The Learning Curve: 5 Hours with AD&D: Hillsfar

Not all games are Pac-man: the kind you can just pick up and play, with simple rules and fairly easy to understand parameters and goals.  Many games, sometimes even those that seem straightforward, have a steep learning curve which requires you to spend more than just a few minutes working out the nuances of the game play.  Too often these games get dismissed as “too hard” or “too clunky” and get tossed in to the pile of games that are collected and not played.  And sadly, a lot of really good games get lost in the shuffle due to a lack of pick-up-and-playability.  I’m guilty of doing this and you are too.  This was partly the motivation behind my old “Closer Look” series in which I took a hard look, and many hours of gameplay, exploring games that might not otherwise get a second look from the casual gamer.  Through that experience, I discovered that many games are quietly very good, but due to their steep learning curve, they don’t get the play or recognition they deserve.  Uncanny X-men is a perfect example. The litmus test for a game’s accessibility seems to me to be around 5 hours of game play.  If you play a game for 5 hours and cannot get into what the game is trying to do, then chances are good the game is A.) not very good  B.) just not for you. 

So with that in mind, I have vowed to sift through my NES collection, pull out those games that I have dismissed as “terrible” and give them 5 honest hours of game play to see if I am missing out on rewarding experiences due to an unusually steep learning curve.  I will play each game for 5 hours and then write up my experience, providing an hour-by-hour breakdown of what I discovered through my play.  Then I will weigh in with whether or not I find the game to be secretly great, not very good, or probably good, but just not for me.  I would love to hear feedback from you whether you agree or disagree.  You might even point me in the right direction!

AD&D: Hillsfar

Hillsfar, as it will heretofore be referred, is a traditional Western RPG.  The kind of game where you build your own character and set out on a generally wide-open quest in an immersive world.   That fitting because this game is part of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons world, the primordial soup from which all Western RPGs spring forth, at least as far as I am aware.  I wasn’t big into the AD&D scene back in the day (shocker, I know) so I’m not as familiar with the nuts and bolts of how this game ties into that world, but I shouldn’t have to be in order to enjoy a video game, not if it has been made properly.  Hillsfar is one of two AD&D titles for the NES.  The other, Dragon Strike, is more of an RPG shooter, something you don’t see too much of.  That game has more pick-up-and-play appeal so you’ll want to check that out on your own sometime; it’s pretty good.

Hillsfar looks like the kind of game I can sink my teeth into.  I absolutely loved Wizardry and Wizardry II, and as long time readers know, I have an unnatural attachment to the Might and Magic franchise on the PC.  But for some reason, this game didn’t grab me the few times I’ve popped it into my NES and tried to delve into the adventure.  So let’s spend 5 good hours playing and see if we can find the joy hidden in the city of Hillsfar…

Hour 1:

I spent most of this hour just figuring out what the game was about and how to get started.  I created my character:  I started with a thief because traditionally with these kinds of RPG’s having a thief as your first character is a good way to get access to stuff that other classes cannot.  Thieves can pick locks, sneak into places, and otherwise interact with characters that your average Fighter or Cleric cannot.  Whether or not this was a smart choice is yet to be determined.  You don’t start the game at the city of Hillsfar, you start at your camp right outside, so to get to town you have to engage in a very tedious and mostly annoying horse ride to the city.  This horse ride will link all destinations you travel to and will be a pox upon fun.  The horse is sluggish to control and the obstacles are random and not smartly spaced.  And whatever you do, don’t under any circumstance crash so much that you lose your horse.  More on that in hour 2.  

Once you arrive in town it is best to seek out your guild house and get something to do.  It is very easy to wander around town aimlessly and get into general trouble.  As a thief you can pick any door lock and go into pretty much any building if you have the wherewithal and the talent.  Furthermore, nere-do-wells wander the streets making you bad offers that more often than not send you to the arena (you do not want to go to the arena).  Every class belongs to a guild in Hillsfar and finding the guild house will grant you access to the quests that will give your life, and  hopefully the game, some meaning.  Hillsfar is a very open RPG and does not give you a master quest to complete.  Your destiny is tied to your guild and how you choose to play.  That’s pretty cool, but can be meandering if you don’t find your guild and get to work.

