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Affilliation
"Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords" Demo Review
“Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords” is basically a RPG (role-playing game). You pick a class, equip your character with stuff, take on quests, fight baddies, level-up, assign points to your stats, etc. Combat, however, is executed by playing a Bejeweled type puzzle.
Your level and equipment determine your HP (hit-points), and your class mainly determines what spells/techniques you can execute in combat. You stats affect how effective various aspects in combat, fire affect red pieces, water affects blue pieces, etc. In combat, you and your opponent take turns swapping adjacent pieces on the board to make Bejeweled style combinations. 
The pieces you combine determine the various aspects of combat. Damage is mainly dealt to your opponent by combining 3 or more skulls together.
The elemental pieces, in particular, provide you with “mana”, which you use for casting spells or executing techniques (like dealing damage, destroying certain pieces or shifting mana, etc). Even the amount of cash you get (and experiences points also, I think) at the end of combat are affected by the pieces you play on the board.
The structure and navigation system of the main map is similar to the Tactics type games where you basically just choose where you want to go. On the way, you may encounter some baddies which you’ll have to dispatch. As you go along and accumulate wealth, aside from purchasing items and equipment, you may also opt to improve your citadel (or house) to gain extras in the game, like mini-games (perhaps similar to the fairy world aspect of Breath of Fire III). The game also supports multiplayer, so you can pit your character and puzzling skill at other.
The demo only allows you to play until level 7, so I wasn’t able to see the game through to the end. I’m a bit annoyed that the game is currently planned to be released only for the DS and PSP (which is strange since the demo is for the PC). Given the variety of puzzles in Puzzle Pirates, I was a bit surprised that you could only play the Bejeweled like combat. But then again, they did manage to put enough twists in the Bejewled style game to make it interesting and competitive. Before this game, I couldn’t imagine how you could make Bejewled competitive, but they pulled it off nicely. Perhaps they put in some other puzzle games in the mini-games available in your citadel.
I like what I’ve seen in the demo, it makes me actually think about getting a DS just to play the game. Given that they have a demo for the PC, I think (and hope) they decide to release a PC version in the future. Regardless of where it’s available right now, this game looks very promising. If you have a DS or PSP, this is a good game to check out. For now, I’ll just keep on dreaming for a PC version.
Here are some more screen-shots:
Blogger Annoyances: Formatting Issues
I’ve been analyzing visiting patters of this blog, and I noticed that I get a few hits on my posts regarding the Guild Wars Asura mini-pet and Guild Wars: Eye of the North (GW:EotN). I found it peculiar that this post seems to get hits from Google, but my updated post on the topic, which has more substantial information on GW:EotN and Guild Wars 2, doesn’t get any hits. In service of those who are looking for information, I added a link to the new post at the end of the old post.
In light of this discovery, I tried to use Google to check if the new post shows up. It doesn’t, so it’s no surprise why my older post on the matter is the only one being found and read. Regardless, it was kinda weird that the Google spiders were able to crawl the old post so quickly, but not the new post.
I tried to see what was different between the two. One glaring difference is that the old post’s paragraph spacing was even all though out the post, while the new post had a different paragraph spacing before and after an unordered list I placed. I already noticed this problem when I first typed the post up, but I thought it was just a temporary glitch in Blogger’s display code and that it wouldn’t affect the spiders.
Being my only lead, I tried to google other posts of mine with similar inconsistent paragraph alignments. The newest one ain’t in google yet, which is understandable sine the post is quite new. The older ones (previous month and older) are googleable. The strange thing is, the very next newer post after the Guild Wars update post was googleable, which means that the older post should also have been googleable by now.
For now, my conclusions are that:
- there is a bug in Blogger regarding posts where images and lists are involved
- the spiders can crawl these pages eventually
- the Blogger bug slows down the crawling process for these pages
As long as I notice that the problem occurs, I’ll be doing the following:
- I’ll type my lists manually (I won’t use the [ul][li][/li][/ul] tags)
- if I use images, I’ll remove the “div” tags that Blogger inserts around images
I won’t try to fix the older posts, since they seem to be working anyway, but I did do this workaround in the new posts, and I’ll probably keep doing this for a while.
