iPhone games (also Ipod Tooch/iPad games too)

still finding dream quest v enjoyable

Karl did you get the Alchemist unlocked?

I've taken a pause from CQ2 while I try to figure out what the point is of Pixel Starships or whatever. Set timers, upgrade shit, try to go on a mission, barely escape total destruction, go back and set more timers. There's no difficulty slider and I clearly don't know what I'm doing.

I did get some lucky drops in Spirit Lords, I have to say they might have got the grind-to-special ratio pretty close to perfect

i need to go back and beat pixel heroes too

the first few (dozen) times (through Pixel Heroes) I would get pretty far by being lucky with drops, but I realized if I just take notes on which dungeons and bosses demand which buffs I could probably whup its ass, I just hate documentation. I'm flying to SF and back next week, that shit better watch itself

SPL-T is pretty good.

Just beat the dream lord on Dream Quest for the first time after months of playing it, using the professor with upgraded research ability. Nearly all the damage was done with multiple copies of discharge.

Imbroglio. Lots of depth here, just digging into it.

was meaning to post that here too. it's great, although i'm not so good at it yet. made by michael brough (868-HACK, among others)

I'm horrible at the so far. Fun tho.

i've tried 3 of the 4 classes (haven't unlocked the others yet) and have had the most luck with masina (52 gems). i haven't messed around much with custom deckbuilding yet though. i tried it twice and both times accidentally made the game much harder.

My high score is 95 with count Harry. I've done some deck shuffling. What I do quite understand is the cards can lose levels too??? Like I have a card that gives 4 heart damage, but the more I use it, it decreases.

OIC, that's the type of card it is, the Dwindling Brazier. Tricky tricky.

great game! could get very deep if the character/weapon combinations work out well.

i got 137 with harry. key thing for me so far is getting clubs and claws up to two damage, and the whisk has saved me a bunch of times. one trick with harry is to heal even if you don't need it, to get enemies to advance a square so you can get in the first hit, like using wait in 868 hack.

if you touch your "most gems" box, you can see what boards other people used to get high scores.

brough, please keep making grid roguelikes forever, thanks.

one trick with harry is to heal even if you don't need it, to get enemies to advance a square so you can get in the first hit, like using wait in 868 hack.

great tip! i've been struggling with that - how to deal with situations where you really just need to wait one turn. that's a great idea, at least with Harry.

http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/2016/05/imbroglio-notes-1-inventory-management.html

113 with Harry. Should prob try another character.

This game is great it's kind of taking over all my free time. Just got 182 with Harry. I too should prob try another character.

rly enjoyed that inventory post, mordy. second post on weapons here:

http://mightyvision.blogspot.pt/2016/05/imbroglio-notes-2-blood-and-mana.html

love brog, particularly corrypt and 868-HACK which are masterpieces and imbroglio is up there. 128 Harry (got lucky i think, or rather didn't get *unlucky*) and 50s-ish for the rest I've unlocked.

man how did I go two weeks without realising this existed

130 with Harry (and a custom board, which felt good). I like playing with the other characters but haven't been as successful with them so far (in limited use - I've only played maybe 10-15 games so far)

don't mean to overhype brough but i think he's really great, based on HACK and imbroglio alone (haven't played corrypt yet). i just mean that i will play anything he releases for quite a while because it's clear that he's trying to do something new even if it's not everyone's cup of tea

also getting the feeling that the real game is semi-deep in (100+ gems) when multiple enemies are closing in and you have to start making decisions about which enemy to take damage from first, or whether it's worth fleeing.

also i've gradually started to pick up on this (from the second brough post mordy linked to) and it's very rewarding to learn:

i've noticed that players very quickly grasp the idea that enemies are weaker in one colour so it is advantageous to hit with weapons of that colour, but then often they internalise that as a strict rule ("you always have to hit those ones with a blue weapon") and will go out of their way to use the preferred colour even when it's very unsafe to do so / costs a lot more turns. There's definitely situations where it's better to use the "wrong" colour.

I need to try a new board. I've been using a custom one for about 30 games now. I think it's good but I keep failing. I keep telling myself that I'm just not executing. But maybe it's time for a change. How long do I ride it?

For ILM, I recommend about five minutes max at first and avoid the polls.

this gets bastard hard over a hundred gems

Furious this morning that a stupid lapse saw me die on 100 with Susannah completely unnecessarily.

