ScottVee Gaming

Over on E&P, then upgraded the Path of Valor quest screen to have a whole parallel set of quests.  So now this a Path to Adventure page with two tabs: the old Path of Valor and the new Path of Giants.  The first costs $9.99 per 30 days to get the full set of bonus items (which I do pay for every now & then), and Giants costs $19.99 (which is too much for this kind of thing for me). Having twice as many available quests is nice, even with the default free sets of rewards.  The Giants series almost always has 3 or 4 quests dealing with unique challenges for the Raids.  The Raids got pretty boring and repetitive after a few years, but now there is almost always a quest to defeat 5 heroes by class and another to defeat 5 heroes by element.  So 5 paladins, check.  5 fire heroes, check.  On the downside, it's a bit annoying that when showing the opposing teams, the class icons are not visible unless you click every hero. Some of the othe...

Ticket to Earth is an Android app with a techy theme, with light cyperpunk elements, from what I can tell so far.  It has an interesting combination of drag-a-path combat where the tiles are beneath the feet of the player and opponents.  Dragging longer paths gives you more of a run-up, which gives an attack bonus.  That was interesting.     So far, I don't care for the characters or the attempt at making a story, and I have only fought a few bugs and some kind of filter machine.   I went a bit further ... you can gain powers tired to the tiles on the floor, and fight a lot of robots.  Not really my cup of tea. 

Card Crawl is an odd mix of game elements.  It says that it's designed as a sort of solitaire card game, which is accurate.  The idea is to get all the way through the deck of cards using the swords, shields and potions to overpower whatever monsters come up.  There are also cards with coins and a few special powers.   The dealer deals 4 cards on the top row.  You can put sword, shields, potions, specials or coins into your hand or you backpack on the bottom row.  The idea is to play higher numbers onto those monsters and take the remainder as damage.  Once you clear three cards, the dealer deals three more. At the very top of the screen it says how many cards are left in the deck. It's pretty simple.  I'm not feeling a lot of strategy or depths here.  It boils down to whether you get the cards you need or not.  If four 10-point creatures come up on top, there's not going to be much you can do about it.  But it is balanced nicely, a...

Word Collect had a minor UI update that cleaned up the graphics of a few panels.   You can now tap to skip the annoying wait between levels while a little meter slowly updated from level X to X+1.  Like you could ever be on a fractional level like 1201.3.  Just go from 1201 to 1202, done.  You can now tap the extra words on a level to scroll through all those definitions, which is neat, because it used to just accept an odd word and there was no way to ask it why it thought it was a word.  Of course, they come back with "Word Not Found" for most of those odd words anyway, and they added a bug that broke the word wrap on that long list of extra words fails, so the list just zooms off the screen, so you can't see most of them at all. 7/21 update: Oddly, after mentioning the little update of Word Collect where we can now view definitions for all the Extra Words but the word wrap was broken, yesterday afternoon it went back to the old layout: word wrap...

Empires & Puzzles had an interesting new event about a month ago called the Five Kingdoms, which was essentially the same as your regular faction wars but with 100 players per team.   Trouble is, I have gotten tired of the faction wars, because you only get 6 attacks which use your strongest guys up front and get weaker as you continue.  Right now, my first team is about 4500, then a 4000, but by my 6th team I'm down to a strength of about 2600, and when I login after work there are usually only a few opponents available to fight, all with strengths of 4800+.   So, the first 2 or 3 fights are fun, and the last 3 or 4 suck.  Sometimes it takes all three of my weakest teams to take out one hero from one team of one of those overpowered foes.  The balance just fails unless I can somehow put six equally strong teams out there.  There is hardly ever a damaged team where I can pick off one or two guys and feel like I'm helping.  The...

Idle Heroes added a new building on the main screen called Fantasy Arcade.  It looks like they're planning a variety of game-in-game adventures in there, but right now they just have one that's a tower defense game.     I never liked tower defense games much, but they made a cute little distraction out of it.  Each time, more waves of bad guys come to fight, and the waves get tougher.  You have to keep up by summoning new fighters as you lose old ones, and you do get a few chances to level up those guys in between attacks.  When these games are well balanced, like this one, you have some waves that knock you back but then you get control and push them out again.  But they do tend to drag on for a little too long. Idle Heroes overall just keeps finding new ways to expand, and add more tiers to the heroes, more quests and features.  It also seems to have some all new challenge screen every week.  Like this Fantasy Factory one whe...

Grim Tides is another roguelike dungeon Android app.  The tutorial gives a decent overview of what's where without being too tiresome.  So you buy some items, equip them, and go to World Map to pick a dungeon to explore.  After that, you just move your guy on a grid where the squares are usually empty, but sometimes a fight comes up.  All very standard.     What's nice is that sometimes custom encounters are generated, which spell out a scene and ask you what you want to do.  It could be helping an NPC with something, scouting out a camp looking for items to steal, or negotiating to avoid a fight.  There are tons of quests (bounties) available in town, and pages for Crafting and Enchanting items.    One of the main pages is a Bestiary where, after defeating foes, they will show up here with full stats shown. I got through my second level with only 4 HP left, so I guess I'll be spending most of my plunder on healing potion...

Out There Omega is an Android app with a space exploration theme.  It felt good at first, with a scaled-down set of options and simple UI, just three stats tied to resources: fuel (H, He), oxygen (O) and hull strength (Fe).  There's a brief tutorial with just a few suggestions, then you can choose star systems which have zero to three planets to explore.  Choose planets, and they have different resources to drill for.  Worlds with atmosphere might refill your O2 bar.  There were some interesting written enc ounters... But it was a huge letdown when I couldn't get hydrogen from stars and ended up running out of fuel.    Since there's no way to scan ahead and see what elements will be available at a location, this hardcore mode is a real show stopper.  I don't mind so much the first time through, where I was learning and only got to see about 8 planets, but knowing it could be a dead end after hours of effort means I don't want to play it ...

I have seen these Hunt a Killer games advertised on many of the Youtube videos I watch, and on gaming websites.  I was wondering what they were like.  I think they can send you a new mystery every month for $30 a pop.  Sounds interesting, but these must be difficult to design. At a swap meet event at the Bates Nut Farm, we found one of them for $3, so I could finally see how they are put together. They provide a good range of paper clues and other props.  There are almost no instructions other than "figure it out" and if you get stuck, try their web page with a few extra clues.  This one had a nice, big map, and a variety of story pieces, mock news clippings, all leading up to finding the combination to open the metal box with a few final clues.  We were able to use the clues to more-or-less decided that all but one of the suspects was elsewhere at the scene of the crime. It's not a game.  It's a puzzle.  It is very entertaining early on, and we a...