Games: Super Collapse 3

I downloaded this game at the same time as Peggle Nights (both were already paid for), but waited, as usual, for an opportune time before installing it. We had company (friends of my husband) downstairs where Al and I usually play together, so I agreed to install a new game.

Super Collapse 3 is a “match 3″ game, which I just learned is a type of game that goes back some two thousand years. After the fall of Rome, the idea of the game (no ancient gameboards survived) was preserved in medieval monasteries. Professors from England brought the game to America when they went to teach at Harvard. The games became very popular in America for the next two centuries. There was a popular match-3 game show in the 1950’s, but it was quickly cancelled after evidence surfaced that the producers had “fixed” the game.

I suppose there were so many inexpensive games available in the next few decades that match-3 games lost their popularity. I certainly don’t remember playing any, or even being aware of their existence, until Al started playing them on the computer. They’re relatively easy to create and easy to play.

Some of the match-3 games I have played previously (and reviewed here) are Luxor, Newton’s Nightmare, Ultra Block, and Mr. Peanut Matchup. Of these Super Collapse 3 is closest to Ultra Block, but unlike Ultra Block it has very “modes” of play. Classic mode is very similar to Ultra Block, though it differs in one helpful way: when there are no available moves the game speeds up (temporarily), so you not only don’t have to wait as long to make the next move, but you always know whether there is or isn’t a move available.

For the challenge of it

In a recent post I quoted mountaineer George Mallory’s famous line about why he climbed mountains: “Because it’s there.” The challenge drew him irresistibly, even to his death atop Mount Everest. While I like hiking, I’ve never been drawn to dangerous climbs. But I do respond to the challenge of a good puzzle.

My sons, especially my younger son Al, do not seem to feel the same way about challenges. I am annoyed when he helps me with a puzzle I’m working on, though I try to express appreciation because I know he means to be helpful. I do not want help, I want to solve it on my own. Some of that may be pride, but it is also because it is the challenge itself that appeals to me, and to the extent that hints reduce the difficulty of solving it, they reduce my pleasure in finding the solution.

Over the years I’ve noticed that some kinds of challenges appeal to me more than others. At one time, the idea of fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzles appealed to me. One sort has no picture, just a solid color, and only the shape of the pieces shows how to put it together. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is The World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle, where every piece is exactly the same shape, and only the picture provides the solution - plus the puzzle is double-sided, with the same picture on both sides! But by the time I had money of my own to purchase such puzzles, I found I was no longer interested.

I enjoy difficult crossword puzzles, but if I spend an hour on a puzzle and have only come up with a few words, not enough to help me get any more, the puzzle is simply too hard for me. I will try even longer on an acrostic, but eventually I will give up on those also if too many clues are too obscure for me to come up with even a decent guess. I can do “cross-sums” puzzles, but I find that too often, I discover three quarters of the way through that I must have made some error in logic early on, and the only way to undo it is to start completely over. So I rarely start them at all.

One kind of puzzle I enjoy is computer programming, but never purely for the sake of the challenge itself. I like doing programming that provides a useful solution to a problem, or an entertaining game to play. I work at the application level, meaning the level where the program interacts with the user, rather than at the systems level where the program simply provides a platform for other developers to write their programs.

One kind of computer puzzle I have never found an interest in is hacking. The term hacker is often used in a pejorative sense, because some hackers have used their ability to alter hijack code for malicious purposes. But at root, hacking is simply figuring out the secrets that are coded into computers and not intended for anyone but the people who put them there to know. It’s not a challenge that appeals to me, but it has a very strong appeal to many people – at least to many young men (estimates of hacker demographics indicate that about 90% are male and median age is 25).

Puzzles: Cube Eraser

When my younger son told me that the prize for selling at least one item in his school’s fundraiser was a Rubik’s Cube eraser, I wasn’t too excited. I’m not excited by school fundraisers to begin with, though I do take the brochures to work and leave them in the breakroom for my co-workers to browse through. (Throughout the fall months, there is a steady succession of fundraiser brochures for different schools and community groups, often including multiples of the same fundraiser because our department has a lot of parents of school-age kids.)

My son gets a lot of erasers in goodie bags at holidays, and I couldn’t see much reason to be excited about another one. They are bright and colorful and sometimes cute, in every imaginable shape and theme: Christmas trees, smileys, rainbows, basketballs… just take a look at an Oriental Trading catalog to find dozens more. But I’d never seen a Rubik’s Cube eraser. I wondered if it was supposed to go on the end of a pencil or not.

