Games Interactive 2: The Benefits of Carelessness?
Comments(0) Among their many other flaws, the two Gameses Interactive are lopsided. There’s a good variety of different puzzle types, but if you want to play ’em all, you’re going to spend the bulk of your time on the Battleships and Paint By Numbers, as my posts here will attest. It’s like one of those Mixed Nuts assortments that’s mostly peanuts.
I feel like it’s gotten worse in Games Interactive 2, too. It definitely has in one respect: it has six Paint by Number sets where the first game had only four. But it seems to me that the Battleships have gotten harder. I said in my first post about Battleships that it took me about an hour to complete a set. I think that was an understatement, but now, I’m wishing that a set of Battleships took me so little time. I think there are some individual puzzles that take me that long. I don’t have exact numbers, though, because the in-game clock maxes out at 99:59.
The thing is, though, I could well be wrong. That is, even if the puzzles are taking me longer, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re actually more difficult. It must be remembered that back in the first game, I got a number of the Battleships puzzles wrong. By now, I’ve learned from experience how to quickly and accurately check the correctness of a solution. I start by checking the ship counts — one four, two threes, three twos, four ones. It gets so you can do this at a glance. Then a sweep over the numbers in each row and column, and finally make sure that none of the ships are touching at their corners. Thanks to my thoroughness, I haven’t submitted an incorrect solution in a long time. But it takes a lot more time to find a correct solution than a solution that’s almost correct and fails in just one respect that you failed to notice before submitting. And the almost-correct solution is just as useful for completing the game, by both my personal criteria, which basically just consist of “Submit solutions in good faith”, and those required for unlocking the final puzzle in Games Interactive 2, which don’t even require that.