So I made it to the Rogue’s Hideout, home of the Master Thief and immediately asked for something to do.  My first quest was simple: just retrieve an item from the sewers. (well, I had to find the Magic Shop and talk to a guy first, but that was relatively easy)  This moves you along to what seems to be the basic game mechanic in Hillsfar:  enter a building, find the thing you are looking for before time runs out, and escape.  If you take too long the guards show up, take all the gold you found and either toss you out or toss you into the arena.  I got tossed out a lot and sent to the arena a couple of times as well.  In the arena you have to engage in absolutely confounding hand-to-hand combat with a monster opponent and, one way or another, emerge victorious or badly beaten (meaning with 1 HP, and given that recovering HP in this game requires a miracle or lots of gold, you don’t want to lose in the arena)  By sheer luck I escaped both times the victor.

Navigating the interior of buildings is also the province of luck, as the layout is randomly selected from a set number mazes and treasures and traps are scattered throughout.  Most chests are locked and require picking.  Many contain gold, a few are empty, and some give you bizarre items like old clothes, or are helpful by revealing the location of floor traps.  Picking chests proves to be a challenge as there is a time limit and if you choose the wrong pick, it will instantly break, leaving you with a useless set of tools.  This happened to me a lot.  Once your time is up, you get a notice saying the exit can now be found (you can exit immediately upon entering through the main door, but where’s the fun in that?) and that the guards are on their way.  From that point on, it’s a mad dash to find the newly spawned staircase, avoid getting pinned by the guards, and escaping with your plunder.  Since the layouts and stair placements are random this is not an easy task.  I spent much of the first hour breaking all of my picks, getting tossed out of the sewer, and generally getting beat up.  At the end of my first hour I had 9 HP, 3 Gold, and nothing to show for my troubles.  Not the best start.

Hour 2:

This hour brought more frustration and futility.  I was able to complete my first quest: finding the rare mushroom in the sewer and getting out without capture, but I had broken 4 of my lockpicks and lost all of my gold.  Needless to say, being a thief with no lockpicks makes you a pretty useless thief, so I spent most of this hour going back into the sewer, running around trying to find unlocked chests full of gold and escaping without being caught.  This was neither easy nor fun.  It might be what passes for grinding in this game.  But eventually I collected enough gold to repair all of my picks and was able to resume questing.  The next quest took me to a Hermit’s Hut to recover another item, a phial of liquid.  After all the sewer diving I had been doing this felt much easier, however getting to the hut and back proved to be a problem.  

To get to the hut I had to go to the Trading Post, a seemingly useless waypoint between Hillsfar and many of the world’s destinations.  At the Trading Post you can buy or trade for a new horse, talk to the guy at the Trading Post, or attempt to walk to Hillsfar if you haven’t a horse or the gold with which to purchase.  That’s about it.  It’s not very helpful, as my experiences soon prove.  

During one of my forays into the Hermit’s Hut, I managed to break two picks, was caught, and tossed out with very little gold to my name.  I decided I needed to return to Hillsfar to regroup and then try another campaign into the Hut.  Whilst riding my horse to Hillsfar, I was thrown off one time too many and my horse got annoyed and left me high and dry.  The game gave me a few options of what to do next, one of which was to look for a new horse, the other was to wait for another passer-by to give me a lift to the Trading Post.  I first looked for a new horse, to no avail.  The I opted to hitch a ride to the Trading Post.  Once there I was given the standard options of buy a new horse or walk to Hillsfar.  New horses cost considerably more than the 3 Gold I was packing, so walking seemed to be the only option.  This was not a good option.  8 times I attempted to walk to Hillsfar and 8 times I was beset by bandits who took my remaining 3 gold, roughed me up and dropped me back at the useless Trading Post.  8 times.  8.  This easily took up 15 infuriating minutes of game time.  Eventually I was able to find a new horse wandering around get back to Hillsfar, but I had lost all desire to ever leave and if I never saw the Trading Post again it would be too soon.

