Reah’s Crib

Did you know I used to play Ragnarok Online? It is an multiplayer online role-playing game from South Korea. Yeah, I’ve been addicted to it in 2005 that even in my dreams I was playing Ragnarok. One time, I answered a phone call while I was half asleep. The phone was ringing just right above my head, so I grabbed it, and said hello as usual. However, I mumbled about ragnarok items after. Only when my caller asked me “What are you talking about Reah? What’s a muffler?” that I got back to my senses.

Anyway, while waiting in Farm Town’s marketplace last week, I remembered the emoticons in Ragnarok Online. Especially the crying emoticon. It would be fun if farmers in Farm Town could show a crying emoticon if they are pleading for a job, or a thanks emoticon when they get hired.

Ragnarok Online Emoticons

For me, emoticons was one of the best things in Ragnarok aside from the real game. So that players could  socialize better with other players. Here’s some videos I found in YouTube showing Ragnarok players communicating with emoticons, or at least reacting with emoticons.

Adding this kind of animation in Farm Town though may add to the bandwidth being used in the game, but I still hope Farm Town developers are considering such feature in the future. And oh, letting the farmer/avatar  sit too would be cool.

For the meantime, I will use the Ragnarok Emoticons app to bug my friends in Facebook.

The initial land’s size in Farm Town is 12 x 12. This is enough land when you are starting the game, but as you reach higher levels where more experience points are needed to level up, 12 x 12 land size may not help you anymore. Instead, you may want to upgrade your land so you have more space to plow fields, plant crops, and put new decorations on your farm.

But you can only start upgrading your land when you have reached level 15.  So it is best to know while you are at a lower level than 15 how much it costs to upgrade your land, so you can save coins for it. Here’s the sizes and costs.

• Level 15 – 14 x 14 size – 20,000 coins
• Level 17 – 16 x 16 size – 25,000 coins
• Level 19 –  18 x 18 size – 30,000 coins
• Level 21 – 20 x 20 size – 35,000 coins
• Level 23 – 22 x 22 size – 40,000 coins
• Level 25 – 24 x 24 size – 80,000 coins

The 24 x 24 is the most expensive one. You can decide to buy it at a later time if you still don’t have enough coins. Since you cannot skip any land size, you have to buy it all. Example, you cannot upgrade to 22 x 22 if you still haven’t bought 18 x 18. The total cost of all the upgrade is 230,000 coins.

For me, the cost doesn’t matter. It is worth it, since you can plant more crops if you have a bigger land. Hence, earn more coins. That was my goal when I started playing the game–to upgrade my land as soon as possible, and save a lot of coins after I’ve got the biggest land size.

By the way, do you know where and how you can upgrade your land?

Well, you can upgrade it by going to the Realtor’s Office. Just click the map icon on your Farm Town screen. A window will pop up, and there are icons that represents the several places you can go to. Choose the Realtor’s Office. Once you are in the office, another window pops up which shows the land you can purchase and how much it is. Just click the buy button on the land size you want to buy, and changes will be made in your farm a few seconds after that.

You might have tried playing Typing Maniac in Facebook but your computer might not be able to support the Flash game, or it will not load. I have exeprienced that same problem with my old desktop computer. I have upgraded my flash but my screen still sometimes freezes because of the low specs of my desktop. I got frustrated with it so I ended up playing the game again with the laptop.

I want to use the keyboard on my desktop though in typing games, so I tried to find other typing games in Facebook that I could play with my old desktop. And I found some.

1. Typing Monster – This App has an old-school design, incomparable to Typing Maniac. The good thing about it though is you are going to type a paragraph, which combines uppercase letters and punctiation marks, while numbers are in a bomb. You should type the numbers as soon as they appear. Of course if the bomb explodes you will lose one life. You have 5 lives to spare, and if all are used up, the game is over.
2. Typing Race – As name implies it is a race on typing, LIVE. On your first time playing, you will choose a car, and your country. Then choose whom would you like to race with: with your friends or with random people in Facebook playing the game at that time. This is a good game to see for yourself how fast you can type against other people in 30 seconds. You will see your typing speed at the end of the game.
3. Typing Speed – This is just a simple and short game. In 30 seconds of typing  you can find out what is your typing speed and accuracy rate. Typing Maniac does not compute your typing speed, so play this game if you want to find out.
4. The Typing of the Ghosts – Ghosts appear together with the words you have to type. The ghosts get bigger and bigger, so you type the words, or numbers as fast as you can. If not, the ghost will snatch your life. You have 5 lives to spare in this game too.
5. pa-Ching Typing Game – See how fast you can type by typing three sentences or 10 sentences. That’s it. I would say that the goal of the developer of this app is just to gain money in Adsense.

