MCF Key to Ravenhearst

This game is a flat out stinker. As I mentioned in my last MCF post, Elephant Games did a great job with Dire Grove, Sacred Grove, because Eipix Games did a horrible job with the next game in the series, Key to Ravenhearst. The original Return to Ravenhearst was a really groundbreaking casual game - but perhaps too it's time to move on. The game producers just don't understand why people love the creepy weirdness of the previous Ravenhearst games or have run out of ideas. You might like this game if you haven't played the previous ones.

As Master Detective, you once again match wits with the demented Dalimar family. Unfortunately, there isn't much story to string the puzzles together. Basically you click on random things and complete objectives to progress through the game, but without a strong story, the game is as soulless as the Dalimars. It's more like a pastiche of scenes from previous games with lackluster art. The quality and quantity of puzzles is actually pretty good, which is fine if I wanted to just play puzzles. The super puzzles are, thankfully easy and I didn't skip any. To lengthen the game play, harder chapter puzzles are available once you collect an item to unlock them and they were unique. But, after a while I just used the walkthrough to finish the game.

I bought the collector's edition (on sale, thankfully), but there are not a lot of extras although there is a bonus chapter. The other extras can't be accessed until the bonus chapter is completed, but I was so mad at the game, I couldn't do that :D I just don't understand why Big Fish would trust their flagship game to a lesser studio. I bought all the MCF games up to the current ones during the sale, which hopefully wasn't too regrettable.

Continuing adventures in Ponyville

I can’t believe that five years ago I started playing the My Little Pony game. And I can’t believe that I’m on my third or fourth try at the game, as it was developed before Gameloft started saving progress in the cloud. Fingers crossed that my current tablet doesn’t go bust like the old one did!

As far as freemium games go, it’s not that overwhelming and it hasn’t even expanded that much for game play. However, it does have cute characters, happy music and unfortunately tugs on my competitive spirit. Whenever there’s a community challenge, I’m in it to win it. Hubs just shakes his head. “Think of all those six year olds you’re disappointing!” he implores.

The game remains oddly generous and greedy at the same time. I say generous because last spring they started making gift codes available for 20 free gems a month. The VIP program gives you bonuses depending on how many gem purchases you make, including retroactive ones, which was nice. I now can skip timers and get free mini games daily.

The greedy part shouldn’t surprise anyone. Casual quests have been replaced by monthly time based challenges. To succeed at these challenges, you need certain ponies or to buy certain ponies for both the main storyline and the community goal. Usually this means tapping a button every two or three hours and the buttons are set at different times. For example, it might take one pony two hours and another pony half an hour. Truly, this is a circle of freemium game heck as you have to be constantly tapping without any regards for school, work or sleep. You can also pay to skip. The challenge to win Tempest was especially brutal - but I was suffering from insomnia at the time, so it wasn’t a problem to be up every three hours to tap the button. There were a lot of hurt feelings on the FB page about Tempest.

Then there is the sheer cost of ponies. Once you have all the cash ponies, the leftover ones either cost over 100 gems or can be won in the balloon pop game. Gameloft tested everyone’s mettle by pricing the yaks and certain ponies at 1000 gems in the fall. Wow! The game throws out flash deals as well and sometimes I’ll go for them if a pony is a couple of bucks.

Someone at Gameloft recently realized that the game’s economy was out of whack though and that they were probably losing out on sales. Here’s the problem for older players like myself - you have billions upon billions of bits that you can’t spend because everything costs gems. So, during the fifth year anniversary celebration, they brought out decorations that cost hundreds of thousands of bits and in one of the recent updates, repriced the mini games and changed how that worked. It’s 69,000 bits to play a mini game at medium level, which makes it a challenge for new players to level up ponies but makes older players take a hit to level up their ponies. Playing the medium level is a sure fire way to five stars now - but if you have ponies that only have 2, 3 or 4 stars, you will take a bit hit to get them to five stars.

One thing that the game changed recently, and unsurprisingly was not well received, is that all the shops are now self-sufficient. The resource allocation part of a resource allocation game was taken away and people really enjoyed assigning ponies to the different shops. I did - Discord working at the town hall? Haha! The amount of bits that the shops, as well as the time to make them, also changed. Some produced less money and others took longer. Technically, this now frees up ponies to do tasks for experience and bits and earn more bits, but the players don’t see it this way. It just results in more tapping :-D

LOL I really don’t know why I play the game still. Five years! But it’s something that I have invested a lot of time (and some money) in and I’m not ready to walk away yet. If anything it’s something to do while trying to drink that first big glass of water in the morning and pass five minutes here and there.

The Surprising Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen

If you wonder what's up with all the oddball games I play, it's that they are mostly casual games and a whole genre to themselves. Casual games can be finished in five or ten hours and are generally appropriate for everyone. If you can point and click, you can play! My mother really loves these games too, despite not being much of a "computer person" :-D. Not only do they take a few hours to play (well, sometimes longer depending on your skill level), they are inexpensive, especially if you get them on sale from Big Fish Games. I was introduced to them through Azada, which I played while suffering from a cold many years ago.

New computer plus ridiculously cold weather was the perfect time to catch up on some of these games, especially ones that I bought years ago on sale. After being disappointed with Key to Ravenhearst, I picked something that didn't revolve around murder and mystery - the cheery The Surprising Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen by JoyBits studio. Now, I know I have criticized Russian games before, but they're not all bad. My only complaint about this game is that it is too short!

The style of the game is more cartoony than most hidden object games (HOPs or HOGs) and it provided the right amount of challenge for me on expert level. Hidden objects can be found over multiple screens, with varied and helpful hints from the Baron. I don't know how many times I rolled my eyes at missing obvious things, but staring too hard at the scenes causes you to miss some pretty obvious things. Most of the pure HOP screens involved word association, so you had to match an object with the object it was similar to or complemented. This was surprisingly tricky as you're matching wits with the game developer. Some of the matches were easy - a fish and a fishing pole, for example while others were more obtuse, such as a diamond and a pearl. It seemed like you had to precisely click on objects too - there were times when I had the correct match but I was just a little off where I clicked.

There were several "mechanical" games throughout too. For these mini games one has to line up objects and time everything perfectly for the action, usually something very Rube Goldberg, to work. It was such a relief to play a FUN game. I wish the voice actor had been credited - the voice acting and snarky comments really added to the game.