Hour 3:

I had taken several days break from playing Hillsfar after my ill treatment on the road and it proved to hearten me a bit.  I was able to restock my supplies in the city and then liberate the phial of liquid from the Hermit’s Hut with relative ease.  I was getting better with the lockpicks, I wasn’t panicking and breaking them constantly, and I was getting out without getting caught much more successfully.  The really good news:  for recovering the phial I got 1250 gold.  Oh how to spend it?  Well, let’s just say that in Hillsfar, fortune is easy come, easy go.  All it takes is one unlucky trip in a house and you’re back to skid row.  More on that later.  For now, I was riding high with a pocket full of gold and feeling like I was getting the hang of things.  The next quest was to find an amulet.  To do this I would have to prowl about a couple of taverns and the sewer seeking information on the amulet’s whereabouts.  Eventually the search brought me to a Hut located just outside of the city.  After about 6 successful forays into the hut, I began to suspect that the amulet wasn’t there at all.  This is hard to know since the chests all appear at random and you rarely have enough time to search every single nook and cranny of the building before the guards catch you, but after multiple trips coming up empty I began to suspect that something was amiss.  However, I was pleased to see that I was able to make so many trips, pick so many locks, and escape so many times without being caught.  It felt like I was finally starting to get the hang of the basic game play mechanic.  But no amulet.  The one thing I did find repeatedly was a piece of paper encouraging me to pick the cellar door in the taverns back in the city.  So as my third hour wound down I retuned to Hillsfar once again…

Hour 4:

So I picked the cellar door and eventually found the chain the amulet was on, but no amulet.  This meant a trip back to the Rogue’s Hideout to get more information from the master.  Apparently the amulet has been carefully tucked away in the Cleric’s Guild (also known as the Shrine of Tempus).  Getting into the guild house proved to be a bigger challenge than expected.  The lock is impossible to pick as it requires a pick I do not have in my tool set.  I’ve purchased 3 different sets of lock picks and none of them contained the correct pick, so I assume it’s a pick I need to find elsewhere or my luck is just terrible.  But there’s more than one way to pick a lock and a couple of times I was able to get in by physical force. This is a dicey proposition however as the lock is trapped and 75% of the time you will spring it and take 3-5 damage.  This caused several reloads and about 15 minutes of frustration.  Nevertheless I got in several times and explored the guild.  The building layout is static, but the traps and treasures are randomly placed.  This makes definitive exploration nearly impossible.  There simply isn’t time to see all the sights and get out unmolested.  The only upside is the hefty coin pouch I got from all the plundering.  Annoyingly, six trips in and no amulet.  Experience is a great teacher though and I’m no longer taking lumps getting in.  A knock ring purchased for 250 gold got me in nearly every time and with no fuss.  It’s not all good news, though, as this process is a series of diminishing returns with most trips into the Shrine netting an average of 195 gold.  So I’m 45 minutes in and I’m in a downward spiral of losing gold, finding no amulet and sometimes dying due to traps.  I’m back to not having fun.  I feel like I’ve checked every chest and I’ve even started checking walls and dead ends for secret doors or anything that might move the game along.  This doesn't seem like the kind of game prone to such devices, but at this point anything is worth a shot.  Hour 4 wraps with no amulet, a wasted hour of dungeon crawling and me questioning if I can even take an hour 5.

Give me the damned Amulet!

Hour 5: 

25 times I went into the Cleric Guild in search of an amulet.  25 times I emerged with nothing but gold and a few healing potions.  My time with Hillsfar was winding down and I was having decreasing amounts of fun.  So I decided a new tactic was in order:  Start Over.  It might seem a little late in the game for such an idea, but if I was going to salvage anything out of the final hour, this might be the only way to do so.  So I started over, this time as a Cleric.  The thief thing wasn’t panning out so maybe a different character would bring me better luck.  And, maybe due to familiarity with the game, or maybe the Cleric path is just easier, it seemed to be a lot simpler to get going.  I rode into town and checked in at the Shrine of Tempus (they just let me in, a frustrating juxtaposition from my previous experience).  I spent most of the fifth and final hour tooling about town finishing quests with relative ease.  I even had to go to that miserable Trading Post several times to complete quests.  Dungeon diving was much easier as it seems far more chests are just open and ripe for the pilfering than in the Thief track.  I soon accumulated a sizable pile of gold and had quite a few completed quests under my belt when I came upon the Haunted House (bonus points to any RPG with a haunted house).  My next quest required me to enter the Haunted House and find a bandit who had something the guild wanted.  Sadly, upon attempting to pick the lock and enter the haunted house, the only apparent way in, I triggered a trap which exploded and killed me.  The real tragedy: I had failed to save this character at any point during my game.  Thus, my final hour of play, while much more enjoyable, was completely undermined by a failure to save.  The entire hour just wiped away by a single trap.  Frustrating.

