What Did We Play Yesterday?

Unfortunately Ball x Pit must be shelved. I never did reach a place where I felt like I was exercising strategy or genuinely improving, and I'm tired of replaying the first level. I might return to it down the road, since it sounds like development will continue.

This is a cute hidden object game with, surprise, cats! It takes about an hour to find them all, and some are extra hidden in cabinets and whatnot. It's a fun, short puzzle.

Belted out a few levels in Freshly Frosted. The levels are samey enough this isn't a game I'd play straight through, but I may continue to pick it up and play a few levels here or there. It teeters riiiight on the edge of potentially being boring for me due to the lack of variety.

Continuing to kick the tires on Ball X Pit. I'm figuring out some things. For instance, you cause a great deal more damage by bouncing your balls off the walls before strikes, so most of the time you should be aiming at the walls and trying to get the balls to bounce up and behind enemy lines rather than shooting directly at them. Evolutions, which create new balls, and more powerful than fusions, when combine elements of two balls. And typically, if you can collect all the gems and level up before you snag a fusion orb thing you should do that.

That being said, at this stage the game feels more like grinding based than skill based. I beat the first level once fairly early on, but I've consistently gotten overrun by the second mini-boss ever since. I'm still sorting out how to make my base more efficient for resource gathering. The beginning of each round is pretty slow, and things don't really get moving until you get enough XP to snag your first upgrade. But I'm gonna continue working at it.

A sort of mashup between arkanoid, vampire survivors, and tetris, with a base building component. Tough to explain, with the potential for addiction. You can have up to four main balls at once time, and have the ability to fuse or evolve them to open up slots. You also have passive bonuses. The goal is to clear the enemy lines before they reach the bottom of the screen (or kill the roaming boss, if you've reached the end). Will probably be playing a bit of this.

Freshly Frosted is a cute donut-frosting line game. It's fun watching the donuts move along the conveyor belt and get frosted, sprinkled, etc. But it's like inbento in that it's "fine" but I don't know how long it will hold my attention.

Le famous puzzle gaem. I tried this game years ago, and had an urge to try again and dang this one is hard. When I get stuck, and finally see the solution, I feel like an idiot every time. I'm gonna do my best but I swear my brain does not work this way.

Well, I gave Kamaeru another shot, but when I got to the frog breeding minigame, which involves using tic-tac-toe to determine dominant genes (with the remainder being randomly selected) I threw in the towel. The game play is tedious and none of the things that "work" work well enough to be interesting or rewarding beyond a few minutes.

Decided to tear myself away from FT2 before my game brain atrophies completely and I can't play anything else.

Kamaeru is a cozy frog-collecting game. The frogs are cute, but so far most of the species variations are uninteresting (different color combinations). You can buy items to place on the farm and you can build up wetlands and catch bugs. Cooking is a mini-game with reflex-based bonuses. It's also kind of buggy (ha) so I had to look up a workaround to actually play it. It's very much take-it-or-leave-it at this stage but I may play around with it a little more to see if it opens up.

Finally unlocked cherry trees.

I decided I kind of hated having all my chickens in one big mixed plot, so I started breaking them out into their own areas. I'm experimenting with landscape fencing and mixing in trees and flowers. I'm also spacing out my ducks. After I realized ducks will interact with water I wanted them all to have their own ponds. I'm still trying to avoid having massive livestock tracks.

Also trying to create more mixed flower arrangements and beds, using checker and stripe patterns.

I have been having a blast in FT2, and didn't bother blogging since it's just "THIS IS FUN Weeee".

It's holiday time! Maxed out the holiday event and made a little area. Originally it took up a whole plot but I have since condensed it to half a plot since the poinsettias really don't need to take up that much space.

I picked up the Meadow and Gothic expansions to treat myself and am thrilled with both. The only "issue" is the houses, especially the gothic one, are freaking huge. The Gothic pack has more stuff generally but I really dig the flower fences and art style of Meadow.

Lots of re-arranging and expanding favorite areas (since taking these screenshots I've rearranged at least 3 of those areas), I'm experimenting with less roads we'll see how that goes.