Bonus Link Dump Friday:
Spot the Difference Edition
December 12, 2008
This special edition of Link Dump Friday features a selection of traditional spot-the-difference games with a pleasing presentation and a story to tell. Coincidentally, each of the following games also contains something I have an irrational phobia about, and that's how I've listed them.
Dreams - Fairies. Especially fairies who wear ballet slippers, despite the fact that they can fly. That just seems wrong.
Mad World - Dancing skeletons. Okay, I guess that one isn't so irrational. But I'm scared of perspective-warping animated transitions, too.
Jasmine and Jack - Angry bees. Dogs with huge square teeth. Also, children.
Help in a Box - Destructive robot cats. Cardboard boxes. Shirts with mushrooms on them. Receding hairlines. Children. Instruction manuals. This game is like a nightmare for me.
The Dragon and the Wizard - Role players. Seriously. They freak me out.
I was just playing The Dragon and the Wizard. If you don't make the time limit the consequences are hilarious (and appear to vary depending on which scene you were on).
Dragon and Wizard made me want to play through it again and intentionally fail on each page, just to see what would happen. (It'll let you go back to find the mistakes you missed, but you won't score anything else for re-tries)
What's so scary about instruction manuals? I always read them before I use the associated equipment or play a video game; they just help me understand it more fully when it comes down to operating the equipment or throwing exploding fruit at the other players.
Yeah, the whole "if you run out of time, you get a bonus picture" thing outweighs the bonus time feature in Dragon and Wizard, but I guess you could see it as "2 ways to play!"
Mad World is pretty trippy I guess but it kind of irked me that the floor was often asymmetrical, but for all the levels except the last one, it didn't count, yet the sky always counted.
I played Dreams last night. The art was okay, if the game was a rush job, otherwise it could have been better. The story wasn't very well-excecuted or great, either. Speaking of which, when a game is trying to tell a story, consistency is appreciated. In a Spot the Difference game, consistency would make things too predictable, maybe. However, the inconsistencies in the stories do bother me.
Mr Psychotronich , you are spoiling us with your bonus LDF!!
GASP! 2 LINK DUMP FRIDAYS! *faints*
Dreams was... weird. It should have been called "Spot the suddenly appearing tattoo."
Sorry.
You know the secret to Spot-the-Difference games, right?
Cross your eyes, like you're looking at one of those "Magic eye" posters. If you line up the two images, everything that's different will have a flickery/wispy/ethereal look to it..
Saying "irrational phobia" is redundant, as a phobia is an irrational fear.
Unless you have an irrational irrational fear, and you're really afraid of numbers like Pi and the square root of 2?
It's a pleonasm, although they are not perfect style, they are a pretty common phenomenon for human talkers.
Although yes, this is one of the more striking pleonasms ;-)
Great. Now I have an irrational phobia of pleonasms.
You mean
Great. Now I have just acquired recently an irrational phobia of superfluous pleonasms.
? :-)
Just wanted to point out that (at least) in Dreams and Jasmine & Jack there are often more than the advertised number of differences on the page. Finding all of them is not necessary.
wonderful set of spot the differences. The first was the simplest, last two were getting hard.
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