Discovering old Drafts

While the games are fun, I would honestly say I don’t think any of them are worth their price point of $5 (Or all 4 for 15 dollars in the Bundle). Despite planning to (and obviously I still did) buy them all, I was expecting $2-$3 each so imagine my surprise when it was doubled. The main thing though is these games require StreetPass in a much larger way than Find Mii 1 & 2 and Puzzle Swap do (Although, the latter does require it to some degree to get all the puzzles). If you do not have an easy time getting StreetPasses or have a large supply of play coins, you may run into issues. Especially as some of the achievements require you to meet many other people with the game–and honestly, I don’t expect everyone with the 3DS (when many people don’t even have the Plaza activated) to be buying these games.

These games also bring in a whole bunch of new hats (some which even give you full costumes) that update daily. However, you earn these hats a lot differently. You actually get them through spending tickets which are earned by accomplishing certain goals (AKA Achievements) in the new games.

Mii Force is the first game and is essentially an old styled-space shooter. It’s definitely the one I’d say is probably the most popular, but it’s also one of the more dependent on StreetPasses. It involves you going through the levels to fight and a boss at the end of each level.

There are various levels and you can even replay them without moving onto the next if you’d like. There are achievements per level (besides the achievements overall) for beating the high score, getting all the treasures, and not losing any of your “pod attackers”. More or less, your “attacks” are determined by people’s shirt colors similar to how Find Mii would use shirt colors for magic. The main issue here is that there is no other attack so if you have trouble with a shirt’s color, there’s not much you can do. For example, I find black to be pretty awful to use–they are slow and while they take out multiple enemies when they go off, you will probably be hit first. Also, as the levels go on, you will find that it’ll be harder and harder with just one or two Miis which really requires you to try and have as many as you can with you. In fact, even gold pants’ Miis actually get a bonus further encouraging the use of hiring through Play Coins.

While I really enjoyed it at first, Mii Force slowly became my least favorite game. It’s difficulty spiked up rather quickly and I found myself having a harder time keeping my pods–in fact, I spent an incredibly long time on a boss due to only having one pod left and only being able to attack while it was shooting at me–thus, I was barely able to damage it. While I have nearly all the other games close to done, I am far from getting anywhere in Mii Force. Between various things that require specific attacks due a certain skill, I’m just not good enough at it.

Flower Town is the second game and probably the least popular. The game involves growing flowers…and that’s really it. You can do jobs which involve you to grow flowers and decorate your garden and overall, it’s a fairly relaxing game. The main flaw is it’s very slow and there isn’t really anything you can do while waiting for more StreetPasses (or using playcoins) to water your plants until you’ve earned a good amount of money. Unfortunately, the only ways to earn money are:
1. Selling Plants – Of course, you need them to be watered for them to grow…
2. Selling Seeds – You need a finished plant to be watered to get seeds (10 per plant)–I mean, you can always BUY seeds, but that’s not really helpful to making money.
3. Doing Jobs – You can only do one at a time and they require a specific plant which you may or may not need to buy (and in some cases, need to grow multiple flowers to get a specific seed–especially if you are going for the best score) and thus, more watering. And once you submit a flower for a job, you need to wait for another StreetPass to see how you did so you can pick a new job.
Which makes it a bit of an endless circle of what you can and can’t do. It’s more than a little frustrating especially considering it’s supposed to be relaxing.

Regardless, you will eventually have more money than you know what to do with. Other than a couple of expensive plots, most things are fairly cheap and when you get down to only needing a few plants (I’m personally down to 12), you will be selling things quite often. I currently have about 500K and I’ve bought all the plots I can along with at least one of each pot. The main problem with the game is despite being essentially a collecting game, the closest you can get to collecting them all is documenting in your journal. Ignoring that you can only show off one of your gardens to those you streetpass, even your own personal collection comes out as lack-luster for the following reasons:
1. Even if you buy all the plots (2 of which are only available after hitting 20 flowers), you can only hold up to 50 of the 80 total flowers, so yeah, you can’t even keep one of each. This is even worse for people who may have wanted to collect one of each color of each flower as well.
2. Very few decoration spots. Despite a large amount of decorations, there’s only so many places you can put them and some of the plots do not have any spaces for some of these items at all… so a lot of them get kind of wasted.
If you could buy multiples of plots, this would fix a lot of things as you can display as many flowers as you want and also expand more with decorating, but right now it’s a lot of picking and choosing which really isn’t much fun in a game that is Collection-based.

Warrior’s Way is somewhat similar to the board game risk crossed with Rock, Paper, Scissors. You have to conquer realms while building up your army. The main thing is the ways to build up your army are:
1. Conquering said worlds.
2. If you StreetPass someone who does NOT have Warrior’s Way, you will get the amount of people they have in their plaza joining your army.
3. If you StreetPass someone who DOES have Warrior’s Way, you must defeat their army in a fight to get a percentage of their army.
4. Hiring with Play Coins (5 Play Coins for the smallest amount)
Let’s just say it was pretty depressing when Zero bought the game only to make it so I no longer received a lovely 1,000 army. While I do get more now if I defeat him, he sadly can not defeat me (while if I didn’t have the game, he’d have been getting 1,700 people to his army everytime he streetpassed me). I’m very surprised they did it this way–what would’ve made more sense is if you greeted Peacefully, you’d get just the people in the plaza while if you fought and won, you’d get many more.

