Flooding

Literally getting my feet wet
When I came home on Wednesday evening I was in for a nasty surprise. Getting upstairs and into my bedroom after dinner I discovered quite an amount of water on my bedroom floor, courtesy of a leak. A combination of a partially clogged gutter near my skywindow and a ridiculous amount of marble sized hail proved to be a fatal combination to handle for the outside works thus “flooding” my room with water.
Luckily for me the area with my bed, desk and clothes closet was spared, thus leaving me breathing a sigh of relief as I saw all my electronics being intact and not having to deal with a wet bed. The only real victim of this whole ordeal has been the rug I used for under my deskchair, which is now sitting in the outside garbage bin because it was completely soaked. It didn’t give up without a fight though, seeing as it left behind quite a big chunk of rubber remains that I have for the most part scrubbed off the floor yesterday.
All in all not the best two days for me personally.  I have been quite sore all over today due to having to scrub the damn rubber off the floor and assisting my dad with maintenance work on my roof. Having to hold a tilted skywindow over your head for about 20 minutes is a real test to your arms, can tell you that much.

Picross Madness
I posted earlier this week about My Nintendo, Miitomo and the rewards program and mentioned that I had gotten The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess: Picross game.
I really love Picross. It’s one of those games that has you think about your moves and keeps your brain healthy. Combine it with a game series I’m really starting to get into and you have a gem of a game. I’m currently over 2/3rd of the way completed when it comes to the game. There are three modes of play: Picross, Mega Picross and Miicross.
Picross is the original game with the numbers and squares. You can opt into hints or not and after the inital tutorial there are 45 puzzles to complete ranging from 10×10 squares to 20×15 squares.
Mega Picross is the same puzzle buildup only with a twist in the puzzles themselves. Instead of having rows and colums seperately with numbers they have replaced some of them with numbers that span two rows or colums at the same time, making the puzzle a bit more challenging to complete (See picture below, it’s from Pokémon Picross but the same idea).

The last play mode option, Miicross, is a very large picture broken up into about sixty 10×10 puzzle grids. Solve them all and you unlock the picture.

So far I’ve completely solved the normal Picross mode and the Miicross and am now steadily working my way through the 10×10 grids in Mega Picross mode.
I find it a really nice puzzle game to play. I play it at home to relax after work or when I just don’t feel like starting up any of my machines. It’s also a nice way to spend the 15-20 mins on the train every day, making me be at my destination before I even notice.
The music is nice and not too annoying when played constantly and the graphics, as far as they matter, look good. The only downside so far has been that with the bigger puzzles the squares you need to tap to fill in get smaller and especially around the bottom edge of my screen it sometimes doesn’t really tap the right square, causing me to make an error and thus giving me a time penalty.
Time is  a thing is this game in so far that if you go over 30 mins in solving a puzzle you will not unlock the coloured picture. Going over 30 mins has proven to be almost impossible though, unless you keep on making mistakes so they have been really easy with that.

All in all I’ve really been enjoying this game and I feel like it’s a very good way to spend my first 1000 platinum points of the My Nintendo system. I’m currently saving up to get WarioWare Touched aswell, because free games are always awesome! And it will leave the programme at July 1st. With harking in around 200 coins every week though I should have that game on my 3DS in no time at all and have room to get both the Mario and Donkey Kong themes for my 3DS aswell.

My Nintendo and Miitomo

About two or three weeks ago Nintendo launched their long awaited new rewards program: My Nintendo. Meant to replace Club Nintendo, they did a complete overhaul. Where in Club Nintendo you would get codes with purchases of games and consoles, that you could turn in for points and ultimately goodies the brain behind Nintendo decided to go a new route for their rewards program, calling it “My Nintendo”.
Going about it a little differently now Nintendo has installed two seperate currencies for their rewards program: Platinum and Gold coins. Platinum coins are mostly earned with attaching your social media accounts to My Nintendo, logging in the Nintendo E-shop and Miiverse every week and using the newly released Miitomo app (more on that one later).
Gold coins are earned when buying games in the Nintendo E-shop. I don’t think you can get gold coins when buying physical copies of their games, which is kind of a shame. I guess this is Nintendo’s way of pushing people to buy their stuff digitally.


Now what do those coins actually buy?
Platinum and gold coins can be exchanged for various things. For the gold coins it’s mostly discounts on games on the Nintendo E-shop for the WiiU and the 3DS.
Platinum coins are a little bit more diverse. So far you can get discounts on games, just like with the golden coins, but you can also get 3DS themes, ingame stuff for Miitomo and an entire free game: The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess: Picross. This game is exclusive to My Nintendo and costs 1000 platinum points, which you should be able to get in about a day. I opted to buy the game, and one of the 3DS themes, and it cost me 1200 platinum coins in total. I’m more or less totally addicted to this picross game and am well on my way to finishing it completely. But for the 1000 points I decided to spend on the game I could have gotten Mario Kart 7 and ToL: A Link to the Past with 20% discount on the Nintendo E-shop, lowering the prices of those games to respectively €36 and €16. Not a bad deal at all and something I am saving up for right now. Plus if I buy those games I will get gold coins… Which will give me discount on other games again. It’s a nice little circle that Nintendo has created and a better rewards program for someone who likes games rather than silly accessories (feel free to disagree with me). The only thing I dislike is that there is no rewards for buying physical games, and I personally rather have a physical copy than a digital copy so that’s kind of sucky.

og_image

An App to tie it all together
Right after My Nintendo launched Nintendo’s first app ever launched aswell: Miitomo. It’s an interesting app and best described as Nintendo’s take on social media. It boils down to creating a Mii to resemble you, adding friends and then getting to know eachother better by answering questions and reading other people’s answers. Together with a secondary game of being able to put your Mii in the most interesting outfits, and being rewarded for changing clothes constantly, it’s an app to keep you quite busy. For me it’s been very nice to get to know my Twitter friends better and I have tried to get some of my IRL friends to use the app aswell, just for the entertainment value.
Add up that you can earn atleast 15 platinum coins per day by just using Miitomo right it’s also making me use the app a lot so I can earn rewards for my gaming systems.

A very smart marketing move by Nintendo and a very addicting app for people with a lot of friends I’m really happy to see them making progress and branching out with their company.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Picross game to finish.