{"id":68,"date":"2007-11-08T16:42:16","date_gmt":"2007-11-08T23:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eriknovales.com\/blog\/index.php\/2007\/11\/08\/a-game-so-nice-i-played-it-twice\/"},"modified":"2007-11-08T16:42:16","modified_gmt":"2007-11-08T23:42:16","slug":"a-game-so-nice-i-played-it-twice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/?p=68","title":{"rendered":"A Game So Nice, I Played It Twice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Puzzle Quest<\/a> recently joined the elite ranks of “games that I have played to completion more than once.” Months ago, I had played and finished the Nintendo DS version of the game — I enjoyed it so much that when the Xbox Live Arcade version was released in October, I bought it again and replayed it. I recently polished off the campaign mode and got all of the achievements (with the help of Sandy, who got probably the hardest achievement, the Master Craftsman achievement<\/a>), so now I think I can safely say that I’m done with Puzzle Quest.<\/p>\n

I briefly thought about doing some analysis on optimal play at the top of the game board, since I think it’s the one aspect of the game that’s dominated by chance more than any other. I also haven’t really found any good existing analysis out there — I only found analyses of character builds<\/a>, along with speculation that Puzzle Quest is a game that’s “vulnerable” to optimal AI play in multiplayer<\/a>. (I disagree, because the many different character builds and spells make it difficult to truly play optimally. I frankly find it hard to conceive of a Puzzle Quest AI that can play the match-3 game optimally and<\/strong> utilize all spells correctly and with maximum effectiveness.) I think that I’m lacking the motivation to follow through with a project like that, but we’ll see. Apparently the PC version is moddable<\/a>, and the game is driven by XML files and Lua scripts, which should make it easier to find information about piece drop probabilities.<\/p>\n

There aren’t that many games that I play more than once — I have such a huge backlog that I naturally gravitate towards trying to clear some more of that, rather than playing an old game again. I know that I’ve played Jagged Alliance 2<\/a> and the Fallout<\/a> games<\/a> multiple times, but beyond that, I’m having a hard time coming up with additional substantive (>1 hour) games that I’ve replayed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Puzzle Quest recently joined the elite ranks of “games that I have played to completion more than once.” Months ago, I had played and finished the Nintendo DS version of the game — I enjoyed it so much that when the Xbox Live Arcade version was released in October, I bought it again and replayed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}