http://www.wurb.com/stack A completist plays old games Sat, 10 May 2008 04:10:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I started off this whole series of posts by comparing Puzzle Quest to Bookworm Adventures, and I'm not the only one to make that comparison. It's a pretty obvious comparison to make, since they're two of the only representatives of the Puzzle/RPG Fusion genre. But now that I've ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/367 It turns out that level 50 is indeed the highest attainable. I have attained it, and I am now spending my time doing the last remaining batches of side-quests, forging new items, and researching spells. I'm a little reluctant to pursue the main quest line, because it seems ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/366 I seem to be approaching the end of the game. At least, I've reached the vicinity of the castle of Lord Bane, God of Death and primary antagonist, who's appeared personally a couple of times to taunt me and set his minions on me. I'm also nearly up ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/365 At its core, the way you interact with Puzzle Quest is identical to the way you interact with Bejewelled. On a PC with a mouse, this means that you have two ways of swapping games: either click on the two gems that you want to swap, or hold and ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/364 Combat in RPGs is always an abstraction. Even in a relatively concrete system like D&D, there's a sense that the actions explicitly taken aren't all that's "really" going on: combat rounds are supposedly six seconds long, which is an awfully long time to make a single sword thrust. ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/363 Although it could probably get by on the novelty of its gameplay alone, Puzzle Quest actually does something a little interesting with the plot. The premise is uninspired -- the peaceful cities suddenly come under attack by orcish slavers and undead, just like in about half the D&D campaigns ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/362 This morning, as I looked at my desktop and its excessive clutter of icons, my eyes were immediately drawn to places where I could form rows of three similar icons by swapping adjacent ones. This is a familiar phenomenon. You play a game, it trains your brain. ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/361 Outside of combat, Puzzle Quest plays more or less like a conventional RPG, but one played on a scale I more associate with strategy games such as Heroes of Might and Magic or Master of Orion. All travel is conducted on an overland map, and constrained to delineated paths ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/358 The heart of Puzzle Quest, the mode that you spend about 90% of your time in, is a competitive tile-matching game. There have been other competitive tile-matching games, such as Puzzle Fighter, but all others that I know of involve two players competing in realtime on separate playfields that ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/357 Puzzle Quest seems like the logical next step in our examination of nonstandard combat mechanics. Like Bookworm Adventures, it's a RPGification of a casual game mechanic based mainly around pattern recognition, this time Bejewelled and other "match 3" games. Match 3 games are usually classified as puzzle games, ... http://www.wurb.com/stack/archives/355