When the fundraiser items arrived today, I found a colorful rubber cube, but it didn’t look a bit like a Rubik’s Cube. And the packing list just called it a “Cube Eraser.” But he was thrilled with it, and promptly asked me to unwrap it so he could take it apart. Take it apart? How do you take an eraser apart? I thought it was just going to look like a puzzle, not actually be one.

Games: Ultra Block

I’ve liked falling blocks games since Tetris first came out. Actually, it was a Tetris-clone that I played for a long time, on the PC, before I ever had the occasion to play Tetris in a video game arcade. I quickly decided that I liked playing on the PC better, with keyboard or mouse controls, rather than a joystick that never seemed to drop the blocks exactly where I intended.

We bought Welltris, a 3-dimensional version of Tetris, for the Mac, and played that for years until it decided not to work anymore. My son has found various falling block games, but not appealed a great deal to me until I found one for myself this evening. The proprietor at the computer store we’ve started going to recently gave us a list of websites with spyware-free games for my son to play, and I decided to check out some of them myself.

So that’s how I ended up playing a CornNuts game. As it happens, I do like CornNuts, and I think I just might go out and buy some next time I’m at the store. Today for some reason I was wanting some kind of snack that I could really crunch down hard on, and CornNuts are the hardest-crunching snack I know of.

Anyway, Ultra Block is one of those games where you have to find a set of three or more contiguous blocks the same color, and when you click on them they go away, and all the blocks above them fall down into the places they left. At the same time, blocks are being added one row at a time on the bottom, and you have to make sure the piles of blocks don’t reach the top (same as in Tetris). And of course they get added faster as the levels progress, which on the one hand makes it easier to find more sets of three or more blocks the same color to click on, but the whole pile keeps going up faster too.

After playing at least a dozen times, I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. And it doesn’t look like one I’ll get tired of too quickly.

Games: Word Vine

I decided I needed to find a new word game to play. I’ve been enjoying Word Spell, so much so that I need to limit how much I play it. Not only do I keep playing longer than I intended, but the rapid mousing (to drag the letters to where they need to go) to get as many words as I can within the time limit is a lot of work for my wrist, and I don’t want to get carpal tunnel syndrome.

So I set out to find a new game, and I found a pretty good challenge in Word Vine. The game gives a list of words that match up in pairs in some way. For instance, given the words LIGHT, TRAFFIC, BULB, and WEIGHT, you can make light bulb, traffic light, and lightweight. That would be pretty easy if all you had to do was drag the words to each other to show that they are linked. But instead they have to be placed on a diagram showing the links.

Even that would be easy enough if you got to build the diagram yourself. Put LIGHT in the middle, then draw lines going out from it to TRAFFIC, BULB, and WEIGHT. But Word Vine gives you the diagram also, and you have to drag each word to the appropriate place on the diagram, forming leaves on a vine (hence the name). For an easy puzzle such as the example given, it’s clear that LIGHT needs to go in the middle, and the others around the outside (word order does not match, so WEIGHT can appear to the left of LIGHT, or TRAFFIC to the right of LIGHT.

As you progress to more difficult levels, however, the number of words increases. Perhaps the WEIGHT that goes with LIGHT also goes with PAPER (paperweight), which goes with TISSUE (tissue paper) and NEWS (newspaper), which goes with STAND (news stand), which goes with HAND (handstand), which goes with FIRST (firsthand) and SHAKE (handshake), which goes with MILK (milkshake), which goes with BUTTER (buttermilk), which goes with FLY (butterfly). Of course, FLY could also goes with PAPER (flypaper), but I don’t remember any puzzles where the vine ended up in a circle.

Games: Fantastic Contraption

If you look at the date of this post, you’ll see that I am up past midnight. And it’s all because Make It Man over at WorldMagBlog told about this free online game that he said is just wonderful if you’re mechanically minded. I’m not, but he suggested I give it a try anyway.

So I did, with my 9-year-old son watching over my shoulder. I struggled through the first level, then allowed him to give it a shot while I helped my older son with a word in Bookworm Adventure on the laptop. When I returned, my younger son had gone through at least half a dozen levels.

Kyra kept me occupied much of the evening, but when she finally settled down to rest (meaning it was bedtime and I should have been following her example), I took advantage of the opportunity to make sure I could do at least as well as a 9-year-old. (My husband insists that I’m very competitive, even if I don’t go much for competitive games.)

