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Thomas Was Alone: blocks with personality

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I'm not sure how I feel about Thomas Was Alone. Its basic graphic style doesn't subtract anything from the gameplay, and in many ways it enhances the story and narrative, with faceless blocks being given ordinary names. The narration explores the thoughts of these blocks and is really well written. Parts of it have made me laugh a lot.

Claire needed to come up with a superhero name. 'Claire' was rubbish.

But the actual game feels pretty uninspired. The idea of each level is to get all characters into defined positions. Different blocks have different properties - Claire, for example, can float on water. None of the puzzles are particularly taxing, however, and often I'll get to the end of the level before the narration has finished. I can appreciate the style of the game, but it's not the most engaging thing to play.

Papers, Please: sending people off to die

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Quite a grim game, it must be said, and difficult as well.  You play as a border control official in a 1980s communist country, and must verify passport details and grant or deny access.  As you work through the game, the complexity of your task increases - entry tickets, entry permits, work permits, ID cards, fingerprint searches, X-ray scanning ... all of this serves to slow you down, you make mistakes, and you serve fewer travellers in a day.

And serving fewer travellers is bad, as you get paid per traveller and it's not just you relying on your salary.  You will find yourself faced with choices over who gets the needed medicine, and whether food is affordable.  Couple this with days ending early due to terrorist attacks, and you may soon find yourself alone.



The game's currently in beta and ends after a few days.  There are some intriguing plot narratives which start to open, with people asking you to refuse entry to a certain individual to protect them, cards passed across with secret society details, and husbands and wives broken up.  There's a repeat character that turns up with fake details each day, and I'd be intrigued to see if he ever gets everything together.

It's brutally hard to keep your family well, and for the final game I hope there's an easier mode (maybe unlocked after playing the main difficulty, which highlights the difficult conditions in those countries at the time) where you're not expected to earn quite as much.  Even after much practice, the third day still saw me with virtually no savings to carry forwards.


I recommend that you all play this at some point, whether it's now or when it's eventually released.  Details can be found at http://papersplea.se/.

Animal Crossing New Leaf: my lovely town

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On the 3DS you can take screenshots and post them to Twitter.  have a look on there if you want to see all the screens I've shared, but here are a few.

In my position as town mayor, my secretary has been making some rather untoward advances.


Tom Nook is still a shady character. Paying off my first mortgage, he didn't trust me to give him the right amount.


I made a lot of money on the stalk market.


Reese's husband has finally woken up, and he's immediately in a jealous rage. I've not found anything he's interested in renovating yet, either.


I hated Leonardo.  He was a fitness fanatic, and finished every sentence with "flexin'".  I hit him with my net and dug holes around his house.  He got the idea in the end and moved out.  Unfortunately, just before he did so, he taught Olaf to say "flexin'".  I hate him.


I have collected a number of fossils so far, but there are still some holes in the collection.  The T-Rex demonstrates this well.


I've caught a few sharks now, but I'm a bit uneasy that Blathers has put them all in a tank with other fish.  I fear I may need to catch more bass in the future.


Lego City Undercover: a compuper game

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Over the past week or so I've been playing Lego City Undercover when I'm at home, Nicholas is asleep, and Animal Crossing isn't calling.  I was loathe to leave New Super Mario Bros U before completing it, but I was suffering from Mario ennui after 3D Land.  I will go back to NSMBU, though, as it's excellent.

Not quite as excellent as Lego City Undercover.  The quality of writing in the game is superb, and it's a sandbox game that's appropriate for kids and people who don't want to kill all the time.  I've mainly been following the missions, but occasionally getting distracted by some random brick or car chase - at the moment I've not unlocked enough abilities to seriously hunt every little secret, though.

The variety of missions is pretty good, with comedic touched throughout.  A lot of this comes from the sidekick character, Frank Honey, who is just a bit thick.


Frank pops up at the least appropriate moments and makes a hash of things over and over again.


The writing is utter genius, with many levels of comedy.  I know that Nicholas will laugh heartily at Frank driving a lorry into the police headquarters when he's a bit older; I'm more amused by him shouting that criminals are around so people should be quiet.

The main fault in the game so far is that the fighting is a bit disjointed and easy to win through button mashing.  Fights always end with Chase (the main character) handcuffing the baddies and them disappearing, but it can be tricky at times to see where they've gone when they've been thrown around.  I hoped this would change after my last missions, in which I learnt kung fu, but that doesn't seem to have changed much at all.


I did get to build a dragon, though.


As I've been playing this later in the evening, you can imagine my excitement when I saw an agility orb.  In fact, that's a listening post, and Chase can't jump that high.  Not yet, anyway.


Candy Box: more than it seems

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If you've not played Candy Box, then go do so now.  Don't come back until you've got a long way into it.
Right.  Great, isn't it?



I've now got all the way to the Developer's Computer, but apparently it's pretty random as to whether you can pass that.  Facing up the the devil, followed by Chuck Norris, was fun and took a while to develop strategies.  I can leave the window open in the background all day when I'm at work, so while the screen above has a fair number of candies available, my current stats are 17,748,071 candies and 23,254,000 lollipops.  I'm not going to go hungry any time soon.