Filipino Programmer | Philippines

While spending 3 long days of no work, I have looked into the web for some puzzles and trivia dealing with dominant brain puzzles and informations. Accidentally I found an article about Bill Gates, and his story about the game Petals Around the Rose. Unfortunately Bill, solved this game longer than I tried the game myself. Okay so you might be thinking how the games work, well the games need a regular dice, it does not matter how many but, the game usually uses 5 dice. The rules are simple :

1. The name of the game is Petals Around the Rose, and the name is significant.
2. The roller will tell you how many petals are around the rose based on the dice roll results
3. If you have figured out the answer for 5 or more consecutive rolls, it is understood that you have solved the puzzle, and you should not tell the answer to anybody.

I have created a simple PHP script which emulates the games, if you are up to the challenge play Petals Around the Rose

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WARNING!
A current study shows that playing this game would decrease productivity 100%! Many people have been fired by their boss as we speak. You have been warned!

Naaahhh!!! Whatever! From Warcraft’s customized maps tower defense style of gaming have been gaining popularity. Ok so for those who have not yet been playing tower defense games, here is a quick explanation on how the game works. The game will be played either by a single player or more, there will be a entrance point and an exit point for creeps. You will begin on a fixed number of lives, each creeps that would be able to exit through the exit point would decrease your lives. You need to create a defense of towers, to prevent the creeps from exiting, each creeps killed will earn you gold points to be able to build more towers. As the game progresses a more powerful type of tower could be build. If you loose your lives to zero the game ends, but if you survive the whole level you win!

So that is the basic rule of the game. I have been playing this kind of game on Warcraft and I have been surprised that this kind of game had been one by one appearing on Flash based type of game with different varieties. Here are the following Flash based Tower Defense sites I have been playing.

Flash Circle TD
This type of tower defense is a little bit different, instead of having an exit point, creeps will go on circle throughout the maze, but if you let 100 creeps to accumulate on the maze, the game ends. This puts a level of stress on the element of strategy which I find interesting and addicting. I had been playing on this game for quite sometime. From 10 being the highest I rate this game 7 emphasizing on the gameplay’s originality.

Flash Element TD
A normal type of tower defense game, but with a few changes. Every 7th level you will be given a wood point to learn 3 types of research (Water, Earth, Fire). Each research will enable you to build element type of towers. You also can spend gold to lengthen your lives. This flash game is based on Element TD map from Warcraft III. What I do not like on this is you have to start each level and the games will pause each level, to give you time to build your defenses, this game is quite easy for me and did not gave any challenge at all. Controls for building and upgrading is quite confusing since upgraded towers are the same as not upgraded towers, you need to click on the tower you want to build everytime. Building of towers does not consume time, thus making the game much more easier to finish.
From 10 being the highest I rate this game 5 for the worst game controls.

Desktop Tower Defense
This game does not have a maze at all, the game starts with a big empty transparent box having and entrance point on NORTH and WEST sides and exit points on EAST and SOUTH side. You need to build a maze of towers to defend among the creeps. This game uses a pencil-drawn design, making the game light but hard. This game takes a lot of time, beating the Normal mode in 3 hours, Hard mode in 24 hours. And 100 Levels in 7 hours. Damn and there are lots of different modes which caters to all kinds of gamers. Sound is a bit terrible but in all, the game had a challenging levels, such as Spawn, Dark and Flying creeps. Upgrading towers slows down as you upgrade to a higher level. Selling towers will also slow down as you sell more towers in game. From 10 being the highest I rate this game 9 for depth difficulty and easy to use game controls.

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Notpron is a web based riddle website which uses images, sound, google’s adsense search and html code to provide the hardest riddle available on the net today.Basically the focus of the game is to advance to the next level by solving the current level riddle. Hints are available everywhere on the page, you just need to be sharp and fast to recognize clues hidden on each levels. A warning though to be able to advance on level 6 onwards I do believe that some technical knowledge on computer especially on HTML, File handling, and Sound Editing. So far I have cleared level 1-10, and I will tell you it is very hard, from level 5 - 10 the riddles is insanely hard and took me 2-3 hours to clear a single level.

Player Quotes:
“This is possibly the greatest “game” I have ever played in my life!”

“You don’t have to be a computer nerd to get through the levels.
Just gotta be a quick learner and more importantly, willing to learn.”

Current Level Completed: 13 (updated 06/15/2007)
(I will update this and will create a spoiler page for levels I already completed)

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