Having able to play these five typing games, I realized that Typing Maniac is the best among all of the typing games in Facebook.

Yeah, I have a lot of free time lately that I can even play a lot of Facebook Apps and computer games. Aside from Farm Town and Mahjong Titans, I am also into Typing Maniac in Facebook.

To type fast and accurate is one of the skills I have been trying to perfect eversince I got my own computer. I used to practice with Typing games that I downloaded for free online. So when I saw one of my Facebook friends news feed saying she was playing Typing Maniac, I was excited to try the game.

Typing Maniac has a cool game interface, and just like othe typing games, the ability to type fast and accurate will help you advance in the game, and get high scores of course.

The speed goes faster, and words get longer when level increases, but you can get through this challenge with the help of the bonus tiles: Fire, Ice, Slow, and Wind. You can get the bonus tiles by typing the words in the colored tiles which are red, blue, yellow, and purple. Then the bonus tiles pile up on the right column after you got the words correctly on the colored tiles.

Since you can only keep up to 6 bonus tiles while playing, it is best that you strategize when to use your bonus tiles, and what tiles to keep. To use a bonus tile, you have to type the word.

• Type fire if you want to burn all the tiles.
• Type ice to freeze the tiles
• Type slow, so that the speed slows down
• Type wind, if you want to make your error percentage back to 0%, so you could play the game longer

Since the game will be over once you have a lot of misses or 100% error percentage. it is best you have stock up in bonus tiles when you reach the higher levels.

Aside from bonus tiles, you might also have noticed the dark tiles. You have to get the word right on this tile on your first try or else, the speed will increase.

Strategy on Playing Typing Maniac

My strategy in playing depends on what special tiles I get while I level up, but I make sure I have Slow and Wind tiles so I can advance. I also to perfect the scores on the first levels, up to level 10. If I don’t have any error in typing, the bonus points I get on these levels help me make my score high. If I miss to perfect a level I make sure I at least have perfected one of the higher levels. The bonus points are bigger at this point. When I want to do this, I should plan well what bonus tiles to keep and use.

So far, my highest score is 380,344 at Level 19 679,666 at level 26 830,700 at Level 29. The top 1 one on my friend’s list got 921, 680 in Level 27. I am not sure what he did to reach that score. He’s just a random friend though so I could not really ask if he is cheating or not. Could you cheat in this game? Maybe he is really just fast typer, and good at using his power-up tiles.

With six new crops laid out today in Farm Town, the Facebook App has become even more exciting. For sure, you already have seen these  crops when you clicked on the store earlier this day. These are cotton, pineapple, blueberry, pepper, carrot, and raspberry.

Cotton is a 4-day crop, but cheaper than pumpkin. Pineapple and blueberry are 3-day crops, while pepper and carrot can be harvested in 2 days. The best among these new crops though is the raspberry, which can be harvested in 2 hours, lesser hours than if you have harvested grapes. As long as you have time to tend it, raspberry had replaced grapes as the top crop to plant if you want to gain experience points faster in Farm Town.

It could have been better if one of the new crops is an 8-hour or 10-hour crop.

Hire to Plow

The six new crops isn’t just the big news today in Farm Town. You might even consider this as the greatest enhancement of the game on this latest update. You can now hire farmers to plow for you! That is really awesome if you are keeping a big farm, since plowing at that stage tends to become a boring task.

When you hire other farmers, you spend less than what you could have spent if you have plowed the fields by yourself. Instead of 20 coins, you will spend either 10 coins or 15 coins. This depends if you are neighbors or not. The farmer plowing your field will get coins too: 5 coins if you are both strangers, and (someone told me that you get) 10 coins if he is a neighbor you hired to plow.

Okay now, you want someone to plow at your farm, but what about experience point? Will you lose it? A resounding no! You will still get 1 xp, and the farmer you hired to plow will also get one experience point per field plowed. So it’s a good deal for both of you. You might also consider getting hired to plow so you could gain experience points faster.

Hiring someone to plow at your farm is just like hiring someone to harvest. You just click on the player’s avatar, and click Hire to plow at your farm. Once he is in your farm he can only plow on fields that are previously harvested or on fields with crops that have gone to waste. He cannot plow on the green fields.

P.S.

