'm just in the first section of that but so far it's really interesting.

My wife has been pregnant for a while now (months and months!) but her due date arrived and still no baby. So we had an induction scheduled for Friday, October 10 (yesterday as of this writing). But Thursday morning, right after I finished my shower before work, her water broke. I love clear signs like that lol. So we headed to the hospital and literally an hour later she gave birth to our second son. Thing is, it went so fast that she didn't have time to get an epidural AND my son weighed 9 lbs 1.5 oz and was 20 inches. That's a big baby to push out! But mommy and baby were both healthy and complicaton-free, so we're not going to complain (too much).