After playing and enjoying The Voxel Agents' The Gardens Between, I then tried their straightforward tile sliding game Puzzle Retreat (released around 2013), and so the next one for me to try was Train Conductor World, released around 2016. This is apparently actually the third game in a series that started with a game called Train Conductor from 2009 that's only available on iOS, and then there was a sequel called Train Conductor 2: USA, that apparently did have an Android version at some point but is also only currently available on iOS.

It would have been interesting to have played the other two games first (although they aren't free to play), but Train Conductor World is an arcade type of game and stands on its own. The game apparently is similar to an early mobile video game hit called Flight Control, also released in 2009, and also no longer available on Android (although it too apparently still has a version available on iOS). Anyway, in both games you're tracing out paths for vehicles and avoiding collisions. The gameplay in Train Conductor World is set up with a world map (in this case, of Europe), and each stage is a different European city. Each stage has a different layout of train tracks, and although it's not too hard to pass each stage at its thee different difficulty levels, it's much, much more difficult to accomplish this perfectly. To earn a gold star for the stage you have to not only steer all the trains to their correct path and avoid crashes, but you also have to do it without pausing any train for more than a moment.

There's a meta game where, straight out of the Pipe Dreams games, you earn tiles and have to arrange them on the world map to connect cities. At the beginning it can be slow going for F2P players to build up a stockpile of tiles. You can earn them by completing stages or grinding for coins (earned by getting a train to its correct destination in a stage), or, once a day, watching an ad. However, as you progress, some of the cities you link up will generate coins for you, and logging in a couple of times a day will unlock a couple more tiles. Adding to the slow going is the fact that higher rarity tiles are required to place tracks over different types of terrain (e.g. forests). There's also a mechanic where you can trade in five tiles of a lower rarity for one tile of a higher rarity.

All this complexity only to unlock more stages makes the game more of a slow burn than would be ideal, and this is exacerbated by the high real world prices for a set of random tiles (it would've been easier just to pay to unlock a certain number of additional stages). As a way to pad out the experience, since you'll have only a very small number of stages at the beginning, the game has special missions pop up on stages you've already fully completed, such as intentionally cause a certain number of trains to crash, or collect balloons dotted around the stage. There's also a Chaos* mode that unlocks after you get a perfect score in Chaos mode, which is an open-ended stage where you're basically competing for spots on the leaderboard. Neither of these modes seemed very appealing to me, so for the most I just stuck with trying to get perfect scores on the regular stages.

Train Conductor World is a fun pick-up-and-play title that players of all ages should enjoy, although it will take a lot of attempts to get perfect scores and a lot of logins and replays (or a lot of real world money) to accrue enough tiles to unlock every stage. I enjoyed my time with the game, but this is a game that I would recommend that people should try and if you like it and have an iOS device, I imagine it will be more gratifying to pay the flat $3 or so for one of the previous two games in the series and be able to make all of their stages accessible at once, rather than have to deal with the drip feed of stages in this game.

Pokemon Quest is another one of those free to play games that I've been dipping into occasionally off and on since its release (in this case, May 2018), and I thought I would collect my thoughts on it. At its core the game is an auto battler where you collect and train Pokemon from the original generation, and in a lot of ways the game reminds me of the Pokémon Rumble series (I've played through all of those, and the last one was the now-defunct free-to-play Pokémon Rumble Rush on mobile). For me Pokemon Quest's main draw is its cute blocky art style (NintendoLife called it, "a cuter version of Minecraft"), and unlike many other free-to-play games, in this one the paid content is pretty nonessential and unobtrusive.

As with many mobile games such as this, there's not a ton to do day to day. Pokemon will visit your island somewhat randomly which you then recruit, or you can "cook" and combine particular items together to increase the chances of certain types visiting. You build up your Pokemon by taking them into battle or sacrificing lower levels ones to level up and learn new moves. You can also equip HP or attack increasing items. Once your team is ready, you choose three to take on quests. Here you can either let your Pokemon auto battle three waves of enemies and one boss, or you can interact minimally by managing selecting your Pokemon's attacks (a maximum of two moves each) and managing their cooldowns. It's all pretty mindless, but the usual "gotta collect 'em all" mechanics and seeing your team rating gradually increase provide the usual cheap thrills.

