ScottVee Gaming

 A while back I said that I had seen other slide puzzle games like Haru Cat Slide, and I figured I should try a few and see what other kinds of options the game makers may have added to this simple puzzle type.  I ended up finding another cat-themed one, called Slide Cats. The game play was so much like Haru Cat Slide, it was almost comical.  The art was up a notch and it was wrapped in a kind of secret agent vibe.  I guess this time you're trying to stop some alien from turning the cats into zombies.  Like usual, the story is pointless.  But it has so many of the same features: same grid size, same cat sizes, frozen cats, unmovable cats, cats that countdown and freeze other cats, cats with gifts, and blue cats (instead of purple) that zap all the cats around them.  There is a character at the top who has a "power" to zap cats when needed, but this time there is a clear progress bar showing the recharge level of that extra effect.  In Slide Cats, the blue cat

Picross Survival still has plenty of nonograms left to offer.  I like the laid-back art style and overall characters, and the incidental animations and music.       Each of the 3 levels has 10 encounter areas, each with 8 puzzles then a 5x5 grid of more puzzles to solve with a few puzzles blacked out.  The Jungle level is 10x10 puzzles, Island is 15x15 and Antarctica is 20x20 puzzles.  Good for idle time.  No points to accumulate and no quests or power ups to worry about. Looks like I finished the 15x15 Island levels.     10/23 And this morning I completed the 10x10 Jungle levels.    That leaves me only the 20x20 maps to finish, and as always I wonder if a few bonus levels might unlock or if it's just going to end, like Wish Stone did.  The finished maps do trigger Google Play achievements, which is a nice touch. 10/31 update ... it turns out that the last few levels in Antarctica are actually 30x30 puzzles, and these are a bit frustrating to work on.  The boxes are too small

Haru Cat Slide put out a cute Halloween theme.  What's funny is that if you get good at it, the games almost take TOO long.  I want to do some 5 minute puzzles, but to get to 30K takes about 25 minutes.  Also, the high scores get warped by power-ups and whether you want to watch a video to continue.  It has so many ads, it's only really playable if I put the device into Airplane mode. I almost uninstalled this, but Anne likes to poke at it for a while before bed, and it's pretty hilarious when we both crank up the volume and let 'em meow together.  On the sad side, my cat died about a month ago, and back when he was around, he could not stand random meowing sounds -- he would get up and start patrolling, looking for real cats -- he was a good buddy.  Now we can let the sound go, but I miss him. After playing for a while I noticed that you get a glimpse of the next row in that tiny slit at the bottom of the play area, so you can setup cats to fill that cat to buy yo

A few weeks back, Anne got into Minecraft and we have been having a lot of fun building a world together.  It's a modded world, using a pack of 1.7.10 mods I put together, because newer versions would not load on her laptop.  Last night we had a blast decorating our virtual house for Halloween, using the various pumpkins, scarecrows, skulls, spiderwebs and such from the Chisel, DecoCraft, Fossils mods and the vanilla game.  Here are some shots of our house and the elaborate swimming pool out back. It's amazing how many different game sessions and challenges we can come up with.  Sometimes, we just go exploring or mining, other times we crack open stacks of fossil blocks and see what DNA and other things we can come up with, or we hop into the Twilight Forest and look for more animals, or build new buildings, or decorate existing locations ... it is so many different games rolled into one.  After 11 or 12 years of playing in this blocky world, it has never gotten dull. Then we b

Art Story is a new app we have both been toying with.  It's not exactly a Game -- it's somewhere between a coloring book and a find-the-items puzzle.  You get a basic canvas with partial outlines of objects that you have to find in the bottom bar and drag to the proper place on screen, and after each group, another set of outlines appears.  It's relaxing, good music again.  What keeps it interesting is the quality and style of the art, the way it is grouped into books and uses famous stories along the way.  It's also neat how you don't know what size the pieces are going to become once they move into the picture area -- sometimes what you thought was a big object is only 20 pixels tall, or what you thought was a little blob is a hillside covering half the screen. Art Story probably has some in-game purchases but I got it through some Google Play portal where it came with all purchases unlocked, so I started off by getting a free 2000 ink blobs and still

Over in Idle Planet Miner, it's just a grind.  I'm not sure why I even continue with it.  I just bought the $10T planet and STILL can't get any inerton to complete the researches.  The only researches I could do were one for a space probe and 43 plasma torches which took about 2 weeks, and now this one that needs 129 telescopes... Well, a rough estimate from memory says that a telescope is 16 lenses and an advanced computer plus over an hour each; each lens is one glass and one silver and 9m; each advanced computer is 4 basic computers and some other thing plus 20min, each basic computer needs 4 circuits and some copper wire (7min), each circuit needs 8 copper wire and some silicon.  It's easily 200 hours of crafting time.  Sure, I can set up my 5 crafters to produce 100 lenses then run 100 circuits the next day, but it's crazy.  The idle time maxes out at 240 minutes. As far as getting to those 10 trillion game $$, I have over a billion copper ore but even if I sel