Paper Pinball

I got in a couple of rounds of Deep Space D-6 this week, but my favourite game was playing and teaching Alpal how to play.

Watching Alpal play and having everything click was really satisfying for me. It proved to me that once you know how to read the rules and use the summaries how simple Deep Space D-6 really is.

One thing I did notice however was that Alpal had a slightly different deck, from a printing in 2016. This will need to be explored a little more, but expect a full review soon.

So this is a little bit of a cheat, but Alpal introduced me to the 5 Paper Pinball Roll and Write games.

I was already intrigued, buty actually playing the Paper Pinball games was surprisingly fun and frantic. Even though we were playing the ‘same game’, just like a game of pinball our scores and strategies were wildly different.

Esentially, roll dice and mark off the corrosponding value. Can’t fill out something on the table? Lose a ball, and lose 3 balls it’s game over. It even has multiball!

More on this series will be coming soon after I have had a closer look at the series.

So I noticed there is an eShop sale on the Switch, so I had a bit of a look around to see what was around.

I nabbed a couple of games, but the only one I tried this week was Hungry Shark World. I had seen Outside Xbox playing it a while ago and I was curious. Here I could get it mobile and for $7.50 – how could I go wrong?

Well, pretty easily apparently. It crashes every second life without fail, and sometimes on the first round. After having a look online, this has been happening since 2018, so I woudl say by now no patch would be coming to fix this.

Don’t get Hungry Shark World on Switch. Just don’t. It looks like fun, but the frustration and progress loss makes it just not worth it, even for free!

I only played for an hour, but I got through the first visit to Guadosalam. If you know what I mean, then you are nodding. If you don’t know what I mean, it’s close enough to a 45 minute unskippable cutscene section setting up a lot of story about halfway into the game.

When you get through Guadosalam, you then hit the Thunder Plains. Here, if you can dodge 200 consecutive lightning strikes, you get a component for Lulu’s ultimate weapon.

But this is insanely hard compared to what I remember. I got a best of 3, then a fight, then I relaxed at the end of the fight and got zapped as the game transitioned back. This is going to be a challenge.

So I have been walking around with the Pokeball Plus in my pocket for a few weeks now. This week, I decided I should probably check on how my Pokemon was doing in there.

Short answer – great! Lots of play, lots of steps, and I learned something. There is an experience cap on how much XP you can earn in one hit taking your pokemon for a stroll. 99,999 to be exact.

So if you are walking around with your Pokemon in your Pokeball, don’t forget to bring them back regularly!

With everything that has been going on, I haven’t even fired up a ‘quick’ Tetris 99 round for a while. And it showed – I was pretty rusty.

But there was a semi-surprise waiting for me this week – another Event with a skin up for grabs!

This time it was a Splatoon skin in honour of the last Splatfest. I thought it might be a bit of fun, so I settled in for a little bit and played a couple of games to snag the 100 points required for the theme. And rusty and all, snag it I did 🙂

But talking about Tetrising…

This took a lot of time out of my board gaming this week, but it was worth it. Even if I essentially had to set it up twice thanks to TPG, but that’s another issue I don’t want to dwell on.

My old i7-5820 served me well, but now my new machine is running a bit faster and a lot quieter, making my work at home even more pleasurable 🙂 Gaming will be coming soon with any luck!

Talking about putting things together properly, there is one more Tetris project this week…

All of my games are finally out of boxes. Some are in storage, true, but now all games are unpacked from the move.

It became obvious that even with putting some games in storage, I was going to be very tight on room. But there wasn’t any room for more storage. Rabbit came up with a brilliant plan though – put wheels on Kallax!

But just having the games out is only half the battle. Now I need to reorganise all these boxes.

A couple more months at this stage, but the shelfie video will be incoming!