Final Appraisal?  AD&D: Hillsfar isn’t a terrible RPG.  It’s clunky and very slow to start, but I think someone determined to sit down and learn its ins and outs will be able to find something here to enjoy.  Some of the game play mechanics are tedious and some are downright incomprehensible.  The bulk of the game is just journey to X find the Y and return with no combat or battle system unless you get tossed into the Arena.  But the world is fairly well constructed and I can see really getting in to it if you are not turned off by the obtuse mechanics.  

Learning Curve:  About 2.5 hours of solid play should get you accustomed to how the game works and what is expected of you.  It probably takes a little longer to get invested in the world of the game, but it is possible.

Will I Finish It?  Unlikely.  Most of my time in Hillsfar was spent being extremely frustrated and the brief moments of accomplishment weren’t enough to help me power through the annoying parts.  I may give Hillsfar another look in a year or so, after I get over the aggravation of this play through, but I’m not inspired to keep the adventure going at this time.

A Closer Look at Mermaid World app for iPhone and iPad

Ok, so banner ads do work.  I got roped into this new app for my iPad when I saw one such ad at the bottom of another game I was playing.  The app is called Mermaid World and while it might look like a way to distract a 6 year-old girl, it is a surprisingly fun and challenging game.  I played it for about 2 days and then Aimee got curious, now we are both addicted.

(For Updates, scroll to the bottom of the page)


Mermaid World is basically a DragonVale clone with a few added challenges and, of course, cute mermaids.  You purchase realms for your mermaids to live in and can "summon" different kinds of mermaids to populate your realms.  Mermaids have different characteristics that are described by color.  For instance, a Velvet Twist mermaid is a Red, Blue and Green mermaid.  Mermaids can have up to three characteristics, but may only have one.  Characteristics determine the type of mermaid and are static.  However, each individual mermaid has 4 criteria that determine their happiness.  Mermaids like realms that are 100% decorated, they have a special trinket item that they like, they also have a preference for and against one other kind of mermaid.  When all 4 criteria are met, the mermaid is ecstatic.  Each realm can hold up to 5 mermaids and if you can make all 5 ecstatic, then your realm will rate 3 stars.  Having 3 star realms is the goal of the game and will earn you pearls.  Pearls are the in-app purchase for Mermaid World, and like DragonVale, the in-app purchase system here is done the right way.  Pearls can be earned in game both by having 3 star realms and by sending mermaids out on explorations.

Explorations are the primary method of obtaining decor and trinkets.  As the mermaids lounge about in your realms, they earn gold that you can spend on decor or explorations (trinkets cost pearls).  The more characteristics a mermaid has the more it will cost to send them on an exploration, but there seems to be some correlation between the amounts of characteristics and the rarity of the mermaid and the items and trinkets they are able to find.

The balance of the game is spent trying to build, decorate, and populate your realms and then elevate your mermaids to ecstatic status.  Populating your realms can be achieved by summoning mermaids by spending coins or pearls, but the much cheaper and more challenging way is to "call" them.  Calling mermaids is conducted by having two mermaids sing a duet.  The siren song they sing will summon a new mermaid to your realms.  The kind of mermaid that is summoned will depend entirely upon the kinds that are singing.  For instance, if an Aqua (blue) mermaid and Coral (red) mermaid sing, they might summon other Aqua or Coral mermaids, or they might summon a Fuchsia (red/blue) mermaid!  Needless to say, the combinations can build from there.  All in all there are 51 possible mermaids to summon ranging from those that have a single characteristic to those that are more complex and have three characteristics.  There are also rare mermaids that have unique characteristics not governed by color types.  Every kind of mermaid can be summoned by "calling."

(Click Here to visit the Mermaid World Calling Guide)

Calling mermaids is done by sending two mermaids to the Singing Summit.  Once there, they will being their song and a status bar will appear telling you how long it will take them to sing the song.  Generally speaking the longer the song, the greater the rarity of the mermaid summoned.  For instance, the Tiger Lily mermaid is extremely common and takes only 5 minutes to summon, however the Silversong mermaid is fairly rare and takes 10 hours to summon.  Those times are a bit deceiving, however, because in addition to the time it takes to sing the song it takes an equal amount of time to summon them, so a Tiger Lily mermaid will take 10 full minutes to summon in full (5 for the song and 5 for the summoning) and a Silversong will take 20 hours.  It should also be noted that the cost for singing a song will be determined by the rarity of the rarest mermaid singing, not the rarity of the mermaid being summoned.  Thus an Aqua/Coral duet may only cost 135 coins to sing their song, while an Aqua/Koi duet might cost as much as 2065 coins to sing.

