Dragonvale Breeding

I am totally hooked on this new game for my iPhone. This is Dragonvale. Your goal appears to be to spawn a lot of different dragons. Toward that goal you need to gold, dragon food, and habitats. Previously I had a whole fire nation of dragons. They produce gold quick. But their maximum is capped and that is getting in the way.

Now I am trying to raise up some dragons for my earth habitat. What better way to do that than get some Quake dragons in there. While waiting for some quake dragon eggs to hatch, I tried to also breed a Sandstorm dragon for fun. The sandstorm eggs look like they are a combination of air and earth elements. Fine. I got both those dragons.

I chose my air dragon first. Next I wanted to choose the earth dragon to mate with it. No luck. It was grayed out. At first I thought this was a bug. Then I thought perhaps one dragon was too much older than the other. I fed my air dragon to raise its level. No help. Finally I searched on the web for a solution.

It turns out that air and earth are opposite elements. They never mix directly. I had to first create a hybrid dragon that was half of one of those elements. Then I could mate the hybrid with the other element. I tried this, but the result does not look like it will be a sandstorm dragon. The egg had a long incubation period. I might be getting another Moss dragon. Great.

Bardness Update

I am pretty much done trying out the 7DRL successful entries. Now I am checking out games with regular updates on rgrd. Today I installed Bardness. The game required a separate XNA Framework download from Microsoft. I wanted to try the game, so I went ahead with the download and install.

Bardness starts out with a huge page of stats and abilities. I accepted the defaults, and quickly lost during a demo verion. Then I went for the full quest. This one had more enemies. But I guess they were spread out better throughout the dungeon. I have not seen an enemy yet.

Bardness has a blinkig cursor next to your player character on the screen. Not sure if that is a side effect or a feature. I like the power bars that graphically show your health. Some of the menus are clipped on my screen. Is this due to my screen resolution? Who knows?

Based on the version number, I suspect this game is still in beta. I will be interested in seeing version 1.0 some day.

Snake AKA Wyrm

I played Wyrm a couple times today. This game is hard. I make sure to move so as not to bite my own tail. However it seems monster just kill me within a few turns. I eat monster to gain energy to no avail.

When the game starts, you have a lot of options thrown at you. Perhaps I could search for a difficulty option. Then I should put the thing on easy. This feels like the game of Snake. However it has a roguelike flavor.

The game requires the Java runtime environment version 6 or greater. You got to run the game manually from the command line. It is a cool game, but way too hard.

Return to the Dungeons of Doom

I just tried out the 7DRL called Locks. This game has an eerie music playing in the background. There seems to be some advanced targeting and movement. When I started the game, some enemies were immediately firing projectiles at me.

There is one major problem in the game. I cannot figure out how to attack my enemies. I read through the readme file. No luck. I cannot run away. I get zapped by projectiles. This is just no good.

It is amusing that the author left some cheats in the game. They are fully documented in the readme file. Still, if I cannot attack I can't play the game. Oh well.

Life in the Shadows

I am trying to play Shadowrogue. The colors are nbice in this game. The yellow of the lighted area is great. The shadows seem somewhat blue. I did find and kill one guard. Aside from that, there does not seem much to do in the game.

The goal is to get something called the MacGruffin. Get it and you can climb up the stairs. This is definitely a minimal game. The messages are color coded. I don't know what the colors mean. It is just something different.

completing a level allows you to increase one of your stats. The more levels you climb, the more guards you must deal with per level. Not sure if the guards (G) are stronger than guards (g). I did eventually die fighting the guards. Got to level three. Killed a few guards on that level before I was bumped off.

This is a simple but nice game to play. The controls feel very natural. Colors are great. Impressive for a 7DRL creation.