Today’s post goes to advertising a site that has a worthwhile mission.  Instead of abandonware it catalogues games that have actually been made freeware by the owners and encourages developers of old software titles that have stopped selling their games to release them as freeware.
 http://www.remaininplay.com/
Also, just to keep with the trend of posting a song on all my recent posts, here another.
So, starting this post early so that maybe during the day I can start to build a bit of content and get to some of those things that I alluded too in my previous post. Some may ask why I bother if I’m just spamming my own blog, main reason? To start up a dialog, even if it’s with noone other then myself and make it easier to continue doing so. The more I write the easier it becomes to do so, and if I make it a habit to post to my blog every day, it’ll be much easier to keep it up. It does however take a small bit of effort to force something into becoming habit.
So, without much else to babble about, gonna leave you with todays bit of MP3 blogging. I originally found this tune somewhere on the net with talk of it being used in an iPod advertisement. It’s pretty catchy, so here it is to be shared.
So, new years resolution and all, and I’m barely managing to succeed for two days. I’m following up my first post with much of a second cop-out post that’s just here to fill the space. Although, I will confirm some intent. I do intend to keep up with Nintendo DS game reviews. I am going to retouch on the sudoku and picture logic games. I’m probably also going to keep posting a few MP3s every now and then, even though this isn’t specifically an MP3 blog, I think sharing the occasional tune will be fun.
So, not to drag this post out for a silly length, here’s the one bit of semi-good content. A remix of the Hello, Blue Roses song ‘Shadow Falls’ by Ruby Isle.
Multiple breaks, and a long leave of absence, have left me discouraged, and I’m sure any people who have stumbled upon this blog (a number of people have amazingly, especially due to my round ups of sudoku and picross games.) have lost interest or thought it completely abandoned. In some ways it has been as even with my new years resolution of taking this up again I debate scrapping it and starting anew, mind you I still think the name is catchy, but, wondering if starting anew would allow me to build some kind of momentum with it.
I’m still very surprised at the amount of traffic the sudoku and picross posts attracts, my last post was in august sometime and this place still gets 200-300 hits a month, which for a personal blog that has done no advertising it’s kinda interesting that if you hit the right niche, the traffic does come. Plans for the future? I really don’t know. Just hoping that I can convince myself to start making semi-frequent posts again, maybe I’ll start with some rehashing or updating of new resources for sudoku or picross since those were so popular and I’m sure there’s more to be had since my original posts.
This of course, is a cop-out post, just to go ahead with my new years resolution and at least attempt to post more frequently to the blog instead of ruining it before the first day of the new year is even over. ;) So, fire at will and flog me for not posting more often and when i do it being something mostly useless like this. However! I’m not gonna make it entirely useless, I’ll add in a small bit of MP3 Blogginess-like advertisement for a catchy song I’ve heard too many times recently.
Most of my time as of late has been spent programming, or rather, learning too.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time with a neat little game-making tool called BYOND. It’s amazingly easy to learn and it’s amazingly adaptable to allow creation of simple games and of course, some not so simple games. There’s tons of people pushing the tool to it’s limits. I’m nowhere near that level at the moment, but, have had some fun in porting the Munchkin card game to a playable online version. Unfortunately, due to intellectual property laws, it may never be publically released, but, this kitty usually is one to point and laugh at such copyright claims, so I may go ahead and do it anyways and just live with the crying of lawyers attempting to get blood from a turnip.
Just a small update to keep me from fading into the group of people with blogs that don’t post :P
Still not had much luck in updating, but, the blog is far from abandoned. I hope to resume a more regular posting schedule, but, right now it’s still a bit busy x.x;
Got some projects underway, and might be doing some blurbs for the upcoming SketchieGames independent game studio. Fun stuff!
I’ve been missing for a week or so whilst I made my transition from Canadian kitty to American. Still heavy in the move though, got lots of crap to move around an unpack. Hoping I’ll be able to return to a more active posting schedule soon.
It’s not exactly 1 month after I made my return to the states. I’ve still not managed to get life settled, it’s hard when you have to transition everything. My schedule’s still an absolute mess. My blog’s been discovered by spambots though. Which makes for an interesting look at the stats. It appears my traffic’s skyrocketed during my time away.
