Pre-weekend doldrums got you down? Look no further than this edition of Link Dump Friday, which will first strain your brain with puzzles one fellow reviewer calls "ridiculous", and then soothe it with lovely images. Spot-the-difference in an ethereally beautiful book, get home before the music stops, or do battle atop a sufficiently epic castle roof, complete with rain and lightning and everything.
Professor Spelunkington - The touching tale of an older man desperate to buy a younger woman's affections with copious amounts of cold, hard gems stolen from undefiled caverns and beaten out of monster faces, this retro platformer isn't actually as similar to its namesake as you might initially think... or hope. The controls are a little stiff, but it's still fun to bounce around the monster-ridden caves as an extremely dapper geriatric. We should all hope to be so spry!
The Search for WondLa - What it lacks in any sort of narrative, this spot-the-difference game makes up for in sheer purdy-ness. There are twenty-eight scenes to explore, and while they're all phenomenally well illustrated, the absence of any sort of story integrated into the gameplay makes it little more than a virtual sideshow. The good news, at least, is if you want to know the reason behind the loveliness, you can check out the book of the same name it's based on by Tony DiTerlizzi, whose work you might recall from the (rad) "Spiderwick Chronicles" or his work on the "Planescape" products for Dungeons and Dragons. (radder)
The Roomz: Eclipse - After three years, the Roomz are finally back to confound us with a series of remarkably difficult puzzles and riddles, making it part (sort of) escape, and part "GAAAAAH WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM MEEEEEEEEE?" One reviewer describes it as being for "people who hate themselves"... well, what better pit of self loathing to look into than the internets?
Battle Shift - Battle a boss through eighteen stages of transformations in this surprisingly tricky retro action platformer. It's a straight-forward concept presented in a neat package, but too many of the boss forms are too similar to one another, and it isn't until halfway through when the terrain changes that things get challenging. Anyone else think this is basically just the last boss battle from Link's Awakening?... anyone?... *sigh* Man, I'm old.
Get Home - Make your way home before the music runs out in this short advergame platformer designed to promote the band Team Me. Although the gameplay is exceedingly straightforward and unvaried, the game features a breezy, likable aesthetic, great soundtrack, two endings, and a clear though unobtrusive message. It may be an "art" game, but it's a decidedly well intentioned and clear one. While it might have benefited from some more creative gameplay, I can find no ill in a game that introduced me to some new fantastic bouncy music.
Holy crud.
Battle Shift is awesome. It starts out kind of dull at first but the later forms are intense. I haven't finished it yet though.
Get Home is a nice game :)
The Search for WondLa gets pretty boring after a while :( But the art is quite nice with some interesting creatures.
The Search for WondLa really is gorgeous. I got a bit too caught up in the spot-the-difference, so I almost missed seeing the picture a couple of times when the differences were trivial to spot.
One thing I didn't like was the way the "shake" hint worked, or rather, didn't work. I don't know whether I missed it because didn't shake very long, or because it didn't shake very much, or both.
(I was ready to give up on two pictures, but after "shake" didn't work, I did finally find them. I guess I could have used the "reveal" hint but that seems more like cheating to me, I have no idea why.)
Gah! I'm missing 'lonely' on the first level and I've tried every interpretation I can think of.
for "lonely", use what you didn't use in the others
Get Home is awesome.
I love all spot-the-difference games, and Search for WondLa is no exception. With beautiful art and soothing music, it's a welcome slice of serenity, although I would have liked to have been a little less bewildered. You can play the shorter sequel on the WondLa website, which sheds no light at all on what the hell is going on.
Get Home is brilliant, but I'm too groggy right now for Spelunkington or Battle Shift. As for Roomz, I got stuck in the foreword without any next or skip buttons. Fixed the problem by playing at Newgrounds instead, so let's see how far I get before I come back here asking for help.
Do not understand Battle Shift. I start the first level, and I can't seem to damage the enemy and he can't seem to damage me. Even if I just stand there and let the shots hit the ground exactly where they aim at me, or if I go through the shots he shoots at me, I don't die. I can only die by jumping off the top of the castle, and I can't seem to hit my enemy at all.
Bug?
I tried playing Roomz 1 (before giving this new one a go), and when I start lvl 1 I just get a black screen and an inventory bar. I thought it was part of the puzzle, but I'm starting to think not. Anyone else have this?
Holy crap, Roomz: Eclipse is hard. I got to the binary room after lvl 3, and the game reset. But it was a doozy. "for people who hate themselves" indeed!
Get home is great.
And the no drugs ending has an awesome chiptune remix of the main song!
Gotta love it.
