I picked up this game this morning and am having lots of fun with it. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a DS game where you have puzzles that you solve by writing in the name of an object and having it appear on the screen so you can use it. For example, one of the puzzles has a lumberjack and a tree and it tells you “help him do his job”. You can write in “axe” or “saw” and give him one of those, or you can think of something else. I wrote in “beaver” and it appeared and gnawed the tree down and that’s how I won that level. There’s more information on the Wikipedia page, along with a screenshot of a more elaborate way to solve that puzzle.
So if you are playing, share your favorite solutions you’ve come up with. Right now I’m going through puzzle mode trying to solve them the most direct way with the fewest objects.
The only really cool solution I found so far was for a level in a park where there’s garbage and a fly and it tells you to get rid of the fly and clean the park.
I typed in “fire” and burned the fly and the garbage (along with the tree that had some garbage in it).
I just got it, haven’t started playing yet, but I have heard a couple bad things, mostly about the controls.
The directional pad doesn’t move your character like you think it should, you have to move him with the stylus. And since you also interact with everything else with the stylus, there’s a lot of times when you move when you don’t want to, or touch something you don’t mean to.
The controls are very frustrating at times. I don’t know why they didn’t make the crosspad control movement and the buttons control the camera. Despite that, the game still manages to be a lot of fun.
If they ever re-release this for a console system with proper controls, I will buy it again in a heartbeat.
The controls take a while to get used to, but they’re not that bad once you do. I am loving just playing around on the title screen and seeing how things interact. For example, summon two bunnies.
Have you gotten to a point where you need to click on an object, but it’s small (like a rope or something) but miss by a tiny bit, and it causes Maxwell to start walking, sometimes into open pits, or water with a shark, etc…?
Another thing I hate is the camera…you can move it to where you want, but it will then “snap” back to Maxwell for no reason…not moving the camera causes the camera to move. It’s frustrating that you have to keep tapping the D-pad or the A or B button just so you can take a good look at the environment. It’s also frustrating that you can’t move Maxwell to a spot on the map if he isn’t visible on the map. You have to move the camera back to him (or wait three seconds since it will go back to him anyway,) move a little bit, move a little more as the camera catches up, etc…
Hmm. I did mostly the same thing, except I didn’t use the fire on the fly, since I was afraid of burning the flowers around it.
I tried using a tsunami on that one, just for fun. It killed me. Not an optimal solution. But the Starite did show up…I just wasn’t alive to collect it.
My one real gripe is that the tutorial area…unskippable, interminable, and more often than not redundant ‘Click on the object to pick it up’…next level: ‘Click on the object to pick it up. Now click here to use it’…next level…etc. It’s the worst tutorial level I’ve ever had to do.
On the other hand, the objects you can conjure up are delightfully varied, and have some neat interactions.
The level where you need to knock down some bottles without cheating or using a gun (like a carnival game, yeh?) amused me. It’s got an interesting definition of ‘cheating’ and ‘gun’…I’ve used a cannon, and it seems like the only reason the tank didn’t work is I couldn’t aim it at the bottom bottles without crushing the carnie.
My favourite is when I mistyped ‘sword’ as ‘sord’. Go ahead and do it…I was rather surprised by the result.
Hah, I was doing the level where you had to get the soccer ball past the goalie. I’d already used several objects trying to do it, so I was about to restart. Then I remembered someone said you could summon a hydra… so I did it. The goalie ran from the hydra, right into the goal, holding the ball and I got the starite.
This game just wowed me again. I typed in “cryptozoologist” and to my surprise someone appeared. Then I summoned a bigfoot and the cryptozoologist chased it around!