Saturday Casual Gaming 310: Merge Magic

In Which Gram Games Has Done It Again

Once Upon a Time, I played a mobile game called Merge Dragons, and it was good. It got overwhelming at a certain point, and some of the challenges seemed literally impossible, but I enjoyed it when I played it.

Then I discovered Gram Games' other merge/match-3 game: Merge Magic.

What a pretty loading screen...

So Merge Magic is basically identical to Merge Dragons, but with an emphasis on other mythical beasts, rather than solely focusing on dragons. So it's literally the same game with a paint job.

Except...

I'm having more fun playing it, it's more challenging yet much more fairly balanced, and a lot of the creatures are cuter than the dragons were.

So I'm having a blast. I've got magic llamas, magic squirrels, fairies, and more - all digging up rocks and throwing money at me and it's great.

And the holiday events! If I devoted an entire weekend to them, like they seem to expect, I might actually be able to beat one, one of these tries, but they're impossible for a casual player to defeat unaided by real money. Then again, half the fun is seeing how many event points you can rack up before the event ends, so that's still really fun!

And it's actually pretty easy to get the home garden cleared in good time, too!

So basically, if you liked Merge Dragons, you'll probably like Merge Magic. Keep an eye out for secret levels on the level select screen, match away to your heart's content, and just... earn all of the stars. Earn them all. Every last one. You never know when one will turn out to contain gems (the premium currency)!

It's available in the app store, if you were wondering.

That'll about do it for me today - I know, short and sweet...

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 303: Idle Pins on Kongregate

In Which I Am Very Sleepy

I'm typing this up at midnight because I'm 99% sure I'm going to either sleep in like a fool or wake up early to get things done, but either way, I am a sleepy birb.

When I'm tired but cannot sleep, I do one of two things: I watch videos on YouTube or I play idle games.

I have elected to play idle games, since for some reason (which I can't figure out) my computer has decided that a fairly good internet connection be damned, it's going to refuse to load YouTube videos. At all. It's horrifying. We're talking 144p.

Thankfully, you don't need a whole lot of crazy internet speeds or whatever to play a sweet little idle game like Idle Pins.

Idle Pins is a fairly new idle game on Kongregate. Made by publisher Arkshija and published on December 17, 2019, this game is a fun combination of RPG, idle game, sci-fi, and blatant copyright flummery. Seriously. There are a lot of references to other video games which the publisher is unlikely to have had a hand in. I'm not gonna complain about having my pins in the "Charmander" formation... or the one that looks like Sonic... or the one that looks like a Koopatroopa...

What I'm saying is that this game is very tongue-in-cheek. The story is pretty upfront about the fact that it doesn't really matter, but that's one of my big problems with it. When I logged on at the start of January, I had no idea what any of the mechanics were. You're given walls of text that make little to no sense and are left to do just... wait around and hope that something good happens. I'm still not 100% sure what pins go where in a formation!

You have pins, which are little buttons, and you're sending them to kill bad guys. You do this by loading them in formations (you start with "Noob", and it's trash, but you'll need it anyway) and hoping they don't die. Pins are... basically idle Pokemon. Except instead of kidnapping them and forcing them into combat, you either find or create them. This is also a little confusing at first, but here is my advice for if you're going to start playing this game:

1. If you have two pins that are the same (such as, a pair of "Alpha" pins), drag one on top of the other in your inventory. This will fuse them and make them stronger (two "Alpha" make one "Beta" for instance).
2. If it seems like you should be able to do something (crafting, tuning, etc) but you can't figure out how, just chill. You haven't found that ability yet.
3. Don't freak out about Tuning or the SynthLab. Tuning is a way to improve your pins with extra stats. SynthLab adds batteries to your pins and levels them up. You'll find batteries eventually, or you can deconstruct the higher tier pins you have (Gamma and up) for energy. Again, don't worry about this.
4. Bosses will kill you a lot early on.
5. You're not gonna keep the cool pins when you soft reset after Area 4 on the game map, so don't invest too heavily in them.

While the game did frontload a lot of conflicting or confusing info early on, I found that after I started to accumulate Formations and Unlockables (and even Event Items!), the game was better able to explain itself.

If you're looking for an idle game that asks you to practice some basic logic and reading comprehension, then definitely give Idle Pins a try. Now that I kind of understand what I'm doing, it's a lot of fun!!! Arkshija has done a great job here, and the fact that they're continually updating and tweaking the game tells me that they care about the game itself and how much fun you'll have playing it.

I'm going to bed now :)

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 227: Tap! Dig! My Museum!

I used to want to be a paleontologist. I was little, Jurassic Park had just come out on VHS, I had the flu so I sounded like a Velociraptor when I coughed... good times. Finding Tap! Dig! My Museum! by Oridio on the Google App Store seemed to be just the thing I needed to feed my dino obsession.