Regardless if I’m right about the spiders, I do check the HTML code of my posts in Blogger’s composition page before and after publishing. So, if there are any weird behaviors after publishing, and the HTML appears fine in the composition page, the problem is probably not caused by me.
We’ll find out soon enough.
No tags for this post.Webpage Direction
My vision for this webpage is slowly taking shape. My main problem is how I want to integrate this page with the existing blog. Regardless, I’ll be prepping this website little by little until I fix my overall website plan.
No tags for this post.Can’t Sleep (Verdant Gleancrawler Force)
I was planning on writing some nonsense about sarsaparilla yesterday afternoon, but it got bumped out of my schedule. Turns out, aside from the other stuff I’ll mention, it kept nagging me. So now, I’ll mention it: I tried a bottle of some healthy version of sarsaparillas (root beer) from a health store two days ago, and I liked it. I wanted to try it out ‘coz it was in a twist-cap glass bottle, and you don’t find much of that in the supermarket around here, but I was surprised when I read the labels that it was low on calories(which probably meant no sugar) and it had no caffeine! What kind of a softdrink is that?! Fortunately, it tasted pretty good. I’ll get a tad more of ‘em next time I pass by the store.
I decided to get myself some more stuff to enhance my existing deck at Magic: The Gathering Online. After doing some price-checking, I decided to get a set each of “Verdant Force” and “Gleancrawler”. Verdant Force in particular seems to be good fattie candidate for a Thallid deck. Gleancrawler, on the other hand, well, I just thought it was cool. 
I have been considering making a dredge or dredgish deck sometime, so this might be useful there.
For some reason, I woke up around around an hour and a half ago and I couldn’t stop thinking of how to make these work with my current cards at hand. The thought kept nagging me so I just gave in and tinkered around.
Some experts have mentioned that Thallid decks are bad, mainly because they are a bit slow, and I guess tournament play just doesn’t wait for the thallids to do their thing. Since I just play casually, I don’t mind as long as I have fun. Regardless, I have been trying to get myself out of my thallid rut, so I decided to try and come-up with something that would use these cards as a base. The deck I ended up with didn’t turn out to be thallid at all.
Upon testing on solitaire, it seemed that the deck it might work, but I have some risks of mana screw (mainly from a mana drought at the start). The synergies aren’t so clean yet, since mainly I’m scavenging from cards I already have, but after some games, I’ll probably know what I’ll need.
For now, I’ll try to settle down and get some sleep again. Later, I might take another peek and do some tweaking. Hopefully, I’ll come up with something decently playable.
Tags: MtGOBlogger Annoyances: Custom Domain Issues
If you have been having 404 errors or similar problems in accessing this page the past few days, it’s because I just recently found a problem with the Blogger custom domain name. When I first used the custom domain name feature, both http://www.darthvid.com and http://darthvid.com worked correctly. In the past weekend, however, I just found out that http://darthvid.com doesn’t work.
The problem can best be described here, and some solutions here and here. These are basically quick-fixes, though, as Google does admit there are still some problems in the feature.
I stopped using URL forwarding to make it work. I’ll just wait for a real fix or until there’s something interesting to try. Until then, only http://www.darthvid.com will work.
No tags for this post.Getting Ready for 2nd Impact
As time goes by, Wordpress is starting to look better and better. It’s a good thing I got my own domain name already, I won’t have to ask other people to change their URLs.
I still have some things to work work on, mainly how to migrate my old blogs to here. But after that, things should be nice and flexible. Having your own host will allow me to make a real homepage uninhibited by blog software limitations.
You’ll know you’re in 2nd Impact when you use the good ‘ol URL and appear here. 
Comments on the Blue Moon (expandable card game) Rules
I already mentioned the expandable card game “Blue Moon” in a previous post. Now that I’ve read the game rules, I can comment a bit more about the game.
FYI, the rules and complete card list can be found at the official homepage (downloadable rules can be found in the US distributor game page). Given that this is an expandable card game, the complete card, including expansions, is just around 300++ cards, around the same size of a typical Magic: The Gathering 1st block expansion release.
The art on the cards are quite beautiful, and very consistent. Each set/precon is illustrated by one artist, so the cards of a people/set have a consistent feel. World of Warcraft: The Card Game still has better art, though.
To simplify the rules, the game revolves around getting 3 (or more) dragons to your side. This is done through a series of “fights”, each fight being played by trying to trump the opposing player per turn. I think it’s similar to the playstyle of The President’s Game or Big Two Poker (to Filipinos, it’s similar to Pusoy Dos or “super trump”, if you remember that one). Each player takes turns playing cards trying to beat (or trump) the value of the opponent’s last turn. When a player can’t or doesn’t want to out trump the opponent, the fight is lost, and you get to take a dragon or two to your side.
Turns are basically played with Character Cards, with Support Cards and/or Booster cards for enhancement (sort of like Magic’s Sorceries). Booster cards modifiers for the current turn, while Support Cards are modifiers that last for the duration of the fight. The modifiers, and some of the Character Cards themselves, put versatility in the otherwise simple trumping system. There are also Leadership cards, but they seem fewer and generally has similar modification effects.
The rules do appear to be made specifically for a 1 vs 1 game. The text on the cards uses “I” for the current player, and “you” for the opponent. You quite literally read what the card says as if the current player is the one speaking. I’m not so sure that simply applying this to a multi-player game (which technically isn’t supported) will allow a balanced game.
Each precon has a certain flavor or style of play. For “advanced” rules, customized decks (mixing cards from other precons) are allowed. At first, I thought that the 10 moon (a sort of indicator of a card’s relative overall value) limitation would be restrictive, but the leader cards (which determine a deck construction’s limitations), also have similar limitations, so perhaps it’s OK.
Overall, it’s a sort of simplified (non) CCG. Not as overly complex as Magic and World of Warcraft can get, but perhaps that’s a strength. Or, you can consider it a complex playing card (poker) game. Since I haven’t actually played it yet, I could be missing out on something here and there. Some people may dig this, others may not. Perhaps it would work better for more casual players.
Regardless, check the materials out, and if you think you’ll like it, give it a try.
Tags: Blue MoonMassive "Guild Wars: Eye of the North" and "Guild Wars 2" Information from Guild Wars Guru Forums
To start things off, the guy/s was/were very lucky yo have gotten the May PC Gamer #161 so early. I was quite lucky myself when the Iron Giant mini-pet magazine came out early too, so I’ll have to check my local magazine stores if they may have this particular issue already.
A link to the post can be found here. The information available is quite massive, even if it’s just a “supplement” to the magazine article. Regardless, I agree with the guy that you should go out and get the copy of the magazine, a lot of other info can probably be gleaned from the mag, as the post is a summary, and subject to the guy who posted’s interpretation.
Based on the post, and what I’ve been gathering so far, these are the notable things which I think won’t change:
- “Guild Wars: Eye of the North” and “Guild Wars 2″ will still use the no-subscription fee model
- “Guild Wars: Eye of the North” will wrap up the current Guild wars story (or at least the Prophecies story) and somehow tie-up to “Guild Wars 2″
- “Guild Wars: Eye of the North” will require at least one of the previous campaigns (Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall) to play
- You cannot migrate your characters from the current campaigns to “Guild Wars 2″
- “Guild Wars 2″ will have additional races
There is so much more info, but for now, the info I listed above seems stable. Who knows what they’ll decide to change as feedback comes (which is probably why they’re letting us know about this stuff now).
As sad as I am that you won’t be able to carry over your old characters, I pretty much expected it. “Guild Wars 2″ is shaping up to a something new, not an extension, and the changes in gameplay will have its own balance issues, it cannot be comparable gameplay and balance wise.
I do hope they decide to push through with their massive online world plans. I consider myself a casual player of the game, and some of their gameplay plans regarding a resettable persistent pop-in/pop-out gameplay appeals to me, not to mention the thought of hundreds of players fighting side-by-side (or against each other).
I’ll probably have more comments after I get the magazine (which I hope will be soon).
Tags: Guild Wars
