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...

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 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...

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.  I...

 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 o...

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...

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 b...