Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Well, I managed to inadvertently fry my Shuttle’s motherboard last night, much to my dismay as the frying of said motherboard means buying an entirely new barebones. I won’t go into the details, but let’s just say that I don’t recommend attempting to reconnect small ribbon cables that allow your front panel ports to work properly. The replacement case marks my move back to an Intel solution, specifically a Shuttle SD39P2 with a 2.4Ghz Core2 Duo processor.

Update for 7/9/07
The case arrived Friday, and it was a simple endeavor to move my old components into the new case. The only difference in the actual case is that this one has a matte finish on it (as opposed to the SN27P’s shinier finish) so fingerprints don’t show as clearly. Most of my stuff is reinstalled, and boy is this thing snappy.

-Kyle

I decided to expand my DS library so I’d have something to do on my long train rides to and from work. I’ve been playing the excellent remake of Final Fantasy III for a week and a half, but it’s extreme difficulty and lack of save points (long dungeon with massive boss fight + losing boss fight repeatedly = sad Kyle) made me think of picking up two more casual titles. After giving a few hours of play to both, the verdicts are in!

SimCity DS was supposed to feel like a remake of SimCity 3000 (arguably the most fun in the series); instead, it feels like SimCity 2000 with the crummy parts of SimCity 3000 tacked on. While the game replicates the feel of the SimCity series well enough, there are a number of fun-crushing omissions. You can’t enact ordinances (possibly the most entertaining part of being mayor), there’s no variation to the terrain (no mountains or valleys, just flat plains with some water), trading between other cities doesn’t exist (because as far as I can tell, there are no other ‘neighboring’ cities), and you can only ‘run’ one city at once. If you want to start a new one, you need to delete the old city. To top things off, they neglected to add user-triggerable disasters! Who didn’t enjoy wreaking havoc on their bustling metropolis with various natural disasters and UFOs? Sorry, you can’t activate disasters in SimCity DS.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on SimCity DS. If you really, really like the SimCity series, you’ll probably have fun with it’s portable incarnation. At least it gets the basics down, and the touch screen interface was put together pretty well. Mediocre at best.

Planet Puzzle League is the latest in a line of Panel de Pon/Puzzle League spinoffs, preceeded by Tetris Attack! on the Super Nintendo, and the Pokemon Puzzle League series on the Game Boy Advance and GameCube. The basic gist is that it’s a visual matching game. A playing field 6 tiles wide and 12 tiles tall sits on the right/lower screen. You can play vertically a la Brain Age/Hotel Dusk: Room 215 or horizontally like most other DS games. Tiles with various colors and shapes on the will rise from the bottom of the screen. You can drag tiles sideways in a row, but not vertically. Match three or more in a row, horizontally or vertically, and they’ll vanish. Expanding on this by creating chains (tiles can fall when you clear tiles below them, clearing even more tiles of you line them up right) and combos (clear more than three at once) will boost your score. If the blocks ever reach over the top of the playing field, you lose.

If my description wasn’t terribly clear, just visit the Wikipedia article.

The real lure of Planet Puzzle League comes from its wide variety of gameplay modes. You can play online in Novice (only until you win a certain number of times online, after that, only if you lose a bunch of games in a row), Free Play (unranked casual matches), or Birthday (ranked, only VS. people who share your birthday) modes against other players. The catch in multiplayer is that clearing more than three tiles at once, or making long chains/combos will send “garbage blocks” to your opponent’s screen. Clearing tiles touching these garbage blocks will turn the garbage into actual tiles you can manipulate. Single player has Endless, Time Attack (score as high as you can in the alloted time), Puzzle (clear the screen given a certain number/pattern of tiles), and VS. Computer modes, along with a Brain Age-like “Daily Play” system that tracks your progress in three modes you can only play once every day (Endless, Line Clear, and Garbage Clear). The system will chart your daily play progress on a graph so you can see how much you’ve improved over time! If you like puzzle titles, it trumps the extremely enjoyable Meteos. An essential buy.

-Kyle