I've reached around 180 with four characters, still really enjoying this game. I love how different the game feels with each of them. I've yet to make my own board, I just copy the highest score boards: it's quite entertaining figuring out how they're meant to work, which weapons combine well with others etc

Furious this morning that a stupid lapse saw me die on 100 with Susannah completely unnecessarily.

― Fizzles, Thursday, June 2, 2016 8:49 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i just did this on 97! goddammit

if the brief was 'make a game less forgiving than 868-hack' he did a damn good job. i think that has rendered me less addicted to it than i would have been otherwise (nb i am still spending 1-3 hours a day on this) -- like for example moving instead of using a ranged weapon to make an enemy close ranks and thus incurring one damage can be quickly fatal if it puts you out of parity with the next enemy or two.

might try copying the high-score boards once i start to plateau in what i'm doing myself. it's nice that susannah is set up to remove one big layer of complexity from the board design. currently not using any over-complicated chain effects. or more than one tile with curses. or braziers. i have what i think is a strong late-game board set up but if i make >1 mistake before around fifty stars i never get to the mid-game

man does this game have a win condition? too many of the high score tables stop at 256 for it to be a coincidence, also one of them is 256 for the top four

At 256 you escape the dungeon (there's a YouTube vid of a dude reaching 256 with Vesuvius bob).
Braziers can be extremely useful when you get stuck in the wrong corner though.
Has anyone tried playing with the two characters who can only use one style of weapon? The little I've used them made it seem impossible to deal with all the kinds of monsters.

I've hit 91 with Susanah (no blue)

i had 245 with harry and then i got pinned to a whetstone :(

second proudest of 165 with sorceress. there's definitely an early/mid/late game arc you have to plan for. main things to balance are efficiency of movement, steadily leveling up your tiles, and reserving enough runes for late game. there's some pretty disparate strategies on the top boards for harry already, bodes well.

you guys have sold me on this, gonna try it tonight.

lol this time an unforced loss at 98 with susannah. goddamit. i swear this board has a win in it if i stop being an idiot

as long as you can get a club up to level two (quickest weapon to do plural damage) before you get multiple cubes in a row it's possible to have a viable board-- anything w two damage means only having to take one damage from a four-health monster, which means you can survive if the maximum three of them are spawned in a row

braziers are a double liability -- they get weaker and also (since kills are a resource) every time you hit smth with one of them you're wasting experience that ought to go to other things. that said the best board w susannah still has them. i suspect this is a numbers thing -- w/o them you have to do a lot of junk runs until you get to the point where you're competing.

i have two reducing braziers for susannah runs, as they can be needed to get me to a stage where I've upgraded two clubs. the scythe is v handy once you start getting a higher frequency of enemies.

235 with jeska nomad witch. Also got a new monster, a dragon: 12 hp&mana !

that sounds like something your uncle who works at michael brough told you

i escaped! shaking rn tbh. i had two triple damage harps :metal horns emoji:

still haven't seen the dragon

wow brough's harry board is crazy looking

xp - corner braziers are good for early game efficiency. they can keep you from wasting turns backpedaling to another color if you're walled in with a mismatch, and you save movement turns since you're not going to the corners to level them. also fastest way to kill early minotaurs if your board is a long build. late game, they still get you runes.

is everyone reading his notes at http://mightyvision.blogspot.com/ ? pretty great stuff

yeah, it is. really good.

Human Resource Machine is, as I understand it, coding for people who can't understand coding. Or it's logic puzzles. I can't tell which. It's invaded my brain tho'.

That's from the World of Goo people right? Mean to get around to that.

yep, the little inferno guys.

I know some people loooove coding but a game that feels like my job? No thanks.

It's about code, but based in a very stripped-down assembly language not at all like normal programming in the past ~50 years. I learned assembly years ago and occasionally read about some wizardry with some fancy bit-twiddly optimizations or some jump table layouts being more efficient than others but its not something I've actually sat down and _done_ for years, so the game ended up being a lot of fun -- and you can do things the "long" way which translates literally from higher-level ideas or really just micro-optimize the heck out of things to beat the challenges.

153 with Harry. Good enough, time to be someone else.

yez, I got 256 with jeska and escaped!