Jesus. Best of luck to you.
Hey guys, a friend of mine just finished up his latest iPad-only game, Spellsquares.
It’s a pretty cool mix of Seventh Guest, Sudoku and Scrabble with solid gameplay and gorgeous graphics. Definitely worth checking out.
He’s given me six promo codes, so let me know if you’d like one and I’ll PM it your way. First come first served.
More info at the official site.
PM sent. I actually spotted this last night and wondered if it was any good.
All outta codes! Thanks for the interest and I hope everyone else takes a chance and checks it out.
As a fortunate recipient of one of the promo codes I’ve had a chance to test Spellsquares out over the past few days, and I like it. It’s a straight-up word puzzle game wrapped in a beautiful but superfluous Myst-like wrapper. You solve word puzzles to move from room to room, collecting objects that let you access new parts of the giant castle you’re exploring. Each room also has a coin hidden in it that can be redeemed for powerups that help you solve puzzles.
The puzzles themselves all have the same basic structure. A grid appears with a few letter tiles locked down within it. More letter tiles appear beside the grid, and you drag them into place to form words. Once each vertical column and horizontal row contains a valid word the puzzle is solved. Powerups from the vending machine (and also strewn throughout the castle) let you do things like check to see what letters are in the right place, move a random tile to its correct position, etc. It’s more difficult than it sounds because often you can create several words in a particular column or row, but only one of them is correct.
That’s it, and that’s the only potential problem: The entire game revolves around one type of word puzzle. I was kind of hoping for a modern day Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It where you have many types of puzzles to work on if you hate or burn out on a particular variant, but this has a singular focus. Fortunately for me I like this type of puzzle, and the game does a nice job of giving you enough hints to not get stuck while not making progress too easy. I wish you could do more with the coins (spend them on consumable powerups or save them for something bigger and better), but that’s not a big deal.
I got to a locked area that said it would be opened this summer via a content patch, so there is free DLC on the way. You can also play the word game by itself if you don’t want to bother with the adventure trappings. It has great production values, plays smoothly, and has tons of clever puzzles. I wish a demo was available because if you don’t like it from the get-go you’ll hate the whole game, but I would recommend it to any word game fan. Kudos to the developer, and thanks again for the promo code.
Heh heh heh. Too hot, in the hot tub!
Nice re-entry ElGuapo!
Sorry your IPad was damaged, though. That sucks.
So what was the eventual fate of the iPad, Lorini?
Thought I’d chime in on Spellsquares. Tracy did a nice job summarizing. The production quality is nice overall. The music track does get a bit old after a while. I like this sort of puzzle game where there’s a context for what you are doing. I do think they might have taken that aspect a bit further, frankly.
I played on the highest difficulty level. My goal was to not use any powerups, but decided to forego that in the last third or so, where things got pretty tough.
This is recommended if you like word puzzles. There’s enough to keep you entertained for several hours in the main story, plus the free play mode Tracy already mentioned.
I’m planning to send an email to the developer with a couple of thoughts and suggestions.
It’s been nearly a week and it’s still dead. So either it will go on Ebay for parts or my son may take it to Apple to see how much it would be to repair. In the meantime, I bought an IPad 2 with 3G.
3G and water wings?
Nope, no water is in the future of my IPad 2. The frustrating thing is that I had a bunch of games on my old IPad and I don’t remember all of them.
Look in your purchase history?
Should be backed up on your iTunes app on your pc. In fact, you could just restore your iPad 1 backup to your iPad 2.
I did the restore from iTunes and only the few I had already remembered showed up. Maybe I need to change a setting.
I don’t sync my iPad nearly as often as my phone, especially since plugging in the iPad to the computer doesn’t charge it.
Do you usually buy stuff through iTunes or directly from your iPad? How long since your last sync (and do you sync your games)?
At any rate, you can pull up your purchase history through iTunes, as already said, or via your email through the weekly notices they send on what you’ve bought.
I didn’t even know you could buy apps outside of using your iPad so I’ve bought all my apps directly from my iPad. Thanks for the reminder about receipts.