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Monthly Archives: July 2014

The Room games

I recently played through The Room and The Room Two, available both on iOS and Android.  Aaaand…wow.  I like them a lot.

The Room and its sequel, The Room Two, are puzzle games developed by Fireproof Games.  They were released in 2013 and early 2014 respectively (for Android, because I am against Apple).  They’re relatively short puzzle games (I beat them both within a few hours of continuous play) set in a slightly dystopian, slightly horror, kind of steampunky era.  (And you know how I love dystopian, steampunk things.)

There’s is a broad storyline to the game where you are following a friend and his research on the Null element.  He leaves notes and clues to help you solve the various puzzles, first in the form of puzzle boxes and then whole rooms, in the game that allow you to see more of his research and mental state.

The puzzles are solved by manipulating various on-screen objects.  The touch control is intuitive and well-executed.  The puzzles themselves are also well crafted, graphics and all.  They’re moderately difficult and when you’re stuck, there’s an optional hint system that will provide hints in degrees to nudge you in the correct direction instead of giving you the answer outright.

Atmosphere control in the game is quite good in terms of what is revealed as you progress in the game as well as the accompanying music, especially in the second game.  There is a definite sense of unease and suspense as you find new clues and solve new puzzles.  But it’s not so bad that the panicky ones can’t handle the game.

I played The Room on my first gen Kindle Fire and The Room Two on my brother-in-law’s (henceforth known as the bil) Kindle Fire HD.  I definitely recommend going with a Kindle Fire HD if you’re going to play on a Kindle.  My Kindle struggled to load some of the puzzles and would crash opening some rooms.  Restarting my Kindle would fix the problem, but it’s annoying.

Also, The Room Two isn’t even available for the first gen Kindle Fire.  It makes sense considering how my Kindle struggled with the first game and the second game is much more involved graphically and otherwise.  Fireproof Games says it’s working on trying to make it available for all versions of the Kindle Fire, but I doubt that the first gen Kindle Fire would be able to provide as good as an experience.

So, The Room and The Room Two.  You definitely should play.

I make! Wire wrap edition (1)

So, here’s a thing I’ve been doing.  Kind of.  In my spare time.  Of which I have little.  And what little I have I am generally bemoaning what little spare time I have thus totally squandering it.

Anyway.

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I have embarked on this journey to make the cable for a pair of Sennheisers I have less tangleable by wrapping it with embroidery floss (a larger diameter cord is harder to tangle).  It’s…taking awhile.  And I’ll have to be adding floss to it before long because I didn’t cut the originals long enough to wrap the entire length of the cord.

Anyway, this is just a friendship knot (or lanyard knot or barrel stitch or crown knot, I should probably get a book on knots in English so that I don’t have to scramble around the internet looking for proper terminology and then find all this conflicting information) around a core (the cable) always going in the same direction so that it spirals around the core.

I was going to do a variation of the knot that involved more string and colors, but then it got to be a big tangled mess with the length of string I needed to use.  But that’s ok!  I’ll change colors somewhere along the length of the cable as I run out of existing embroidery floss.

No, I don’t particularly care about the Miami Hurricanes.  Why?