Gesundheit!

A Touching Tale of a Little Piggy With a Runny Nose Who's on a Mission

Mini Review

First things first - Gesundeheit!, by Revolutionary Concepts, is free for only a short time, so grab it pronto.

Gesundheit is one of those rare games that appeals to just about every age group - it's your classic 'save-the-princess (pig)' set in a crayon-drawn world. You play as a little pig with a cold? allergies? who uses the power of his boogers to battle enemies and interact with the world.  The gameplay is essentially top-down, and plays much like Mario Brothers or Zelda, with a bit of stealth elements thrown in. Controls could not be simpler or easier, which is critical, as much of the game revolves around your ability to sneeze boogers at a distance to lure enemies and activate switches or traps.

Farmville 2

No Horsing Around Quest

I Gotta See A Man About A Horse

The "No Horsing Around" quest in Farmville 2, which probably appears somewhere around level 13 or 14 (but your mileage may vary), contains yet another minor mystery concerning the acquisition of saddles to complete the quest. The quest text merely says "Gather 3 Saddles..." and unhelpfully has a "help" button marked "Go To Farm", which brings back to staring cluelessly at your farm. Are they hidden? Do I make them? What's the deal?

The answer, like most things in FV2, is that in order to get said said saddles, you have to buy them. Actually, you have to buy a horse which drops saddles. On occasion. When the mood strikes said horse, it appears. Go to the "General Store", and buy yourself a baby Black Arabian Horse. If you have the Farm Bucks, and want to save yourself the in-game money, or bottles, you can also buy an adult Black Gypsy Horse for 54 Farm Bucks, or an adult Black Arabian for 30 FB. Either way, they're not cheap. 

Even if you go the cheapskate route like I did, and buy a baby Arabian, the numbers still aren't great. Here's the cold hard numbers on a Baby Arabian Horse:

Cost:                                 22,000

Bottles Required:                6

Feed Required:                  12

Time Between Feedings:    24 hours

Drops:                               2 Horseshoes

                                         3  Saddles (sometimes)

Thus, it could take several feedings to acquire the Saddles i.e. days. You could buy multiple horses, but with Level 15 land unlock looming, which requires, among other things, 125,000 coins, this is not the time to be spend multiples of 22,000 coins to get 2 or 3 horses  to get 3 saddles. So settle in, cowboys and cowgirls. This quest might take some time.

FarmVille 2

"Spicing It Up" Quest Hints

aka Cheese Please!

OK, so I've playing Farmville 2. Well, that is to say, a lot of Farmville 2. It's a lot of fun, and the annoyance of having to co-opt FB friends to be farm "neighbors" is gone with the advent of the game on Zynga.com. Anyways....I am currently at around Level 13, and just got the 'Spicing It Up" quest series. Nothing on the surface of the quest seemed all that difficult: Master Habanero Peppers, Harvest some Wells, and make 5 Spicy Quesos sauces. Making Quesos proved more difficult than I thought - it requires 4 Cheese Wheels (which come from cows and some goats), and 10 Habanero Peppers. Simple enough on paper, right?

"Please don't cut the cheese!"

Wrong! Despite having 3 cows and 1 cheese-producing goat, I was getting no cheese after feeding them. After about a day, the goat gave up 2 cheese out of perhaps 5-7 feedings. I was regularly making milk, and fertilizer, but cheese drops were like winning the lactose lottery. In other words, very seldom. Turns out cheese is a rare drop, meaning it doesn't happen with every feeding. This is the type of thing I'd expect from a hardcore RPG like World of Warcraft, not a casual Facebook game like Farmville 2. Plus, there's no visual indication, or text, to let you know cheese is not going to be dropped 100% of the time after each feeding. It's a relatively hardcore game mechanic, coupled with really poor user feedback. So be forewarned in the future.

Also, I'd recommend going with the Sanaanen Goats, rather than the Loghorn Cows, for cheese production; Cows require 4 hours between feedings, Goats require 15 minutes.

Dragon Story Review

"The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?" 

- Joshua, WarGames (1983)

Such is also the case of Dragon Story by Team Lava. Team Lava seems to specialize in making odious free-to-play games that limit just about every aspect of gameplay, from money earned, to cost to create, and time to create, to say nothing of the number of missions that require you to download another one of their games, or make In App Purchases (IAP) to actually complete a mission. I get it's a free game, and they are trying to make money, but such over the top practices such feel like a visit to a user-car salesman convention.

Anyway, back to Dragon Story. The game itself is standard fare - breed dragons, feed them, they grow, you cross-breed them, yada yada yada. There's nothing original here, aside from the arm-twisting to make IAPs in order to make the tedium of waiting to collect enough coins, or for your minuscule crop yields to ripen, or for structures to get built. At it's core, Dragon Story is trying to monetize off of your boredom waiting for something interesting to happen in the game.

I put together a little chart on the plant farm yields in the game, in case anyone is interested. I know I wasn't.

Food		Farm Size		Cost		Time (Mins)		Harvest
Impruberries		Small		30		1		6
Buffbeets		Small		120		3		20
Firapples		Small		650		60		50
Pumpwings		Large		3,200		300		225
Eliteleeks		Large		5,500		480		325
Scalypears		Large		13,000		1,200		700

Freebie Alert: Draw Race 2!

Start Your Engines...

Just a quick heads-up that Draw Race 2 is free at the moment. The original Draw Race was a heckuva lot of fun, particularly multiplayer, so it's stands to reason that DR2 will be at least 2 times as good. Intuitive user interface, and really well executed. The iPad version looks phenomenal.