ScottVee Gaming

I am still looking for a good app with a dog/puppy theme for Anne to play, but it is surprisingly a lot harder than finding well-done cat games.   I looked at Dog Hotel but it starts off with dogs in little pens (which is depressing), and up close they look like they might be part zombie, they are just not likeable.  They also started out with sad stories and health issues.   Other apps had art styles that were too childish or too sparkly, or were clearly targeted at young kids.  A bunch of them were too focused on rescue stories that don't sound relaxing at all.  Starting out with bruised or sick or injured animals is not relaxing.  Maybe there are feel-good points after they are nursed back to health, but it's not what we want to see in our limited spare time. I wasn't expecting our expectations to be so specific, I just know from an intro video whether it's the kind of thing we would enjoy.  I guess the same is true of the cat/kitten apps, but we lucked

LOE is now running a Marine Reptile limited-time event.  Like the previous event, there are three days to level up 8 creatures as high as possible, and tons of pay-to-play options to avoid along the way.  I made it to number 1 on Sunday. which was a fun goal to hit.    Then I had to go back to work, so other players had half a day to pass me by, but I was still 4th when I got home monday night.  I pushed back to number 1 with a few minimal strategic purchases, and when I woke up tuesday it was over and I ended at number 3.  This time I got screenshots of all the (relevant) tier and rank bonuses and creatures.   So, for the $ spent, this is a good way to get a huge variety of in-game goods, including ones I did not even know about. I'm a bit annoyed at myself that I spent about $25 on this thing, but there is a psychological draw to wanting the highest numbers you can get.  While the selection of chests in the event offers a range of things you might need, don't forget t

Back on Kitty Cat Resort, I misread the cost of upgrading the Whale Movers.  It was not 400 M, but 400 K.  To get to the new island you have to level the facility up to level 130, which starts at 400 K per level and ends up about 2 M per level, so I estimate the total cost is about 200 M.   As you tier up the Whale Movers, pieces get added to the model.  First, it's cute enough that it's a raft on the back of a whale.  As you build it up, first it adds a canopy, then some crates, then some more crates, then it's ready to go sailing off to the new island. Whale Movers, ready to go.   Head back to the Island Info icon to launch.   Here comes the new island.    All your cats and buildings move with you, and you can now add 7 new facilities and up to 20 cats.  The first new facility is a Yoga Shack for 2 B. Okay, I logged back in the next morning and picked up hairballs until I had the 2 B to spend.  Sure enough, the cats walk over and do yoga positions on the yoga mats.  I swe

Back to Life on the Earth (LOE) ... I figured out what the Rebirth button does.  It looks like there is no way to level up the robot until you do at least one Rebirth so,  BOOM.  Blew up the planet and had to start over.  It keeps a few things, like your creature cards and some amount of growth.  But it wipes all epochs, all creatures, and you start fresh.  It's fun watching the world explode, though. It's not such a huge setback, though.  I was back up to the Silurian ages in only about 15 minutes, with 127 F and making 7 E/second.   I also went ahead at bought the $11.95 package, mostly because it offered no ads and a "golden tour".  Comically, I pictured the golden tour being a walkthrough of the crazy, undocumented interface of the game, but no.  The golden tour is on the Rewards page, "Tour" tab, where like so many games, there is a bonus track for non-subscribers and a bonus track for subscribers with tons of extra goodies.  In this case, you can walk

 I was just clicking around in LOE (Life on the Earth) and saw they have special events.  A bit hard to find in the interface with so many buttons and widgets, but it's the second button on the top left.  Click to see if there is an event ongoing, and Enter from there.  This week's event is the Human Evolution Journey.  It uses hormone instead of catalyst to level up organisms, and the competition is based on how many trophies you end up with.  There are only 8 hours left, and the prizes only go down to rank 100, and I'm at rank 135.  There are 8 cards, so I assume 8 organisms.  So far it's: genetic material, myllokunmingia, tiktaalik (first vertebrate with a true neck), and I just unlocked archaeothyris.  There are always three quests across the top showing chests, complete them to get the chests, which in the event always have some number of trophies.  The quests are things like: unlock a species, level up a species to X, total level of all species = X, get X cards, a