And I did finish all 11 levels on the screen, even if I did stay up way late doing it. My contraptions are probably exceptionally inefficient designs, and I succeeded purely through trial and error and stubbornness. The last two were especially difficult, and I felt quite good at having finally met the challenge. Then, back at the menu, I discovered there’s another screen with ten more levels!

I am not going to do any more tonight. First thing in the morning, maybe, if the 9-year-old hasn’t gotten in here first…

Have fun! But don’t get started if you have anything important to get done soon.

Can you do “Hoo Doo”?

We have been cleaning out our “games” closet in the basement, because that’s where the crack in the foundation is that has to be fixed. Once all the bigger boxes were packed away, I found my “Hoo Doo” game where it had fallen behind the shelves. The cover is moldy and had to be thrown out, but the rest of the game – a peg board and 64 colored plastic pegs – appeared to be fine.

Since the instructions had been printed on the inside of the cover, I went on the internet in search of a set I could print out. Hoo Doo is not exactly a well-known game, and it took me a while to find a few copies of it for sale on ebay, one of which provided the name of the game’s manufacturer, Tryne. And with that I was able to do a search which netted me a copy of the instructions (at a site with a vast compendium of rules to various games).

I used to spend hours attempting to solve Hoo Doo. (It came from my grandfather’s house or my great uncle’s house, I can’t remember which. Since I clearly enjoyed it so much it was given to me to keep.) Think of it as Sudoku using colors instead of numbers, and with no starting positions filled in. It’s not quite the same, as Sudoku requires each number to be unique in horizontal and vertical rows and in smaller squares that make up the larger grid, but allows duplicates in a diagonal line so long as the other requirements are met. Hoo Doo, on the other hand, requires unique colors in horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, but has no requirements regarding smaller squares.

I’ve gotten pretty good at moderately difficult Sudoku puzzles, and wondered if that would help me at Hoo Doo. So far I’d say not. The downloaded instructions tell me that it is “three puzzles in one” – something I don’t remember from the now-illegible box cover. I discovered that I could do the 4 x 4 grid just fine, with no duplications (not too hard, with eight different colors). I came close on the 6 x 6 grid, but was left with three holes I could not fill. I gave up on the full 8 x 8 grid – I could be up all night trying and still get nowhere.

Somehow I doubt that the manufacturer still offers the printed solution to frustrated puzzlers in return for “ten cents in coin for postage and handling.”

Where in the world are the best geography quizzes?

I guess I’m on a geography kick lately. Besides playing “Where in the U.S. is Carmen Sandiego?” with my 9-year-old and taking a virtual trip across the country via the WOMAN Challenge, I’m on a committee planning “Where in the World Are Cub Scouts?” day camp (which has me looking up games and crafts from other countries and bouncing around ideas of countries and landmarks to link up with daily activities).

Today at infoplease.com I tried the Historical Geography quiz (identifying former names of current countries/cities – or vice versa). I’m not sure whether to be pleased or disappointed with a score of 60% – not bad considering I never had to study geography in school, but a D- is not very satisfying, and I had to redeem myself with a better score on another geography quiz.

Geographical Superlatives was my next choice, and I’m happy to say that while I did not get a truly superlative score (i.e. perfect), I scored a very satisfying (if somewhat surprising) 90%. (I rarely get better than 50% in some categories of quizzes as infoplease.com – if that much.) So if you like geography – or just want to see how much you know, see how well you know (or can guess – it’s all multipe choice) the longest, biggest, tallest, and deepest (not to mention driest) places on Earth.

A puzzling question

Someone on another blog today mentioned cryptic crossword puzzles. I was not familiar with them, so someone else kindly provided a link. I love doing crosswords, but after reading through the description of cryptic crosswords and looking at an online example, I concluded that they held little appeal to me. I think I might like a few of the clues to figure out at a time, but not a whole puzzle-worth of them.

That got me wondering, what is it that makes some games/puzzles appeal to me and not others? My husband does not understand why I have no interest in bridge, since I have an excellent memory and he thinks I would have good “card sense.” I know enough about playing bridge to stumble through a game, but I always like it best when my partner wins the bid so I can be the “dummy” and not have to do anything more until the next hand.

What does your camera tell about you?

Could you find the owner of a camera just by looking at the pictures taken on it? I love puzzles, and the idea of following the visual clues to their source intrigues me. But when the clues weren’t left on purpose by someone expecting them to be followed, it took a lot of tenacity on the part of someone determined to return the camera to its owner, to track down his current location on the other side of the globe.

Read this intriguing story about what you can learn about someone from the photos he takes.