Books : Apress sale

Apress is having a big sale on Apple/iOS/Mac books to celebrate Steve Jobs 55 birthday. Use the order code JOBS55 to get a 55% discount. I've had my eye on a few books that I picked up at a really good price. Hard to pass up a good book sale.

Gaming: The Room, Little Inferno and Node.Hack

Most of my gaming now a days happens on a tablet because it's easy to hop in and out. Every once in awhile I'll run into something that really grabs me and I keep playing for hours on end. Here are some recent examples.

The Room

The concept reminds me a lot of The 7th Guest in the fact that it's puzzle based and sometimes not very obvious what you need to do next, but it still keeps you hooked. The game consists of a room with a box on a table. The box has multiple boxes inside it and the goal is to solve the puzzles on the current box to get to the next nested box. The concept is simple but the puzzles aren't. If you get stuck there is a hint system in the top left of the screen. I'm on box three and it's probably going to take an hour or so to figure it out.

This is currently on sale for $0.99. The normal price is $1.99

Little Inferno

This is a simple game on the outside, but has a few layers to it. On the outside it's a game about burning things. The more things you burn the more money it gives you to buy new things to burn. There is a combo system that rewards you for burning combinations of things. For example placing the pirate and bike in the fireplace and burning them both gives you the Bike Pirate combo. There are 99 combos and not all of them are easy to figure out. There is actually a story to the game that you can ignore for the most part but the ending is far more rewarding if you don't. It's told through letters you get in the mail that you can burn for money.

It's list price is $4.99. The PC and Wii U version is $15.

Node.Hack

This puzzle game plays very heavily on a risk/reward mechanic. The player navigates a maze that's populated with enemies. The goal is to dodge the enemies and collect points detonated as different colored nodes. Once green bar at the bottom is full the level starts falling apart. You can still collect points before leaving and this is where the risk/reward mechanic comes into play. There is a leader board system for each level and achievements for killing enemies with specific weapons under certain situations.

It's tough but rewarding once you reach the end with a higher score than your buddy. Every time I think my score is pretty good the wife has done far better.  It's on sale for $0.99.