Here is an idle-time game that I forgot I had, but looking at it again, dang ... it is gorgeous.  Wow, for a futuristic or high-tech science-like app, the design is top notch.  Every little bit of it cycles through colors, or swirls, or bounces or pops, or is filled with status bars and doo-dads and things that go bump in the night.  And I don't know what some of the pages even do. Okay, so it's called Life on the Earth or just LOE, by doMobile Games.  The splash page has a lovely full-screen video of evolution up to the age of dinosaurs.  Nicely done.  And every page after that, as you will see, is meant to catch your eye. I'm not sure these idle time apps really qualify as games.  They are pastimes or amusements, sure.  But there are no real decisions or goals.  You just get numbers, and tap to put the numbers in various bins, and the numbers get bigger over time, unlocking more places to put the bigger numbers. The main screen goes through the epochs of evolution, starti

I suppose I could call this ongoing series "apps I was thinking about taking off my tablet to make way for new apps, but then tinkered a bit and figured I could keep them for a while." I played Merge Magic a bunch about 3 years ago.  It's fun just dragging the groups of 3 matching items together to get the next tier of that item, or match 5 to get two of the next item.  3 tier 1 things = tier 2, 3 tier 2s (which takes 9 tier 1s) = tier 3.  These are simple powers of 3, so let's look at some higher tiers: tier 8 = 2187, tier 9 = 6561, and tier 10 = 3^9 = 19,683 tier 1 items.  That's a lot of dragging.  But numbers are easy to lose track of. There are at least 20 sequences of items, and I have seen up to tier 8 of most of them.  If you want to tackle a sequence, you really need at least a 4x3 space to line them up and merge them: four rows or columns of 3 to fit the numerous items of the first four tiers. There are also about 20 species of creatures you can breed fr

It's not such a leap to go from cat-themed card games to cat-themed Android apps.  Apps are so easy to find and get, and try out for free with no harm done.  I will try not to go too far down the rabbit hole, but here is another one I found over the weekend, after trying others and not being impressed.  Kitty Cat Resort by FatherMade games.  This is an idle-time app, so expect to earn a few points for poking around at first, then building things and watching the points go up to ridiculous levels over time ... even earning points while you are away. What makes this one work is the smoothness of the cat animations and the good humor of it all.  You are just trying to build an island resort to attract as many cats to live there as you can.  There are a few basic buildings you can build.  You start with a Fishing Hut where -- I am not kidding -- the cats sit down with fishing poles and pull fish out into the bucket before walking off and popping out a hairball. The next few attractions

After writing my overview of Empires & Puzzles a few days ago, I wanted to stop by and give some more detailed info and game tips. At the start, your characters might have 100 hp, 100 armor, and do 100 damage, and some calculation gives them an overall strength rating of 200.  They have the usual 2-star to 5-star "rarity" of all games of this type.  As you level them up, they have up to 4 tiers, ultimately leading to characters with 1500 hp, 1200 armor, doing 700 damage and an overall strength of 800+.  From there, you build teams of five, and gradually you can reach teams in the 4000-4500 range.  You start with five teams (I think -- that was a long time ago) and can spend cash/diamonds to get extra teams.   Once a character is maxed out, they have access to a Talent Grid where they can spend class emblems to bump their skills up to 20 times.  These are fairly minor bumps, maybe plus 10 or 20 on something. Around August 2021, they added Limit Breakers, which add four tie

Apps cover such a huge range of ideas, styles and target audiences, from hobby projects to multi-million-dollar media properties.  The games can be rock solid or full of bugs or holes, they can be dead serious or some of the weirdest, funniest things you will ever see, some are meant for laughs while others cater to the most specific interests or fetishes. This weekend, Anne & I were in the mood for cats and kittens.  After looking at the previews of a few games, I started poking at one called Kitten Match, which was quite simply a match-3 puzzle game full of adorable kittens.  Duh.  Part of my brain asked why bother with something so trivial, but we were enormously entertained going through level after level with little cat dialogs in between.  It really is just a series of match-3 puzzles, but as usual, the strange obstacles and power-ups are a fun mix.   Technically, the whole home repair storyline and dialog is just a super-graphical representational scoreboard: instead of just

Here are two phone app match-3 hero battle games that I spent some time playing: Empires & Puzzles (E&P) and Legendary: Game of Heroes (LGOH).  Both have a variety of teams and events available, with special events every week or so.  Both are stuck with that wheel of 4 elements plus light and darkness, probably directly inspired by Magic: The Gathering, but actually leftover from that dumb old "Four Elements" nonsense from Aristotle.  It never ever made sense, but every fictional series with magic seems to think it's brilliant stuff.  I'm sure D&D has some blame here, since it was core to their magic system, which inspired generations of games and gamers ... anyway, it's a pet peeve of mine, let's quit if with the :Air, Earth, Fire, Water" stuff already ... Game play is very similar, but one "round" in LGOH is as many combos as you can make before the quick timer runs out, where in E&P you get just one match per round. While a fe