This may work somewhere in Japan where everyone has lots of StreetPasses so it’s a close match and you will be good, but here… there’s people who have barely any who will be at a disadvantage and people who have a lot who will repeatedly win. It’s not very balanced and makes things a lot harder. Not to mention the amount you have to pay Play coin-wise does not feel very rewarding.

The game also has some crazy ups and downs in regards to how many you may be facing which may be in part due to some of the achievements (Requiring you to win a fight with someone who has an army 1.5x larger and 2x larger… not fun), but still very frustrating. The main thing to keep in mind with this though is it’s not impossible to win with an army much larger than yours. If you have around 2x (at least with the actual map–it’s more luck based with StreetPass), there is a good chance you can figure out a way to win. I didn’t expect to get as far as I did with this game, but once I started getting a better idea with the strategy, I started increasing my army size much faster. I’m now at max (9,999,999) and at my 3rd run with the Emperor (you need to play at least 3 times to get your Castle’s rank to 20) and am essentially just waiting there as now it’s the waiting game. The achievements I need are from meeting people who don’t have the game, greeting those who have the game peacefully, winning against those who have the game, and hiring Mercenaries (Which will cost at least 100 Play coins for the achievement). These are all relatively slow achievements so there isn’t much to do–I just know I don’t want to have to play through a 4th round.

The final new game is Monster Manor which is probably the closest to some degree to Find Mii. In this game, you are a detective trying to go to the top of the tower to solve a mystery. You place parts by passing people (the parts being the color of their shirt). Placing parts of the same color next to eachother will possibly get you 1 or more chests (depending on how big you made the room) and make it so no enemy will spawn. If you place a different color, there is a chance an enemy will spawn–however, you can get in as many hits as needed to defeat the enemy (as long as you don’t die) along with dodging which makes it more engaging. This game is a bit nicer to people who may not be able to StreetPass often–especially if you only have one person as you’d pretty much only have that one color which guarantees you no enemies and lots of chests. Of course, that does make it harder for achievements like “Defeat 100 Enemies”–though, later floors have some color pieces already placed which can help with that.

I would say the biggest issue is that there are some things that require you to have more players with the same color–for example, Puzzle Boxes need at least 2 players and need you to complete a room with them for -the chance- of a puzzle box showing up as it’ll only show up if a player is in the room. If it weren’t for things like that (which are also achievement-based no less), it’d be a lot easier. Similarly, if you are able to Street Pass people a good amount but the shirts are random, you will have a lot of trouble with the chest achievements. The game just gets a bit more complicated than it needs to be in places which I find takes away from it a bit.

Overall? The games definitely are fun. Despite my frustrations, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy them. The price is still a bit high, in my opinion, and I do think they will be a lot harder for those who do not have access to many streetpasses, but if you enjoy StreetPass and the Mii Plaza, I’d still recommend picking them up.

And no, ignoring some general sexism towards a female gamer (“What? Girls don’t play video games!” “Yeah, okay, you’re a G.I.R.L.–Guy In Real Life”), there is one other issue–if you notice, most of the time when a female gamer may be acknowledged, they are a tomboy.

The issue is, a girl can be “girly” and still kick some serious butt in video games.

Recently, I have run into an issue with both my laptop and computer. My laptop, which is completely pink and white (Pink everywhere except the actual keys on the keyboard which are white) apparently has an issue that could cause it to burst into flames. While the firmware update prolonged this, it’s gotten to the point where I can’t do much of anything. My computer, on the otherhand, besides also having a heating issue and needing a parts upgrade, the Hello Kitty Mouse and Keyboard need to be replaced. The mouse works poorly and the keyboard is so worn that the letters on the keys have been completely torn off. The space bar and some other letters are also barely functioning.

So, Zero decided I should finally try and actually get a keyboard, mouse, and laptop up to spec. And you know what doesn’t exist in that case? Pink. You will find black and silver mostly. Occasionally some red and sometimes some blue. Afterall, any real female gamers can’t also like the color pink! Or want to be healing princesses! THAT IS AN OUTRAGE.

Thus, nearly any pink laptop or mouse or keyboard you will find will have a 98% chance of sucking. If it does not suck, it will only reach “okay” or “decent”, it will never be “great”. So you will have to replace it yet again because it won’t really be what you need. And that’s just not very fair.

After much searching, I finally found a good laptop. It’ll unfortunately only be pink on the side I can’t see while everything else will be black which, well, sucks. Pink is my favorite color (Followed by white, and no, I don’t care that it’s technically a shade, and ocean-shades), especially the light shades of it. So, when I have something I plan on using a lot, I’d like it to be a color that makes me happy.

And sure, there’s skins. But not only are they more money, a lot of them honestly aren’t that great. You can tell it’s a skin for one and there’s usually many off-areas that show the original color underneath. It’s just an obvious fake and it’s not really satisfying. (And finding one for a specific laptop is also quite hard)

However, that still leaves the mouse and keyboard (And skins on either of those are just annoying to deal with) which I will end up just having to settle on a black or silver colored one.

The question is, despite the fact that girl gamers are “acknowledged” (With a good 75% of female character clothes still having been gotten from a strip joint… -_-), other than maybe t-shirts and things also be in girl sizes and maybe some actual respect when making them in-game, why can’t we actually be able to get good stuff to play? At least some handheld systems and console controllers have started to make pink versions that are on the same level as the rest–so, how long until the computer decides to catch up?