When you hire someone to plow, it is best you wait until he is done plowing before you plant your crops. It’s hard to get over the ’saving’ feature. You could try, but it would just frustrate you.

One of the mysteries Farm Town developers left in their App is the question, what levels are required to get the other crops. When you go to the store as a newbie or in Level 1, the crops you can only purchase are grapes, tomato, rice, corn, and potato. Then the other crops are locked. When you go harvest somebody else’s farm, and you would see their crops, especially pumpkins, you would wonder when will you be able to plant those crops too.

Anyway, I was fortunate that I was able to level up quickly in one week and had unlocked all crops in 8 days. So below, I listed the levels and what crops get unlocked when you reach them.

The costs of the crops are also listed according to the: price when you buy them / price when you harvest the crops yourself and sell them / price when you harvest them, put the crops in the storage first, and sell them/ price when someone else harvests the crops for you and  you sell them in the marketplace.

Level 1

• Grapes – buy for 20 coins /sell for 50 coins, 56 coins, OR 67 coins
• Tomato – buy for 50 coins / sell for 126 coins, 140 coins, OR 168 coins
• Rice – buy for 80 coins / sell for 171 coins, 190 coins, OR 228 coins
• Corn – buy for 130 coins / sell for 257 coins, 285 coins, OR 342 coins
• Potato – buy for 40 coins / sell for 89 coins, 99 coins, OR 119 coins

Level 2

• Strawberry –  buy for 30 coins /sell for 77 coins, 85 coins, OR 102 coins

Level 6

• Wheat – buy for 80 coins /sell for 162 coins, 180 coins, OR 216 coins

Level 8

• Sunflower – buy for 115 coins /sell for 249 coins, 277 coins, OR 332 coins

Level 10

• Coffee – buy for 150 coins /sell for 268 coins, 298 coins, OR 358 coins

Level 13

• Watermelon – buy for 35 coins /sell for 83 coins, 92 coins, OR 110 coins

Level 16

• Cabbage – buy for 45 coins /sell for 96 coins, 107 coins, OR 128 coins

Level 19

• Peas – buy for 90 coins /sell for 182  coins, 202 coins, OR 242 coins

Level 22

• Onions – buy for 170 coins /sell for 304 coins, 338 coins, OR 406 coins

Level 25

• Pumpkin – buy for 200 coins /sell for 356 coins, 396 coins, OR 475 coins

P.S.

Please leave in the comment section anything you know that is not accurate on the numbers I listed above. I got the prices when-you-sell the-crops from this Facebook group. Also, there might be updatesin Farm Town that would change the prices. But whatever it is, it is clear you will earn more when someone else’s harvest the crops for you and you sell them to the marketplace, and you will earn less if you harvest the crops yourself and sell them directly without placing them first in the storage.

After being bored with Mahjong Titans, I decided to try another App in Facebook, the Farm Town. I got interested with Farm Town after seeing a photo of my friend’s farm. I was amazed how a barren land could turned out pretty after few times playing the game. Making a farm online like that was like building my own dream farm.

Despite the low coins when I started the game, I was not discouraged to try the App. Besides games like this really start with almost nothing. I just have to start playing it and I will surely advance.

On my first day, I planted a few grapes, added another App to get free coins, and added my Facebook friends, who are already playing, as my neighbors. I was fortunate I had a lot of friends playing because I could visit their farms and earn coins by working on their farms like weeding. Once I had good amount of coins, I started planting more grapes.

But it was not only the coins from working on my friends’ farms that helped me to advance quickly in the game. I was able to get big jobs from other farmers in the Inn, and Realty. Yeah, me as a newbie got impatient in the Marketplace I went to. So I decided to try the Inn and Realtor without knowing I can just click the Marketplace icon again to be in a different market, and if lucky got a job.

After a few minutes I became determined to upgrade my land to the biggest as soon as possible, so that I could plant more crops, and in return earn more coins, and in return create my beautiful dream farm. Seems impossible eh, but I made it. How?

• I planted and harvested grapes mostly to get more experience points.
• I removed the spaces between fields, so I could make more fields.
• I planned to make my farm as simple as possible. Less expenses on decorations like buildings and fences and trees.
• When in the marketplace, I made sure I didn’t sound begging for work.
• Sent messages to my friends who had crops ready to be harvested if I could harvest for them, and good enough one of them replied and let me harvest his pumpkins!
• I went to the discussion board to look for a good resource and overview of the game, and I did. This one.
• Whenever I was hired by another farmer, I tried to make a conversation so we could be friends and so he could hire me again next time he has new crops ready for harvest.

