Tuesday 28 May 2013

Dead! Bookworm Adventures Vol. 2

Well, this is embarrassing.
Bookworm Adventures is a game for children. It's a fun way to practice your spelling from Popcap, who are widely known for their approachable, fun, and ultimately fairly easy games. You play 'Lex', a bookworm who is sucked inside the world of books and has to battle his way out by spelling the longest words you can from a four by four grid of random letters. There is no time limit and potions are given out liberally. Each opponent you defeat replenishes your health to full.
I have just been beaten by a boss less than half way through the game.

Luckily, before that I busted out some huge words and had lots and lots of fun. Bookworm Adventures is one of those games that people would be tempted to call a 'secret pleasure' or something, but in my case there's no secrecy about it, I love it! It's great! It appeals directly to my 'you are the best at spelling' node which always gives me a warm sense of primary school era pleasure.
The game is basically Boggle but with certain letters causing things like poisoning or burning and so on. It's full of little literary jokes and references and a healthy dose of puns.

Here's my absolute favourite moment in this playthrough:


An astonishing 'Ejaculation' helped me decimate this pig.

Other highlights include mrbenn turning up:


Here's my top words from the first 'chapter':


Drink them in! Quotidian! Engorges! Aquiline! Each one causing massive damage and also filling me with pride. Although to be honest the fact that it allowed 'Creatives' did make me feel a bit dirty.

Alongside 'Ejaculation' and 'Engorges', I also managed the following cheeky words:




And I have to agree with Lex that Orgies, Panty and Plums are indeed, nice.

Finally some words which aren't words, allegedly (although Gordon Freeman might disagree)



Ultimately though I was defeated by my own caution. I came up against a boss who had a shield which reflected damage. While he had it equipped I only used three letter words to minimise the reflected damage, but this was foolish, as the reflection only did half a heart of damage back no matter how long your word was...
By the time I'd worked this out I'd wasted 6 goes on three letter words and used up all my potions.

So my one surefire chance at a completion is down the toilet (a word which I used twice to good effect).

On to Braid it is then (urgh).

Stats:

Name - Cromwell Liverduck
Pride - Massively boosted
Fall - Came just after the pride
Ejaculation - Astonishing

3 comments:

  1. Cheer up bro, Antlions are totally real!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antlion

    "This article is about the [basically disappointing] insect. For the [difficult, upsetting] alien creature in the computer game Half-Life 2, see Creatures in the Half-Life series#Antlion."

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