I played Battle Shift for a while, had flashbacks of being unable to complete any Castlevania games, and then quit. Not even a rage quit, it was a pre-emptive rage quit.
I initially thought Get Home wasn't all that great but having finished it it was rather pleasing to be proved wrong and I love the song so want to do it without any 'extras'.
Prof Spelunkington took a while to get to grips with the controls (had me raging to start off with) and is, all in all, a very competent and pleasing game.
Sounds like Battle Shift is worth a try now!
i agree with dora, battle shift is incredibly similar to tLoZ:LA's final battle, the boss made of shadows, the transformations, the only real differences are the view, and the fact that you can't one hit the final form with the boomerang.
(shout out for no long trading sequence)
Is it just me or is the key selection for Professor Spelunkington really awkward?
Though I haven't actually played Link's Awakening, that picture for Battle Shift up there does look a lot like Nightmare!
I loved the art for WondLa, but every once in a while a big ole' honkin' achievement box would pop up, covering a chunk of the screen. It was kind of obnoxious... But I also felt like the time bonus was both unnecessary and kind of detracted from actually looking at the art. So many times I had to struggle not to click on the next item just so I could take in the whole picture. My gaming instincts were kicking in before my art appreciation gland would turn on.
Also, yes - Link's Awakening is the perfect analogy to this guy... except with a bunch of bonus, unnecessary forms.
Okay, Roomz needs to either tone down the difficulty or include a link to a walkthrough, because I cannot get past level 1! How the heck am I supposed to know what "Guarded", "Numerous", "Doubled", & "Lonely" are?
ok...The Roomz:Eclipse is just an evil, evil game :)
Yeah, I'm stuck on level one of Roomz:Eclipse. I have the secret scroll:
Type in DRAWING
but I can't figure out anything else. I've tried everything with numbers and letters I can think of!
The Roomz: Eclipse is going to be even more evil than the original. ;) There's only 3 levels out right now, but there WILL be more soon!
By the way, the original game has 45 levels now - plus 5 bonuses to find. If you haven't been there in a while, I strongly recommend you have a go!
I figured out Numerous!
Roomz : First Room
read both messages
Inspect the wall.
jrbr3o15
orour3bab
11devil16n
okoe9ytet20
Well, devil is obvious.
3 15 3 11 16 9 20 . numerous.
c o c k p i t
There are repeated letters in what's left, rroobboott.. so robot is doubled.
Which leaves journeybrake
You break out of jail, and go on a journey...
and then i'm stuck.
Anyone?
Room one :
Once you've got S2, think Crossword
There are 2 seven letter words, and three 5 letter words.
you Could try arranging them, or you could just use letters 2 4 and 6 of each,
o o r k i e , or rookie
It's been a long time since I dabbled in geometry, but room 2 of Roomz is killing me... Would anyone check my maths?
Starting from the scroll, we can calculate four areas:
A1 = 25
A2 = 54
A3 = 27
A4 = 24
Then we check the glittering thing and it's an UV lamp. Passing it over the wall we get the four geometric figures to go with the areas. So, with simple calculation we get:
a = 5
b = 3
c = 6
d = 6
so X = 20
Now, if the equilateral triangle on the wall has every side = 20, its height is 22.360 and its area is 223.600
...but inputting that above the door doesn't do anything! What am I getting wrong?
Now I need room 2. I just got the UV scanner, and HELP!
I think I figured out what A is - if I'm right, what do I do with it? I already put it in above the door. SIMPLE MATH???? At least I have a geometry book right here!
A=132.659
in Get Home, how do you complete it without
taking any drugs?
ooh i found it ^_^
I have the same issue with Battleshift. My sword doesn't hurt the enemy. The enemy doesn't hurt me. I only get hurt when I jump off the castle.
@Tracian
Your math is right up until the very last part.
The formula for the area of an equilateral triangle is, where s = the side, s^2 * sqrt(3) / 4, making the answer
173.205
After some testing, it seems that Battleshift DOES work. My host OS is Ubuntu 10.04 x64 and I don't know if it's because I'm using 64 bit flash or just flash for Linux.
When I started up my XP guest VM and played it, it worked fine. That's all 32bit.
Roomz needs a save and continue feature, because there's no way I'm playing that all in one go.
Okay, I figured out where I messed up in my calculation of A. I can't figure out secret 2 now! A bunch of meaningless squiggles! Well, some look like letters, and there are six of them in groups of three (just like A). I can't figure out what it means!
Badmojo, I guess my math IS very rusty after all... Luckily the next part was a breeze!
You must count the pen strokes in the "squiggles". The resulting numbers are: 353.926 and 331.443
elisha - you are on the right track that they are two groups of 3.