So these were my strategies. I started playing in the afternoon of June 22nd, and seven days after I hit level 24, and got the second to the biggest land. I was actually aiming for level 25 so I could get the biggest land, but I wasn’t able to. But level 24 was still a good level to hit in just one week.

Now, I am in level 25, already got the biggest farm, but my goal now has changed. I am not aiming to level up quickly but to save more money so I can create a pretty farm. My strategy has changed too. I won’t plant grapes anymore (or for the meantime) since it’s kinda hard to tend on a big farm. I decided to just plant pumpkins, onions, and peas so I can rest. The first week was tiring anyway. In fact, there were nights on my first week  that I got up in the middle of the night to harvest my grapes. lol.

Here are some screenshots of my farm on Day 2, Day 5, and Day 7.

I have been figuring out how to get more points in Mahjong Titans. It’s the computer game I told you about in one of my previous posts. I got hooked to it a few weeks ago, and stopped playing last week. Yet, yesterday morning, I decided to play again, to improve my statistics.

According to the help section, the way you can improve your score in this game is to get pairs from the same class, one after the other. I was doing this before but I didn’t think my score got better.

However, I realized that the way I could get more bonus points is that I should try to find all the pairs I could find in the same class until I could not find any pair of that class exposed, then that’s the time I should start finding pairs from another class until I could not find any pair again. This cycle will go on until I could find all the pairs in the board.

There are some instances though that I would not eliminate all pairs especially if there are still a lot of tiles of the same class not exposed. I would just eliminate those tiles I need to eliminate first (because the tile it hides is the one I need the most. It could be a match to another tile at the very far side of the layout).

After doing this strategy, I noticed how fast I could solve most of the puzzles, and yes, my score got better. (Though there are still a lot I could not win.) So far my highest score is 769 points in the cat layout. I am still struggling in the Dragon layout, but my scores in Spider and Fortress aren’t that bad. While in winning percentages, my numbers in Spider and Fortress layouts aren’t that good compare to how I am doing in Crab layout which has 89% winning percentage. Nice eh?

Anyway, here are the screenshots of my scores (so far). (Note: The name on the title bar on the screenshot says Chris though, because the Vista laptop I am using is not mine. But I am the only one playing Mahjong Titans in this laptop. )

On Turtle Layout

On Dragon Layout

On Cat Layout

On Fortress Layout

On Crab Layout

On Spider Layout

Recently, I got hooked in Mahjong Titans, a computer game readily installed in a Windows Vista Home Premium computer / laptop. For the first few minutes playing it, I confused it with the real Mahjong my uncle got addicted to. I found out that it wasn’t that game.

Mahjong Titans is a solitaire game  like the Freecell game, but instead of cards it uses Mahjong tiles. Your goal is to be able to find a pair of identical tiles, until all 144 tiles are paired, or a total of 72 pairs. You may think it is easy, but only the tiles on top, on the right and left are movable, and those under or in between are locked up. You have to remove first the movable tiles, before you can exposed the locked tiles.

By default, Mahjong Titans is using the traditional tiles of Mahjong, but you can also customize its look or tile set with:

• Primary color tiles – These are actually traditional tiles with just black, yellow, blue, green, red, and pink as backgrounds of the images instead of white.
• Pastel Tiles – The image background has pastel colors of course, but the images are designed for kids or to players who are young at heart. The images in traditional tiles are replaced with stars, moon, rabbit, flowers, among other things.
• Large Print Tiles – So you could easily see the images. This is my favorite tile set.

Aside from changing the tile set, you could also change the overall background with seagrass mat, green felt, brown felt, red felt, and cherry blossom.

What I like most about this game is that the level of difficulty on playing depends on what tile layout you choose. Most of the time, you need a different strategy on each of the layout. And sometimes, it becomes tricky too, that you end up losing when you use the same strategy you used in your previous game (in same layout). The layouts to choose from are: Turtle, Dragon, Cat, Fortress, Crab, and Spider.

Your score depends on how fast you find pairs. Bonus points would help you improve your Mahjong Titans scores. These extra points are achieved when you free up pairs in the same class one after the other. Bigger bonus points if you have the opportunity of finding pairs on the same class. Less score points if you use the hint feature most of the time. You can undo some moves though.

(Update: I tried to find pairs in the same class quickly. I found some of the points aren’t that much high to be considered bonus points. Now I still wonder how Mahjong Titans scoring really works aside from trying to be quick in matching.)

