Link Dump Friday
January 30, 2009
This week's Link Dump Friday is infested with puzzle mites! Yes, the rare puzzle mite, a creature so small, so insidious, only I know it exists. Puzzle mites like to crawl under keyboards and infest internet circuits, turning ordinary games into puzzle games! No one is safe from their wrath. Not me. Not you. Not your pet kitty. FEAR THEM!!!
Gravitat - What would be a simple matching puzzle game is made better by one tiny mechanic: rotating gravity. Click to drop blocks on the screen with the goal of lining up three or more in a row. After each drop, however, the playing field rotates 90 degrees, forcing you to think several moves ahead in order to stay out of trouble.
Sirtet - A parody of sorts of Tetris (Sirtet is Tetris spelled backwards, you see) where you can only make tetrads, matches of four shapes. Place five or more together and they turn into immovable blocks. Which is bad.
Xor - A simple logic puzzle where your goal is to eliminate all of the colored blocks from the screen. Place the cursor over a set of blocks (rotate with the mouse wheel) and click to fill empty spaces with pieces while eliminating existing shapes. Try and plan your moves so the last click clears the board! Tons of levels make this one a big winner.
Rollercoaster Creator - Built around a Line Rider-esque concept, Rollercoaster Creator is a creativity-based puzzle game where you draw and assemble rollercoasters designed to collect coins and transport the riders to the goal safely.
Gravitat was fun to start with, although I lost interest after 10 levels. Very polished and nice to look at, it just needed a bit more variety in the gameplay. It would also be nice to know how many blocks you have left.
Sirtet was unplayable for me - after a minute or so there would be two blocks on screen at the same time, and they would both move left and right simultaneously.
I found Xor really unpleasant to look at, with all that flashing LCD-style text. Nice idea though.
My computer is too slow and useless to play Rollercoaster Creator, but it looked fun.
I loved Gravitas, thought it was an interesting twist on the match three genre. A little more variety might have been nice, but I only did ten levels, so maybe there are more exciting white blocks later on (have to say, the ones that changed the direction of spin drove me nuts!).
Like jimbog, the control mechanic in Sirtet was very frustrating for me, especially because I'd keep forgetting that there was a block at the bottom of the screen and focus on getting the new block in the right place, which could make things frustrating. That aside, it wasn't very challenging because each block was just a single brick, so it was easy to not connect more than four bricks - maybe having double (or even triple?) shapes falling might have made it more interesting. It's not a bad concept, but it needs some serious work, I think.
xor is a lovely idea, the music is great, but unfortunally an otherwise perfectly casual/relaxing puzzlegame is spoiled with a time limit and a click limit :-/ To bad when a great idea gets IMHO wrong.
Rolercoster is nice, but instead of picking most of the components I would prefer to just draw a loop for a loop, and a horizontal line for a horizontal line and so on.
Gravitat, nice game.
Found a cheat in Xor:
If you click more than once in the same place, rapidly, it can have a different effect than clicking twice slowly. For example, if you're in a 2-color puzzle, and you click a blue one and then click it again before the blue is done fading out, it won't change to red. The way to exploit this?
If you click any area three times rapidly in a 2-color puzzle, all spaces within the area will end up blank. I think this will work if you click four times rapidly in a 3-color puzzle, but haven't tested it.
Another great LDF. Cheerz!
I finally got all gold stars in roller coaster creator!
hhmmm... can't get the gold star for the level 9 of roller coaster.. any clues?
forget it, i got it right after posting.. ;)
That "cheat" in Xor is actually an annoying bug. If you do it by accident, you can wind up with a board that's unsolvable, like leaving you with two colored blocks when your cursor is three blocks long. A bit frustrating after you've clicked a couple hundred times. Otherwise, an entertaining game.
Excellent, puzzles! This is my kind of link dump. Xor is fun for a while, but there it really never gets difficult enough. Sirtet is fun, but clearing one got me a bunch of grey blocks. What do I do with those?
keith:
You can break down those grey blocks by making tetrads next to them. I haven't played it for about a week, but I think each block takes three hits before it goes away.
Can anyone post a walkthrough for Xor, especially level 84? I just can't figure out how to do it without needing four more clicks...
Sirtet was buggy for me. At first I thought the blocks dropping immediately was part of the game play, but when blocks would fall behind blocks, or hover over blocks like there was an invisable block, or worst, refusing to join tetrades with 4, 5, 6, 7 or more blocks all joined together.
BTW IE 7 w/ Vista
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