ScottVee Gaming

I tried out a few new apps on my tablet over the weekend.   Villagers & Heroes was an interesting pick.  It's one where you walk around the world looking for people with quests, and those aren't my favorite thing.  But the world is enormous and the quests come in well-written sequences that can be pretty challenging to work out.  Some quests are standard "kill those darn bees for me" or "go get 10 apples" types, but there was a long sequence involving a theater and an actress who vanishes with a variety of clues to look for and return to people. In addition to the size of the world and number of NPCs, there are four or five gathering skills (plant lore, bug lore, fishing lore, mining) so you can always go get more things to sell or skill up.  There are a lot of crafting skills (smithing, tailoring, etc) and hundreds of items you can find or make along the way.  There are announcements of bosses appearing at specific times, and a small horde

After stage 30 comes a new base called Traveler Camp.  One of the quests on Stage 30 did not work: finding the poisoned doctor in the crypt passage, he asks for 4 ghost spiders. I cleared the whole sub-level and even killed 5 more spiders on the main stage, and it did not recognize it.  Oh well, on to the next levels.  I did finally get a decent piece of armor in the fire set, so that set now looks like this: sword Lv 140: ATK+342, total ATK +19%, immunity +16%, crit chance +19% ring Lv 135: ATK+316, immunity +15%, crit dmg +40%, DMG + 15% armor Lv 170: HP+346, crit chance +11%, block str +21%, block chance +13% boots Lv 170: DEF+557, block chance +13%, crit chance +11%, block str +21% Double crit damage. Again, it's very similar to the other sets, with attack bonus in the 600-700 range.  Big boost in DEF. Maybe I'm dense, or I just stare at the phone so much I'm not really processing information, but in the Adventure stages, you don't heal automatically.  That&

A few weeks back I was looking to delete some apps I hadn't played in a while.  I saw Empires & Puzzles which I played heavily 2-3 years ago, and thought about removing it, but once we've invested so much time and levels (and sometimes actual cash) into one of these, it's hard to just click Uninstall. I ran it, and it was a nice homecoming.  All so familiar, there was my strange assortment of heroes again.  Boy does it spam the ads whenever you go back to your base, though, usually 5 or 6 in a row.  No, I don't want that, or that ...or THAT.  The offers go up to $29.99 and more, so be careful what you click on. I got to play their Valentine's Day special event, fighting angry boxes of chocolate, Cupid & friends.  That was fun for thes first 12 levels or so, then got out of my league.  They had a Wild Pets event for about 3 days, and I did invest a few $$ into the summons to get Ferdinando the big dog and some angry muskrat to add to my teams. S

Here's a title I was really looking forward to.  It's a huge game, 25 gigs of downloads.  I just picked the default fighter character to avoid getting bogged down in details right away.   The game world is gorgeous.   As it claimed, it was the first major orthogonal map world using the Pathfinder system.  I really should be enjoying it more, but I'm a sandbox guy and an explorer at heart and you start off stuck in one particular castle in one particular story.  I picked up some NPCs along the way, mostly because I have no idea how to remove them from my party. There were some fine choices of UI, like using the Tab key to highlight all items in the scene that you can interact with.  But using the old WASD keys (or moving the mouse off the side of the screen) to scroll the view is clunky.  When traps appear or combat comes up, it automatically pauses to let you make choices, which is nice.  Actual voices performing the dialog is high-end and actors do an enjoyabl

I took a quick first ride on Meow Express and it reminded me of using the jetpack to get around my Minecraft world. So I thought it might be fun for a while before bed. Except that I can't seem to go more than 10 seconds without crashing.  Every balcony kills you, every rooftop below kills you.  Even touching a cloud kills you. I guess there are things I am supposed to be picking up, but it would be nice if I could not die for a few seconds ... argh! I can't see myself spending hours trying to get better at this.  It is definitely cute, but the frustration level is a bit out of my range.

The Humble Bundle site has really come up with some big bundles lately.  I got an add for this one , for charities supporting victims of the Turkey/Syria Earthquake.  It includes Steam licenses for about 60 games including an early access game set in the Pathfinder world, plus Paizo downloads for the Starfinder Corebook and a Starfinder module, and about 10 PDF downloads of comic book collections, all for a minimum $35 donation.  It sounds like this deal is only good until March 8. Most of the games did not appeal to me (either too dark or bloody or just annoying platform games), but my interest was piqued by their inclusion of a bunch of games from developers IN Turkey.  That is just good curation of the collection.  Of the games from Turkey, I saw two with cats in them and one chemistry game, and those were my first downloads.  Sure, there were some big-time games from major developers (Gotham Knights, Ghostrunner, XCOM-2 and so on), but I like to see what's going on