I’ve got a nice plan for some future posts though, keep an eye out. :)
I recently did a small blurb on Picross DS. I’m absolutely in love with that puzzle style. I was pleasantly delighted when my research into sudoku games on the Nintendo DS led me to discover the picture logic puzzles inside Essential Sudoku. Even with all those puzzles, however, I still wanted more. My initial search lead me to try and discover more DS games and I was able to find three of them, Puzzle Series Vol. 6 - Illust Logic, DS Puzzler Numplay Fan Oekaki, and Oekaki Puzzle Battle! - Yuusha-Oh GaoGaiGar Hen. Overall, picture logic puzzle games are all high quality and don’t seem to suffer from the overpopulation and eagerness to hop on a money bandwagon as has happened to sudoku. These 3 games are safe buys if you’re a fan of picture logic puzzles.
Illust logic sports a more stylish interface than Picross DS and is also more ‘clean.’ It’s style is much the same as the the sudoku puzzle series games and Sudoku Gridmaster. The actual gameplay screen is much better in design than Picross’. The top screen gives you your playtime and the column clues, and the bottom screen is your play area and row clues. There is no cumbersome scrolling as there is in Picross DS either. Unfortunately, I don’t know just how many puzzles there are in this title, an educated guess would put me at saying there’s at least 200 puzzles. It also seems to sport an unlockable ranking test similar to that found in Sudoku Gridmaster and the Puzzle Series sudoku games.
DS Puzzler Numplay Fan Oekaki contains both sudoku and ‘Oekaki’ logic puzzles. One of the neat things about this is that it plays in book mode, where you hold the DS sideways. It has options for right or left handed people, and a lot of options I honestly don’t understand. For english players this title might be a bit frustrating as it took me quite a bit of poking around to actually find the puzzles. Also, the type of picture logic puzzles are slightly different then previously mentioned ones. There are multiple colors and the clues are color-coded to indicate the color of block to fill in, also, alternating colors do not need a blank space between them and the previous or following color. Only consecutive clues of the same color need a seperating blank. For the record, the sudoku puzzles are of high quality and worth playing.
Oekaki Puzzle Battle! - Yuusha-Oh GaoGaiGar Hen, the first alternatively themed picture logic game I’ve discovered for the Nintendo DS. It’s fun and has a number of puzzles. It also has an interesting scheme for it’s ‘larger’ more difficult and detailed puzzles. Instead of awkward zooming or squishing everything on the screen it divides larger puzzles into multiple groupings of 10×10 grids. The largest puzzle I’ve found is 16 10×10 grids amounting to a 40×40 picross puzzle. Due to the 10×10 max puzzle size, none of the puzzles are too overly difficult, but, they’re still all quite fun puzzles to solve. The main frustration in the game is that it doesn’t stop when you’ve correctly solved a puzzle and there’s no way to mark ‘x’ in a square. To check if you’re done you hit a set of kanji on the right side of the screen and it’ll check your puzzle. It locks correct answers in red and gets rid of incorrect answers. For each incorrect answer it tallies a miss and lowers your score for that puzzle.
Discovering these three games was really nice, but, these puzzles are like catnip. “I want!” comes to mind. So, I continued my search, along other avenues, searching for published books, places to play online, and how to be able to continue to find these puzzles. I never expected to find so much on this considering how rare I perceived this type of puzzle to be.
I first continued researching what has been released for consoles. I previously mentioned the two gameboy games, Mario’s Picross and Mario’s Picross 2 in another post. Joining these two is a bunch of SNES games. Mario’s Super Picross, Oekaki Logic 1 & 2, Picross NP Volume 1-8, and Ochan no Oekaki Logic. A single gameboy advance game, Hatena Satena. A gameboy game with a downloadable rom at this site, Drymouth. Unfortunately, I’m not 100% sure of the story behind this rom. If it was just homebrew, or a never published prototype. I’ve even come across mention of two arcade boards containing picture logic puzzles, Logic Pro 1 & 2. There’s also quite a number of titles on the playstation, Ochan no Oekaki Logic 1-3, Oekaki Puzzle 1-5, Numeric Paint Puzzle, Colorful Logic 1-3, Painter Logic 1 & 2, Hello Kitty illust Puzzle, and Illustration Puzzle and Slide Puzzle. I would love to have the ability to say a little about each of these. I just don’t have access to all the hardware or games.
Having felt that I’ve exhausted the console market, I next turned to trying to find computer software and online places to play. Unfortunately in this endeavor, most of the computer software I found was russian and very hard for me to read or interpret, and even more of it was of very dubious quality. However, I came out of the scuffle with bad websites and poor looking picture logic software with 3 promising candidates. Japan Picture by Sergei I. Bogomyakov, it’s a very solid looking picture logic software and comes in with only a 12.95 price. It allows you to import puzzle files pre-made, as well as making your own puzzles from computer .ico files. Next, Japan Riddles, it’s an absolutely beautiful game and has an english release. I can’t tell you much more cause the site was in russian. Lastly, Cross Image by a company called Xdyne. It looks to be a well-polished title and it includes an editor for creating your own puzzles. It has two different licensing schemes, a 19.95 personal license, and a 29.95 extended license that lets you distribute the game to your friends and family via the companies greeting card service. I’m not sure I understand entirely how it works, but, if it allows you to distribute the full game that way, it might be quite the value if you and your family all like the puzzles.
