Its cool to have a game that you can come back to and still love.

I must have spent an absolute bucketload of time on this game, and not just a regular wash-your-car bucket – I’m talking like an industrial double-thick wrap-your-granny-in-a-bag-and-dispose-of-the-body type bucket.

Here’s a drawing of me as a reinforcement:

I love the way this game looks, plays and feels. Quirky and well-balanced,this game has clearly had a great dal of very clear thought go into it.

No time to say more now, so I’ll try and update soon!

UPDATE:

Positive: Addictive gameplay, good learning curve, good upgrade curve, good difficulty curve, good tower abilities, one tower is not more powerful than the others, which can make a game really boring, the art is real nice – cartoony and simple, good audio with catchphrases for each tower.

Negative: Trying to push a little too hard for freemium content – I’m not a fan

Interesting: You can make sheep blow up by clinking on them a lot. You can make sheep – blow up.

This is Pop website http://games.adultswim.com/tofu-hunter-action-online-game.html

Tofu hunter on Adult Swim http://games.adultswim.com/tofu-hunter-action-online-game.html

Amusing petition against This Is Pop http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/ending-the-adult-swim-network-relationship-with-this-is-pop/

Things to think about:

playability – fun, graspable, addictive

upgrades – enjoyment, obtainability

character/personality – tongue in cheek, ‘I get it’

My Lunchtime game du jour is Bloons TD5, the poptastic, upgrademongous, dart-crrazy tower defense game by Ninja Kiwi.

My goodness, is this not a freemium game? Damn its hard to pop all those freaking balloons without forking out for some upgrades/special agents/specialty buildings/ premium content/ deluxe edition !!!

See the image above for just the sheer number of ways that these guys will help you part with your hard earned Monkey Money. The premium part is where you can exchange Kong Credits (I am playing on Kongregate.com).

It ain’t cheap, those upgrades: If you complete a beginner level on easy you get $75. A one-game upgrade to one tower/ special agent costs minimum $60, with most of them way above this, whilst a building, which gives you a permanent upgrade, costs $250 to buy the land then $500 to buy a building. Given that a beginner game, weighing in at a hefty 50 rounds, takes a quarter of an hour, you ‘re gonna have to think pretty carefully about where you spend you cash.

And the relentlessness of it – almost every screen encourages you to invest in premium content!

That aside, this is a cool game – its frenetic, there’s shit loads of upgrades, the towers can be hilarious whilst at the same time having an intriguing upgrade path decisions and good effectiveness ramping up to the higher levels. Personally I think Super Monkeys are the absolute killer, and may be a bit too good, to the extent that I generally just buy them as soon as possible . But wait, what’s this? A high level dat-monkey can develop the power of turning all nearby dart monkeys into super monkeys for 15 seconds? I’m interested!

These powers that you can get at higher level upgrades, that each have a cool-down time, really remind me of Kingdom Rush , a TD game that I would go to bed with if it asked me. Kingdom Rush has fireball and reinforcement buttons, both with cool downs, that i think really add to the game play.

I’m heading off to play one more monkey battle before the end of my lunch hour. Those pesky balloons!

EDIT: another handy feature is the ‘save game’ option – this way, when lunch hour is up, there’s no need to cry into your keyboard.

I love BBG’s, and just want to write down how I feel about the ones I’ve played, so, there it is, coming up. Just as soon as I watch this playthrough of Shadow of the Colossuss

And I’ve also managed to get myself a proper job, which starts later in the month, so yay.

Which all leaves me, at the moment, wondering what the hell I’m going to do with this blog, website et al.

So I could:

• scrap the lot
• carry on writing randomly
• rethink the whole thing and write about something specific, which could be either:
1. write about my adventures in game design
2. write about my adventures in parenting
3. both (I.e. pretty much just back to random again)
• pare it back to a regular WordPress site
• break it down into a hand-coded blog thing (do-able, but yikes!)
• bung all my old versions of my websites into some kind of portfolio/archive type deal and not have a blog
• the above, but instead of blogging, just post a lot to Google+

Guess I’ll just have to think this one through : P

Been a while , so I thought I’d upload these pics of a shelf I made yesterday

parallax awesomeness from tripwiremagazine

Having seen this awesome parallax bit of javascript and these woody social media icons today it ocured to me that i could make my own social media icons from actual wood, take photos of them and put them, in layers, into the JavaScript snippet and run them as a parallax thing that would look really cool.

I’m thinking of the icons made as seperate layers, so i cou;ld even take a video f them, with me walking between the layers.

I can’t mock this up right now, so I’ll have to go away and think about it.

Inspiration strikes!

(YouTube seems to have removed the dissolve transition. oh well.) you can download it for smoother playing by clicking on this internal link: calthorpe quick montage

In the picture you can see our carpenter doing some final finishing on the windows.

There would have been more photos of the progress of the windows, which have really come together over the last week, but due to BT (see previous post) we’re not actually going to have an internet connection until tomorrow (if we’re lucky) so they remain on my hard drive.

I might do a montage. you have been warned.

Other than that, I think I’ve written just about all I can about this renovation project, which quite frankly has gone on for bleedin’ ever.

Cheers,

Philip