And it was!

So, you start out with an empty, run-down museum and a small bag of cash. You take that money and build a display case, then you go dig for dinos! The digging is a lot of fun.

If really simple

Basically, you're taken to a screen and, with a limited number of moves, you dig into the dirt by tapping on a section. Sometimes you'll find money. Sometimes you'll find fossils. You can watch an ad to get more moves, too, but only once per dig. When you run out of moves (or find all available fossils), you get sent back to your museum with your spoils. The first dinosaur I uncovered was a Velociraptor, but after that some of the choices are... weird but awesome. I'm pretty sure I dug up dinos I'd never heard of before - seriously.

And they're fairly accurate representations!

While you build up your collection, guests will arrive at your museum. They drop money, which you can then use to buy upgrades or fund digs. The upgrades come in five varieties - on your main museum, you can upgrade things buy opening new exhibits, or you can expand your museum. This, sadly, can only be done once so far (as of the writing of this blog), but the developers say they're working on new expansions and upgrades, so that's cool. The other three kinds of upgrade are in the yellow museum button. These will let you fit more people in your museum at a given time, hire more diggers (and thus have more moves per dig), or increase the power of your taps during digs. I tried to maximize my museum perks as quickly as possible, which made digging the larger dinos much easier!

I flipping love spinosaurus!!!

I'm a big fan of cute pixel games like this, and this game has everything I like. It's simple and easy to understand and play, it's pretty to look at, and it's got great music. It even has a camera button to let you take quick screen shots! They save as .png files, which means...

Yes.

The museum shots are from my actual in-game museum! That makes it so much easier to talk about on the internet. No complicated multi-button presses on my phone hoping I'm doing it right and missing the good shots! Just... tap! Done. Save it to my Drive!

I hope a lot more games start doing that!

So yeah, Oridio's Tap! Dig! My Museum! is a nifty game that I can't wait to get updates on. Especially since it only took me 5 days to play out the missions...

If you're looking for a cute game with dinosaurs, museums, and a great sense of accomplishment, try it out!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 226: Coloring Pixels

Since I started gaming with handhelds back in the 1990s, you can guess that I love me some pixels. I love 8- and 16-bit (and 32-bit!) images. I love the creativity inherent in stacking colored blocks to make things look recognizable or to come up with something brand new! It's always wonderful.

And since I draw and color and paint, you might be able to guess that I love coloring books.

I do not have a ton of space for coloring books, however, so the recent boom in digital coloring books has been a major boon to me! I was bumming around last year on Steam and found this:

From ToastieLabs, this is Coloring Pixels

Coloring Pixels is a really cool free-to-play coloring book you can download from Steam and fill in beautiful pixel art images that range from incredibly simple shapes to incredibly lush scenes. I love the way it looks, the fact that there are occasionally overlays for holidays (there was snow around Christmas, drifting slowly over the screen, and the edges of the screen were, I believe, on fire around Halloween) just makes it more fun!

Now, I'm the kind of coloring person who likes to finish one color before moving on to the next, which works really easily on small images, but when you get here...

Well... once you get into the crazy amount of colors, things go much slower.
Much. Much slower.

But your reward for finishing each image is that wonderful sense of accomplishment from completing a very difficult task! And it really does feel like an accomplishment. You feel like you've done something, and on days when I literally can't will myself out of bed, that can be soothing.

It's not done, yet, but this is a zoomed-in portion of that same image!
Looooook at allllll that deeeeetaaaaaaiiillllll!

Now, the argument can certainly be made that these sorts of things are not, technically, games, but I'm going to count it because it was free, it makes me happy, it requires input, and you are, technically, finishing tasks to get to an end goal. The tasks are just "input all colors in the appropriate locations" and the end goal is just "finish the picture"...

I did mention that it's only kind of a free game. There is DLC. The DLC is really cool, but it also costs money, which means it isn't happening for me. I mean, there are 12 DLC packs (all of which sound fun), and none of them are more than a dollar. The only reason the "Buy All" function on Steam tells you it's over sixteen dollars is the addition of a downloadable copy of the soundtrack. While the music is pretty fun, it's not something I'm dying to download, but I can always appreciate wanting people to pay you for the music.

That wasn't sarcasm. I've played music in a community band before. The number of people who took "community band" to mean "free of charge because we're not famous" was horrific. No, we will not play your wedding for free. The band itself does have financial needs. Like renting practice space and buying water.

What I'm saying here is, I don't think soundtracks should always be free to download. It's cool when a company can afford to do it, but I'm not going to be butthurt when it's under seven bucks.

If they were charging twenty bucks for the soundtrack, then I'd be butthurt.

But yes, the art you're coloring, the colors you use, the soundtrack, the little extras (like the holiday particle effects), and the overall game itself are more than worth your time if you need a moment of zen!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC