CE Wills

Aralon: Sword and Shadow     Hey, everyone. I have been playing my new game, which is a role playing game I bought for the humble, on-sale price of 99 cents. The game is certainly worth that price. I played it for 2 hours last night and a little while today. I like it. It is not as fast paced as I normally like my games but the graphics are really nice and they have given you an option of an easy mode so you don't get stuck. I am having a little problem learning how to do certain things, however.     For instance. The on-screen advice keeps telling me that I could travel faster if I had a horse, but I haven't figured out how to get one, nor have I seen any. I even tried running down a large deer in hopes that I could ride him but he proved to be too elusive.     The roadways of this land which I am traveling through are vexed with robbers. I have killed a score of these scurvy knaves. I would have thought that word would have gotten around to the seamy dives which these

The Piano Man     I have the music for Billy Joel's classic song called Piano Man . Lately, as I learn to play it, I have marveled at how well written it is. Not only can Bill turn a phrase but he can write a short story and stick it in a song.     The singer is playing piano in a bar and paints an enduring picture of the bar's inhabitants. The regular crowd shuffles in. The old man sitting next to me, making love to his tonic and gin. He says, "Son, can you play me a melody? I'm not really sure how it goes. But it's sad and it's sweet, and I knew it complete, when I wore a younger man's clothes." Clearly, this is something that the writer had experienced.     We hear about the bartender who is quick with a joke or to light up your smoke, but he thinks, quite humbly, that he should be a movie star. And of course, there is Davy, who is still in the Navy, and probably will be for life.     Everyone who has drank in a bar or pub can identify with t

The "Closet" Bird Rider     Hey everyone. I bet you guys thought I was dead. No, I am very much (?) alive. I have been incommunicado in the land without internet. Major drag. I haven't had time to play games, even. Not reading Google News and Flipboard was bad. I also couldn't check my app shopper app for the latest games. Speaking of that excellent free app, there is a game on sale you might want if you are an RPG person. That's role playing game for those of you new to the I-Pad. Anyway, the game is Aralon: Sword and Shadow HD. It is normally a hefty $6.99 but it is currently on sale for a paltry 99 cents. This game is big, with 310 megabytes of cool graphics. I haven't bought it yet, but I want to because in the screen shots there is a character who is riding a huge bird, like an ostrich. Not that I am a closet bird rider or anything, but it just looks cool.      My problem is this. I have a new internet service and I am now limited on my amount of dow

    Hey, everyone. You guys really need to go buy the new I-Pad game called Max Payne Mobile. I have played it for hours this week and I am enjoying it.     In the above picture, I had shot a canister of pressurized gas. I was needing to get through a locked door and this seemed like a fun way to do it. I wouldn't recommend doing this at home or in any real-life scenario, but for games it is okay. Last night I was walking on steam pipes 10 stories off the ground, in order to get from one building to another. You can even stop at soft drink machines, televisions and phones and they work.     I was in a hallway of a building and a bomb went off. The door was still in front of me, but the walls around the door were gone. Very cool. For $2.99, you can't beat this game.    If you don't want to spend any money, try these freebies. 1) Paper Monsters 2) Fly Boy 3) Feed That Dragon      Be advised, I haven't played these games and I am not recommending them because I jus

    Hey, everyone. I had mentioned that I had bought the popular sword-fighting game called Infinity Blade 2. I have played it for a couple of hours. While this genre of game is not my cup of tea, I have enjoyed this game. Of course, you have heard about the incredible graphics. Monsters have never looked so good.      This game is on sale and I bought it for $4.99. It is easily worth that price. You travel around to stone castles and fight various warriors, human and otherwise, female as well as male. At your disposal are a variety of weapons, armor, potions, rings with magic powers and helmets. One interesting note is the holiday helmet which looks like an Easter egg, complete with a rabbit face. I believe it was yellow and purple. Man, did it look out of place in the grim castles you hang out in. Did I buy it and wear it? You'll never know.      The new content pack is out with this version. It has the new "Clashmob" feature which allows you to gang up on monsters w

   Hey, everyone. Today I break my cardinal rule and blog while drinking.     Tracy Lawrence has a song called Paint Me a Birmingham . This is a story about a guy that is at the beach. He comes upon a man who is painting pictures for the tourists. He says that for $20 he will paint anything. The guy tells the artist to paint a scene of what might have been if he had not messed up a tragic love affair.    How many of us are looking backward at what might have been? How about that girl who would have been the one, if we had pulled our head out of our rear? What is she doing now?    Paint her there on the front porch swing.    Cotton dress, make it early spring,    For a while she'll be mine again,    Could you paint me a Birmingham?     Life is funny. When you find the person you want, it seems as if the forces of evil manipulate folks to hinder love. Don't let anyone control your life. Like Doc Holiday told Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. "Go get that spirited actress and m

    Hey, everyone. On the preceding post concerning Max Payne Mobile, I forgot to mention the fact that all game saves must be done manually. Go to the title page, scroll though the list and select 'save'. I hope they change this to an auto function with an update. Hint, hint.     Speaking of hints, I went to You Tube, as I threatened, and watched a walkthrough of the Roscoe Street Station. I found out a way to advance a bit more. In the control room you walk up to a control panel and get the ( !) icon which tells you that there is a possible interaction. You start a power switch for a train. Then you proceed to the station platform and board a yellow train. When you wreck it, climb out the front door of the car onto the wooden barricade which you have just flattened. You may have to jump to get on the wood. After that, just run down the tracks until people start shooting at you.     This is CE Wills and I'm heading back to Roscoe Street!