It looks like it takes some 30+ hours to beat the main game, and Pokemon Quest definitely wasn't ever going to hold my interest for even a fraction of that amount of time. This is a game that I may continue to chip away at every once in a while over time, but with so many other daily F2P games to play I don't see myself ever doing much more than that. It's nice that the paid content is pretty much a flat cost, and there are definitely worse alternatives out there, but there are also many better ones as well. Even though it apparently made $8 million in its first month of release, aside from its art style Pokemon Quest isn't one of the more memorable Pokemon spin-offs and I doubt many people stuck through with it all the way to the end.

I feel a bit like I'm going in circles, haha. Along with recently playing yet another Picross game, I've also been playing yet another Pac-Man game. In this case, the game has the utterly generic and uninformative title PAC-MAN, and aside from the barebones official webpage and entries on the Google Play store site and the Apple App Store, I haven't been able to find any info on it. Apparently the game released in 2020, but otherwise everything I know about the game has come from my own experience playing it.

The game apparently has 100+ levels, and I played through about a third of them. The levels start off quite small with only a couple of ghosts, but after a while they become more like the size of the original classic. Each level offers up three challenges, such as "defeat Blinky three times" or "avoid Pinky" or "get the bonus fruit" or "finish the level with a score of XYZ", and there are also three powerups that you unlock as you progress. The powerups just make it easier to defeat ghosts, and there are also some stage elements, such as sections that speed up, slow down, or teleport your Pac-Man.

There isn't really much motivation to make progress in the game or complete all the missions or tackle the limited-time event stages. At a certain point early on you unlock the original Pac-Man game, but otherwise the tickets you earn just unlock useless skins for Pac-Man, the ghosts, the onscreen joystick, etc. The game offers three choices of controls, but the swiping gestures were the only ones that really worked for me. Pac-Man (2020) has a stamina system in the form of five hearts (i.e. lives) that recharge over time, but the real drag is the nearly incessant requirement to watch ads. Ads pop up after virtually every stage you complete, and it's impossible to get into any sort of groove when you're constantly being interrupted. I'm all for mobile games making some money, but these are the most obtrusive ads I've seen in a mobile game in quite a while.

Overall this was a pretty standard and only mildly enjoyable release. Pac-Man (2020) is a paint by numbers affair and doesn't really offer anything compelling, even for long-time fans of the yellow hockey puck. Even though I wasn't a huge fan of my previous Pac-Man game, Pac-Man 99, at least it had a couple of unique ideas. This one feels generic and ho-hum all around, and the incessant ads and required Internet connection certainly don't help things either. Although I was playing a stage a day for a while, I don't really feel compelled to spend much more time with it. Here's hoping my next Pac-Man game is a little more interesting.

Another day, another Picross game, haha. I was looking for something mindless and quick to play, so I decided to check out Mario's Super Picross on Nintendo Switch Online. It's one of a handful of games that was only released in Japan but has been made available since, so it's great to see what was the second entry in the Picross series. (The last 2D Picross game I played was Picross DS, which I played about a year and a half ago.) Mario's Super Picross game is sandwiched in between the original Game Boy release and the subsequent return to Game Boy called Picross 2, and this game adds a few features that have been carried into later games, such as little animations when you complete a puzzle. The main new feature is that there's a separate "Wario" mode where the game doesn't tell you when you make a mistake, in contrast to the usual rules where each stage has a time limit and mistakes eat up your available time.

Otherwise this is just the usual Picross we know and love. The game is presented in the original Japanese, but if you know the general rules of Picross you shouldn't have any trouble playing it. I played through the first set of puzzles for both modes, and although as always I enjoyed my time with the game, given the plethora of other Picross games available I didn't feel compelled to play through much more than that for this one. Overall this is a perfectly good iteration in the Picross series, but really pretty much all of them are equally good. This was a convenient and fun option, since it comes with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription and it was previousy only available in Japan. I do have a physical copy of Picross 2, so I'll definitely be checking that out at some point as well.