My Current Distractions from Kingdom Hearts 2

Broken Sword: Director's Cut HD

Puzzle Quest 2 HD

As you may remember, I received an iPad as a super sweet birthday gifts a few weeks back. It has been distracting me from my main mission of my backlog for two reasons:

1) I own a new Apple product and I have to use it as much as possible until it becomes part of my natural life.
2) Most of my gaming time occurs after my wife goes to bed. I usually go to bed with her, read for a bit, then head out to the living room and boot up whatever gaming system I am playing. Problem is I'm lazy, and its been super cold lately. So I usually don't want to get out from under the covers and I end up playing one of these babies on my beautifully large screened friend.

So, I figured since I am losing all this time to them, why not talk about them a bit?

Broken Sword is a point and click adventure game that was originally released in '96 for PC and Mac. It was ported to various platforms over the years before most recently landing on the iPad. In the game you follow the story of two characters, a female photo-journalist and a male American tourist. The story takes place in France in present day but focuses on historic, sometimes ancient, clues and story threads. It's certainly intriguing aside from the ATROCIOUS voice acting of the tourist dude.

Yeah, and you're the worst voice actor in all of Paris.

The gameplay is perfectly suited for the iPad's big screen. You drag your finger across the scene and if something can be inspected, a small indicator pops up and you can interact with it in various ways. The puzzles are clever and there is a helpful hint system in case you get stuck, but the hints are just that: hints - not answers. They'll point you in the right direction or get you thinking differently than you had been. If you're skull is still too thick to figure it out, you can keep spamming the hint button until it simply gives you the solution, but then where's the fun in that?

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Puzzle Quest 2 is an unbelievably addictive puzzle game. Have you ever played Bejeweled? If not, play it here. Puzzle Quest 2 is based on the Bejeweled formula of matching three same-colored gems but adds in role playing elements. So instead of just playing endlessly for a high score, you're actually fighting monsters by matching gems. This works much better than it sounds like it would. You and your opponent take turns moving gems around the board. The standard colored gems will add to your magic, and once you have enough you can use magic spells to alter the layout of the board, give yourself extra turns, or deal damage to the enemy. There are also "Skull" gems which deal damage directly, and "Action" gems which allow you to use an equipped weapon for much greater damage.

Spells on lower left, a good view of the skull gems, action gems are the gloved hands.

There is also a story throughout your quest. And while it's usually a "Please kill this monster! It stole my babies!" mission, at least you have some hint of motivation to your quest - although you really don't need it. You spend 95% of the game in gem-matching skirmishes and it never gets old. Ever. I could play it for years and not get tired of it. For serious.

I also made a little progress in Kingdom Hearts II last night, but I'm really starting to hate that game. There are broken mechanics that make it frustrating to play and near impossible to enjoy. I'm almost done with it. Then it will live amongst Donkey Kong Country for all eternity.