   Hey, everyone. Late last night, after I blogged about the honeysuckle, I played my new game called Max Payne Mobile. First of all, let me say that this is a great game and you should drag out a few of those dusty shekels that you carry around in your faded jeans and buy it for the excellent price of $2.99.     "Well," you say to me, "What's with the title of the post?" Here's the recipe.     I am on the initial part of this game. I have wandered into some sort of gang war in New York's subway. Unfortunately, it is one of those games where you wander around, trying to figure out what to do or where to go. I feel like a lost puppy, only I have a shotgun, a Desert Eagle pistol and I have just ventilated about 15 goons. Hey, they weren't zombies, but they came around, acting bad, and I had to put them down, you know?     In the screen shot above, as I was walking down this hallway, I started hearing a voice. It sounds just exactly like Wolfman Jac

    Hey, everyone. The pollen has been bad here at the green retreat. We could use some rain. Our creek is dry. My wife and I returned home from our renovation efforts before dark and decided we had enough juice left in our aged veins to walk down the hill to our creek. It is now a creek in name only. There are a couple of places where the creek bottom is damp, but no water. Much to my surprise there was a multitude of tracks in the mud of the creek. Raccoon and deer tracks were plentiful and there was a track that appeared to be that of a dog. Then there was something much bigger and very indistinct. I won't conjecture on that one. There was an old rotten log which had been clawed at and the leaves drifted in along its sides had been rooted around considerably. I suspect a bear was the culprit, though I saw no tracks. A wild boar  could have disturbed the leaves but The clawing was certainly done by something else.     Working on the old house for the last 4 or 5 weeks has helped

    Hey, everyone. I bought a game this morning which you may enjoy, if you like word games. It is called Letterbox and it cost $1.99.     This game has superb graphics and animations. In addition, I think the developers have been reading my blog because they actually put explosions in this game to make it more palatable with the shooter crowd. Here's the recipe.     There is a tower of blocks, with each block bearing a letter. The 3D feature insures that there is depth, as well as height and width, giving several layers of blocks which can be accessed by spinning the tower with your finger of choice. Ha, ha.      You must spell out words by tapping letters, of course. You can spell them across, down, up, diagonally, and can even wrap around to another side of the tower by means of spinning the tower. You must use at least three letters per word, which challenges my vocabulary. Over the course of the game I endeavored to spell words like 'see', 'spot', and '

    Hey, everyone. I wanted to show you a picture of the Lizard Dude from Mass Effect, Infiltrator . As you can see, he is as ugly as a mud fence. If you follow the blog, you know that this bully beat me like a rented mule before my pard, Trevor, came along and annihilated him. Then there was peace on the Ponderosa, as we western fans like to say. I have currently beat a couple of more levels of this fun game. I am close to the finish and eagerly await my reunion with Inalli, my love interest on this rather warlike planet.      Let me show a little love to the puzzlers among you . My wife, Carley, is playing a free game she likes. They call this one GraviMaze. The goal of this game is simple, yet gets increasingly harder to fulfill. There are a series of square grids. You can swipe with your finger and rotate the grid. By doing this, you cause gravity to pull an icon along a corridor. The object is to collect gold coins by sliding across them and reach an exit, after all objects are

    Hey, everyone. Did you miss me? I've been working very hard, which is contrary to my nature. Ha, ha. Glad to be back with you tonight.     Is this a weird tree, or what? The funny thing about this tree is that it resides next to a mountain river. It is actually still alive. Kayakers like the whitewater in the area and back-packers like the trails. This tree doubtless enjoys the ability to have a nice long drink of water at any time, but when the river floods, the dirt is washed away from its roots. When I saw it, I was reminded of a proverb. Something about a tree planted by the water, bringing forth its fruit in season. There is a starkness about this tree which I find unsettling. We are not meant to see this fully into a tree's privates, are we?     This is like famous people. The fame lays bare things that should not be laid bare. All the hidden frailties, quirks and faults. Many people shy away from fame and even success because they are private people.      My good

    Hey, everyone. There is a new front in the war between consumers and marketers. Developers on IOS are now putting out updates which contain ads for other games. Sometimes there are updates for games which you have bought and the update sneaks in a few ads for non-game stuff, like insurance. This will soon have people leery of downloading updates. I hate to retype my earlier posts on disreputable practices in the app store, such as Apple Plays Violin While App Store Burns . So I will not state any particular games which are involved in this, but will hope that Apple will continue to deal with the evolution of the young environment of IOS gaming. I noticed that they are currently dealing with a problem which I had mentioned; that of games which inserted a line of code which changed your settings to allow the developers to open the 'notifications' window in a consumer's device. Hats off to Apple for these actions.      On a more pleasant note, lets talk about playing gam