There is another way those can be interpreted as numbers
Think about the number of lines in each squiggle
Professor Spelunkington was pretty fun, and not too frustrating. I wouldn't call Spelunky its "namesake", though.
Stuck on eclipse room 3
I have the painting and have entered the clue I got from the painting. Now I've got a pile of roman numerals and regular numbers and no clue
Loved WondLa...beautiful game.
I would like to know what was happening (guess we should be buying the book)...I think a bit of story-telling here would have been a great addition.
The artwork is extraordinary.
The only similarity battle shift has with the final nightmare in links awakening is the color scheme and the billion forms.
@MmeTurbulence
Get ready for this one.
Eclipse Room 3 Roman Numeral Hint:
When Dr. Vile is talking to you, he mentions Google, meaning this level is Google intensive. After getting the code from the portrait,
SONNET
this should indicate what you need to search. Straightforwardly,
each roman numeral represents a sonnet by Shakespeare and each number attached to it represents a character.
Yes! Link's Awakening was the first video game that I ever bought.
@badmojo666,
I got that far, and I assume the characters drawn from each
sonnet
form an
anagram
but digging through all the possibilities, even with an online generator, is just too much. Any hint to narrow down the possibilities? (Or is my assumption wrong perhaps?)
@Stephen
It's a little easier than that.
When you inspect the Roman numerals, the order you should decode the characters in will be given to you in the clipboard. To get the answer, though, you should:
read the password backwards and add a space.
After getting rather badly bamboozled by room 1 in Roomz and getting next to nowhere with room 2, I think I can safely call this my quickest ragequit yet. X_x
Roomz Eclipse: I need some serious help with room 3
the hamlet part is driving me mad. I've tried the 88th letter, the 88th word, using the words that correspond to the numbers and nothing's working. help!
Thanks!
@badmojo666,
Thanks! There it was staring me in the face, albeit the other way around. Now I'm stuck at S4 of the same room, #3. It seems there's some context I'm not familiar with in his life or that of one of his characters, unless I'm off the mark again...
@badmojo666
Um... on level 3:
what "portrait"?
@myspi -- The one of The Bard himself in your inventory.
@azulrider -- 88 is the wrong approach, as the hint box tells you. Note that the text of the scroll questions the whole idea of
counting (or math)
and that the text itself is
backwards
So try thinking of the numbers in the same way, and as a different kind of numbers.
Heh. The message in Get Home seemed pretty obtrusive to me. And I felt kind of manipulated - I'd been playing a game, and just before I finished it, the game told me that what I thought was ordinary game powerups was actually evil drugs.
Since there's a temporary roadblock blocking the normal way home the first time through the game, the message could be taken as:
"If there's an obstacle, taking drugs is the only way to continue."
Looks like there are only three rooms in Roomz: Eclipse for now. Looking forward to the finished thing.
Can someone help on scroll 2 in The Roomz:Eclipse?
Get Home - nice, but i think barbara is right, the message can be taken in oposite way, especially if someone will not finish it.
"I can't get high enough, i'm in the castel in the clouds, can't reach the platform, no other way, need more drugs I gues.."
@myspi
You get the portrait after discovering what to do with the spear.
This one is a kind of visual puzzle. What is the spear doing?
shaking
Now, think about making that into a name.
@Stephen
This one took me a LONG time, so don't feel bad.
Since the message is backwards, the numbers must be backwards, also. Now, for the tricky part.
Don't be fooled by the statement. We're working with words and letters here. Keep that in mind as you:
change each number into the corresponding letter, i.e. 3 = C. This should give you the sonnet you need to:
save your life. ;)
Yeah, with Get Home I agree on the obtrusive front:
DON'T DO DRUGS, KIDS!
It's, er, kinda fun, though.
Stuck on room 3!!!
I've got the portrait, and when I examine it I see the letters SENNT. But those don't make any words that I know of! I'm guessing I'm missing some letters? What other letters are in that painting that I'm missing?
@mar: you're missing
the o
i seem to still be stumped on S3 in room 3. can someone give a better lead to the sonnet i'm looking for?
@JIGuest
Thanks! I couldn't find that letter for the life of me.
Regarding your question:
You need to use all of Shakespeare's sonnets to get the next keyword
Count letter by letter, and ignore spaces
Now, type your result backwards
Don't forget to add a space!
Now, when you look at this hint, the whole page is backwards. Letters, and numbers
Translate each of those numbers into letters. 1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc.
Now, type that into the hint box to get the next hint
Read the next hint to figure out the last riddle
I see what you mean about Battle Shift, it is kinda similar to the last boss in that game. Its the one you fight in the wind fish's egg right?
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