(Another update: I noticed how low my scores are even if I quickly solve the board, so I was thinking that time is not a factor for scoring. I just didn’t edit my article yet because I was still studying the scores closely while playing the game, to see any patterns on the scoring. UNTIL, someone commented below and gave me a link to how the scoring really works in the game. This is a web page I had not found before, and would be testing it later the day.)

On the bottom left side of the screen, it tells you how much available matches are still laid out or exposed on the game board. The most frustrating part is seeing just one match left when there are still a lot of tiles left. That’s more likely you are losing the game. In fortunate times though, that one last match may make you win depends on what tile it frees.

If you lose the game, you have an option to restart it but of course lose points in your game statistics. The good (bad) thing with restarting the same game several times  is that you end up memorizing where the tiles are, which for me is a kind of cheating. But I do this sometimes, especially when I wonder why I lost.

Animations and sounds make this game more interesting as well, and the ability to save the game to play it later is also a big plus.

For 45 days now, I have been addicted to this awesome game in Facebook called Hammerfall. It take a few minutes before I got the idea that I have to complete quests so I can advance to the other parts of the map, and of course to level up. Completing quests is a fun task for me that’s why I easily got hook. Anyway, here are the things that I did and am doing to advance in the game. As I am writing this I am at level 126.

Completing Quests

Items needed in the quests are mostly near the area where you need it. It’s either you have to go back or move forward then go back. There are also instances that the items you need are in the hidden paths, or from monsters that don’t reveal their drops.

If for instance you can’t figure out where to get the item needed for a quest, just ask yourself if you have completed every quests to where you have been. There’s some tricky quests though, where you can’t find the item/s, even when you go back and check nearby monsters. At times like this, what I just did was move forward and forward to open new places and check if the items needed are there. Once I found them, I just go back when I have a complete stamina recharge.

Read the Sentences/Phrases

Everytime you have completed a quest or killed a monster for the first time, make sure you have read what it/the monster/the person has said. Some of it gives you clues on what to do next. This is especially helpful when you are solving puzzles in the game.

Power / Toughness / Max Stamina / Max Energy / Max Health

You can’t edit your stats, so make sure you are putting your level-up points in the right place, according to your priority.

On the early part of the game, my first priority is adding points in stamina, then energy, and health. I decided first how much maximum stamina is enough for me to play the game better. Since only one stamina point is regenerated every five minutes, I am online most of the time, sleep for about 5 hours, I decided to have a maximum stamina of 60. I added the points on stamina gradually, making sure I have decent max health and energy too. But once I got the guide boots 2x stamina, I increased my goal to about 72 or 80 max stamina.

For other players, their priority is adding points for max health/energy since a higher maximum health/energy will keep them from eating/drinking regenerating items while fighting monsters. The deciding factors will be the costs of sprites or bread, and how much are lost while fighting.

Adding points to Power and Toughness don’t help much, since you can easily increase your Attack and Defense by acquiring new weapons, and making sure every member of your guild has decent weapons. Although adding power and toughness points will be a great help at the latter part of the game, if almost everyone have acquired the maximum number of guild members and have all the best weapons in the game.

Adding Guild Members

I invited my friends to play the game. I also checked the Legends page and randomly add people from there to be my friends, then I invited them to be part of my guild. I also checked the Raids page, not to raid the players but to add them too as friends. Some players say, that once these people are part of your guild, you can remove them as Facebook friends, but they still stay in your guild.

Be part of the Hammerfall Group and befriend players. Then again. invite more of your friends.

Stores

Always check what each store are selling in every town.

Don’t sell drops

Selling drops will give you money to buy food/sprites/elexirs, but later in the game, you will need some of the drops, and it’s a pain in the neck to go back to those monsters and fight them again, especially if you don’t have a high stamina. Most of the drops only cost about 15 gold so not really worthy to sell them, but you can sell weapons you think you don’t need anymore. Money will be easy later in the game anyway, once you know how to farm.

Farming

This game is not a race, so, as long as you can see a quests with good deal on the item drop rate, and the drop is rare and can never be bough in stores, keep keep doing the quests. When you are satisfied with the items you acquired, move forward, you can go back anyway if you want to farm again. You can get more farming tips from the official discussion board.

Bosses

Remember to fight the bosses every 24 hours. The counting starts after you killed the boss. It’s really a 24-hour cycle.

Discussion Board

Read the discussion board for other game tips and to socialize with other players. Some players give you a link to the Hammerfall wiki site and the map of the game.