Ramblings | Moving Day Distractions

Even with my move com­ing up this week­end, I’ve still man­aged to squeeze in some gam­ing over the few days. More specif­i­cal­ly, let’s talk about what’s been going on for the last 24 hours or so. I’ve man­aged to be thor­ough­ly best­ed to my high­ly skilled spouse in iPhone game Threes, snuck in a lit­tle of inFA­MOUS: Sec­ond Son both on my PS4 and web brows­er and con­tin­ue my quest for a plat­inum tro­phy in Dan­gan Ron­pa: Trig­ger Hap­py Hav­oc  on the Vita.

Let’s start with Threes, which has been occu­py­ing most of my time. This is the most fun I’ve had with an iOS game in quite a while. I have been thor­ough­ly addict­ed to try and best Kim’s high score which she got on my very device (rude!), but to lit­tle avail. If you’re not famil­iar, Threes is a game where you are pre­sent­ed with a 4X4 board with var­i­ous num­bers on it. With a sin­gle swipe, you can move all of the num­bered tiles one space in what ever direc­tion you want until they hit a wall or anoth­er tile that itself is against a wall. If the two num­bers are iden­ti­cal, or a 1 and 2, they will com­bine into their sum and free up a space. The wrin­kle is, each turn anoth­er tile moves onto the board. Once no more spaces are free, the game is over and it tal­lies up your score.

Kim has man­aged to get a 384 tile on the board and thus holds the high score. I’ve got­ten darn close to get­ting one myself, but no luck just yet. In the mean­time, I’ve real­ly grown to enjoy the strat­e­gy of the game and the excite­ment when­ev­er you cre­ate each larg­er tile. This is unfor­tu­nate­ly cou­pled with frus­tra­tion when­ev­er my game ends yet again with a low score. Hon­est­ly, it’s just a game, but the car­rot-on-a-stick-like qual­i­ty of the score to beat is a fun way to keep me engaged.

I was def­i­nite­ly expect­ing inFA­MOUS: Sec­ond Son to be a fun game. That part has proven to be expect­ed­ly true thus far and even with a few sil­ly glitch­es, it’s been great. The part I did­n’t expect was that I would have even more of the game to expe­ri­ence in my web brows­er. The game con­tains an extra set of mis­sions deal­ing with a mys­te­ri­ous char­ac­ter who appears to have paper pow­ers. Enti­tled inFA­MOUS Paper Trail, this sec­tion of the game has you hunt down clues in the actu­al game and then do a lit­tle detec­tive work on a web­site after­wards. If you link your PSN account with the web­site, it will then auto­mat­i­cal­ly detect it in the PS4 sec­tion of the game and you will progress accordingly.

I enjoyed doing the detec­tive work on the brows­er, but have yet to get back on the PS4 after­wards to see what types of rewards I’ve unlocked for doing so. I’m real­ly hop­ing you’ll get to even­tu­al­ly unlock the paper pow­er, which in-game look a bit like a re-skinned ver­sion of neon, but I won’t make any assump­tions until I fin­ish the side-missions.

Hav­ing got­ten a plat­inum tro­phy in Virtue’s Last Reward, I almost feel as though I’m oblig­at­ed to go for the plat­inum in Dan­gan Ron­pa: Trig­ger Hap­py Hav­oc. If you’re not famil­iar, this game is anoth­er in the visu­al nov­el genre that is swift­ly grow­ing to be one of my favorites as of late. Basi­cal­ly, most of the game involves read­ing a sto­ry as it unfolds, only with the accom­pa­ni­ment of music and images. You also get to take the reins, con­trol the main char­ac­ter walk­ing around quite a bit and even make some deci­sions that may effect the out­come of the game.

Tech­ni­cal­ly, I’ve already beat­en the game, but there is more to it once you’ve fin­ished the main sto­ry which leads to the extra tro­phies to unlock. The main parts I still need to get tro­phies for involves inter­act­ing more with each of the indi­vid­ual char­ac­ters in the game and learn­ing more about them. Frankly it’s a bit more tedious than the game was before I fin­ished it, but I’m still enjoy­ing myself. The remained tro­phies also seem very dooable, which has kept me going towards unlock­ing every­thing. Not a bad way to spend a com­mute if I do say so myself.

That seems like a lot now that I’ve got it down, but I real­ly have been spend­ing most of my time pack­ing and get­ting ready for my big move. I am going to leave most of my big game sys­tems hooked up until the very moment they need to be moved though, so I can make sure to keep myself sane through­out the pack­ing process.