Picross

I found this new puzzle game that I'm rather addicted to called Armor Picross. It's a nonogram puzzle (sometimes called a griddler), which is a picture logic puzzle where you fill in squares in a grid according to numbers given at the ends of the rows and columns to reveal a hidden picture. And in case I didn't explain that very well, here's a screenshot from the instructions:


The website has plenty of different puzzles to choose from, ranging in difficulty from easy (5x5 or 10x10 grids) to extreme (25x25). If you want a little extra guidance on how to solve these puzzles, there's a helpful website called Nonogram Solver that you can check out. Have fun. And don't blame me if you get addicted, too!

Farm Frenzy Fails

I recently downloaded the demo to Farm Frenzy from Big Fish. It seemed promising. Billed on some sites as a Tycoon style game, I would describe it as a cross between a Time Management game and a Simulation game where you run a farm. It has the POTENTIAL to be fun if it didn't run so excruciatingly slowly.

And that's not because of my computer which is pretty up-to-date and fast enough that I've never had this problem with any other game. The game actually runs more than 10x slower than intended. Sound ridiculous? Well, I timed it and one second of game play take, on average, 12 seconds in real time. That varies slightly depending on how many things are happening at once, but it is always way too slow.

I tried downloading a cracked torrent of the game from mininova, thinking maybe it was just the demo, but the torrent was just as slow and had a tendency to quit the game in the middle of play. So I don't advise that either.

If anyone has had a different experience with this game or has bought a legit copy and found that the problem goes away then, I would be very interested to hear from you. So please leave a comment. Otherwise, I have to advise against this game. It'll just leave you wanting to bang your head... or your computer... against a brick wall.

Addendum: I recently tried the Alawar game Virtual Farm... very similar to Farm Frenzy but feels a bit more like a Tycoon game, which I don't enjoy. So although Virtual Farm wasn't as glitchy as Farm Frenzy, it also wasn't as fun (I speak of potential fun, not actual fun... since in reality the glitchiness I experienced in Farm Frenzy is anything but fun). My recommendation? If you're looking for a farm-themed, time management game and are having problems with Farm Frenzy, play Dairy Dash or Ranch Rush instead.