I then began to investigate places to play online, and was only able to find a few really great sites. Picture Puzzle is one, a japanese site that has tons and tons of puzzles. Apparently there’s a rating and comment system as well. Neither is all that useful to those that can’t read japanese. Griddlers.net is a site in english with over 40,000 puzzles. A great many of them are multi-color puzzles and my short evaluation of the site lead me to believe that not all of them have logical solutions and many may rely on guesswork. I could be mistaken on this as I’m not exactly an expert on these puzzles, yet. I’d love to hear about more quality sources for Picross puzzles. The ones I was able to find through google lead me to a number of sites with a small amount of puzzles and quirky theming that made me feel I should pass on mentioning them.
It’s widely known now amongst it’s fanbase that the IM program GAIM has been renamed into Pidgin. When known as GAIM it was still one of the best IM clients around. With the transition to Pidgin, it’s gotten several improvements and is getting better constantly. The transition has left the client a little unstable, but, as with most open source software these issues are taken care of quite quickly. It allows you to organize your contact lists into groups, and it also seems capable of handling multiple accounts per protocol without merging the contact lists, something quite a number of IM programs lack, even trillian has a bit of trouble with this. Pidgin also supports a myriad of IM and chat protocols. AIM, Bonjour, Gadu Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, Silc, Simple, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, and Zephyr are all supported. It leaves me wondering what protocols, if any, are missing. It also sports a feature called buddy pounce. This feature allows you to attach actions to certain events and notify you or play a sound. It’s pretty handy to have.
At the moment, I don’t think I could recommend another IM client, all the rest are horribly bloated and slow in comparison. The biggest feature missing from Pidgin is no video chat. I don’t feel that’s much of a loss though, because if I wanted video chat, I’d get an application specifically made for it, not use the junk attached to an instant messenger client as an afterthought.
Link: Pidgin IM
Kohana here again just felt like doing up another article. This time on one of my old favorites, Uncharted Waters: New Horizons. Uncharted Waters: New Horizons is a fairly unique RPG for the SNES and was also ported for the PC. The game takes place in the early 16th century in the age of exploration. Gameplay is divided into 3 different major parts: trade, exploration, and combat and assigns your main character a fame score for each category. There are 6 main characters to choose from each having their own plot along with being a trade, explorer, or combat character. The type of the character relates to which type of fame must be increased to advance the plot though you’re pretty free to do what you want and can pursue the plot at your own pace.
Earning exploration fame involves mapping out the world, making discoveries, and finding ports. Your main opposition with exploration is keeping your crew fed and having enough water. This is simple at first as ports are very common however the further you get from main civilization the less ports you’ll find. Getting trade fame simply involves investing in ports. However this requires a lot of money which is best obtained through clever trading. Profitable trading simply involves buying low and selling high which isn’t nearly as complex as in say the Patrician series. There is a tiny bit of complexity but nothing too bad as this game is more of an RPG rather than a simulation. Gaining combat fame is quite straightforward. You simply need to pick fights. You can’t do it indiscriminately however otherwise you’ll end up making everyone an enemy. Ship combat plays out in a turn based tactical style taking turns back and forth moving your fleet around, firing, and such. If you get your flag ship next to the enemy flag ship you can challenge the enemy captain to a duel. This is nice in that if you win, the battle is over and you can claim what you want, however the reverse is also true giving you a game over if you lose. Despite playing so much I never totally figured out how dueling works but it seems to be some rock, paper, scissors style card game. I generally just get the best armor and weapon I can find, pick the card with the highest value and hope the enemy doesn’t draw the card that counters mine.
I’ve found this game to be very fun and completed it many times. It’s very simple to pick up and play and light on plot so you spend most the time actually playing the game. If you go straight through the plot most characters don’t take too long to finish however especially in the combat ones unless you’re very good at it this might be a bit hard. It’s a great fun game. Unfortunately the SNES cartridge is probably a bit hard to find and the PC version isn’t quite as nice. A great site on the game can be found at http://www.unchartedwatersnewhorizons.com/ . There is also a download for the PC version but I’m not sure exactly if its freeware or “abandonwareâ€. I checked the Koei site to see if I could get any information on it however even their archive section only lists games as far back as 1997 so it wasn’t much help.
Thanks for reading,
Kohana