Essential Sudoku: 100%!

100%, that is, on the first set of 100. I'm now 12.6% through the entire game. I have so far come across one puzzle which I think was a bit ambiguous in one area - I think there could have been two solutions depending on how you solved a block of six - it could have looked like a S or a Z and would have still been correct. I could be wrong, though.

It's a bit boring to read about, though.

Canis Canem Edit: greasy burgers

40% through, and I've just started chapter four. If anything the game's a little easier now, since most of the groups around the school have 100% respect for me, and so don't try to beat me up all the time. It's only the athletes that cause me hassle.

I've also finished photography classes, and have only one workshop class still to go. I've tried it a few times and filed, and unfortunately it feels like it was the game's fault for not picking up my inputs correctly which makes it more frustrating.

Essential Sudoku: not essential

Travelling home on Saturday night after Matt's Eurovision party (at which, unlike the rest of the world, Serbia didn't win - because their song was rubbish), I opened up the DS to carry on with my picross games. I completed the one I was on, number 93, and then decided to try a sudoku puzzle instead - so I quit out of the picture puzzle section.

"The data is unreadable or corrupted. All save data will be deleted."




Luckily I enjoy these puzzles, and have now redone the first 40-odd (quite quickly, since I've worked out a few new techniques to use) and done around 20 in the second set of 100. But still.

Essential Sudoku: a bigger challenge

Rather worryingly, I've now read that there are not just 200 picross puzzles, but 1000 of them.

I've done 69.

Essential Sudoku: not sudoku

The game's called Essential Sudoku, but the first item on the menu isn't the number puzzle, but the picture puzzle. This is the first time I've played picross, and I don't know why it's taken me so long, because this is brilliant.

The idea behind picross is that you have to work out which spaces are coloured and which are not, having been told the pattern that occurs in each row and column. For example, you'll be told that in a row there's a line of five blacks, then a red, then two blues. There may, however, be gaps between these blocks - and that's what you've got to work out.

Over the weekend I've played loads of this, which is rather surprising given that I've not really had that much free time. I'm hoping that the game itself wears the battery of the DS down quickly, since I've had the DS die on me twice - both times at around 3am. It's horribly addictive. There appear to be 200 puzzles, and I've done around 45 so far - and they're getting harder - so it should last me a few weeks at least. Luckily, there's another picross game coming out for the DS on Friday ...

Oh, and I've completed two of the sudoku puzzles. Two.

Games by the coast

Over the back holiday, I went down to the coast with Matt, Gaby and Andrew, for a break away from London. We walked along the beach; we visited a vineyard; but most importantly, we played games.

We would have played Wii Sports, but when I opened the box I realised that it was still in my parents' Wii. Horror. We had plenty to get on with, though.

We played Buzz!: the BIG Quiz and Buzz!: the Sports Quiz. I did better on the former, due in no small part to my lack of sports knowledge. Quite a fun game, though the presentation started to grate after a bit. Mr Buzz sounded very little like Jason Donovan.

We played Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. I pointed out the three or four minigames worth playing. We were in hysterics at the hurdles.

We played Wii Play. Andrew beat Matt quite comprehensively at pool.

We played Singstar. Oh, did we play Singstar. Waking up on Monday morning, I could barely manage a whisper. We did get Matt singing. We got Andrew singing to pop songs that he claimed he'd never heard. He claimed to have never heard "I Think We're Alone Now". That was the point that we knew he was fibbing. Gaby and I did some fabulous duets. I think we were both out of key to the same extent. We drank wine and whisky - not together, obviously.

We played Guitar Hero the next morning. I really am quite rubbish.

Pokémon Sapphire: aimless wandering again

My main team's all at around level 40 or just above now, and I very much doubt that's good enough to face the Elite Four. So instead I've been exploring, clearing the sea routes of trainers and so on. Then I went around the map to the daycare centre, to see how the poochyena I'd left there was getting on. It had gone up to level 20, so I took it out and battled with it to level it up once more so it would evolve. Which it did.

I really don't know what to do now. I don't want to go to the Elite Four and fail over and over again like I did in LeafGreen. But it's a bit dull with no aim. I did think of trying out the pokémon contests, but I can never do very well at those. I really don't understand what goes on, and I think that pokémon who are good for the battles may not be the best for the contests.

I get the feeling that there's loads around to do - I've heard about breeding, for a start - but really I'm going to have to go and get stuck again, aren't I?

Pokémon Sapphire: what's a shell bell?

I finally caught a relicanth, and then my adventures took me to a cave just off of Route 125. Inside was a man who told me that if I found four salts and four bells in the cave, he'd make me something. So I went exploring. All through the cave were staircases that started halfway up the cliff face, and I couldn't find any way of getting to them. I looked around and found four salt piles, and a few other goodies, but I was sure I'd missed something since there was no way of getting to the blue ball things (which I assumed were the shells). I explored loads, made more annoying by the frequency of pokémon attacks.

In the end, after a long time of looking, I gave up and went back out of the cave. And then I had a change of heart, and went back in to check the old man wouldn't just accept the salt. For some reason the cave was flooded. I have no idea why.

But this meant I could just walk up the top staircases and collect the shells, and on giving them to the old man he made me a shell bell. Whatever one of those is.

Canis Canem Edit: tasks in town

I'm now doing tasks in and around the town, not confined to the school. Since I've now completed art, English, chemistry and gym, I get two days off of lessons and then the third day has both photography and workshop in it. Workshop's hard. The problem is that I'm always losing track of which day it is, so have to wait around to see if I should have lessons before leaving - reducing my time in town. It was worse before I completed English, because then I had to wait until after lunch ...

Anyway, the posh kids don't like me, and all the missions I'm doing at the moment seem designed to piss them off. Interesting survival technique. On the other hand, the posh girl does like me, and she's almost as nice as the redhead. I managed to get them to have a catfight over me by snogging them both in turn in front of each other. Much fun.

Singstar: we'll get Matt playing this

After all, I need someone to be worse than me. And that takes some doing.