There are other aspects to the game play that are explained within the game.  For instance, your mermaids will go to sleep after some time if you are not actively engaged in singing or exploring.  Sleeping mermaids earn no gold, so you'll have to check in regularly to keep them up and going.

WAKE UP!

The challenge of Mermaid World is that is can be extremely difficult to get a three star realm.  When you consider that you need to meet the 4 needs of 5 different mermaids, and three of those needs are diverse and distinct, getting all of those criteria met is tough.  You can spend pearls to randomize these criteria if you chose. This can be helpful if you have a rare mermaid with undesirable criteria, however the cost to randomize is based on the rarity of the mermaid being altered.

Keeping all of these criteria in balance can be a real challenge and will require summoning multiple mermaids of the same type to fit perfectly into a specific realm.  One major tip is to remember that you only need a mermaid that likes an existing member of a realm and is not disliked by anyone in the realm.  The only time you will need a specific type of mermaid is to meet the Liked criteria of an existing mermaid and if you do it right, you'll only have to worry about that once or twice per realm.
For a more in depth look at how to create Harmonious Realms, check out our Mermaid World Guide to Harmonious Realms!

To help you summon each and every kind of mermaid out there, Aimee and I are working hard on building a Calling Guide that lists the duets that will summon each type.  This guide is a work-in-progress and will be updated regularly.  I am putting the guide on its own page to help keep the size manageable.  You can access the guide from this link or the link at the top of the page.

I never honestly expected to like, play or enjoy Mermaid World, but I gave it a try anyway. I assumed it was going to be some manner of silly dress-up paper doll game, but I am pleased to say that I am wrong.  On its face this game appears to be geared for young girls, but I think the appeal is much broader and I think that players of all ages and genders can find something fun here.  The in-app purchase aspect is minimally important to the enjoyment of the game and there is a broad social aspect as well.  The only major downfall is that the game is bit buggy (lots of crashes and minor glitches) and it requires you to be friends on Facebook in order to be friends with people in the game.  This can either severely restrict your friends list, if you have few who play games like this or are terrified of hybrid sub-sea dwellers, or it can open you up to friending all kinds of random people on the internet just to play a mermaid game.  However, the game is new and hopefully will see enough support to get regular updates and improvements.

So go give Mermaid World a try.  It's rather addictive and fun, and the mermaids are just as cute as they can be!

UPDATE!

I got the Limited Edition Winter Mermaid!  She is super-awesome!  Check the Calling Guide for details about how to add her to your list!

Also, I got a Stinger and something a little odd occurred.  I have mentioned above that the game is a bit buggy. Well Stinger's favorite trinket was a question mark, big one.  When clicked upon, the question mark identified itself as a mandolin.  I later found the mandolin (you can see it in the picture of Winter above), but the question mark icon remains.  Was this intentional?  If so, why?  Is this a bug?  What is the question mark really for?  And where is the image for the mandolin? Weird.

A Closer Look at the Legend of Zelda: Outlands

Only recently have I been enlightened to the fact that there is and has been a thriving homebrew and hack community within the world of the NES.  Long time readers know that I am a huge booster for the Atari 2600 homebrew community, so naturally, the news that the NES also enjoyed such treatment piqued my interest.  Of particular buzz is a hack that everyone hails as a masterpiece: The Legend of Zelda: Outlands.

Lauded as the natural successor to the Adventure of Link (and probably taking place somwhere around the time of Link's Awakening), Outlands takes place in the wilds that exist outside the kingdom of Hyrule.  Link has ended up there, bereft of his weapons and tools, following Zelda who had entered a portal that is the only way into or out of the Outlands.  It seems this strange territory is in terrible jeopardy.  The Thunderbird, denizen of the Great Palace in Adventure of Link, has escaped his defeat at Link's hand and has stolen the Triforce of Power!  The Thunderbird is now threatening the relative peace of the Outlands from his hidden stronghold.  Link's mission is to seek out the 8 Tetrarch Fairies, unbind the spell that seals the Thunderbird's fortress and take back the Triforce of Power.  It's not going to be easy, though.  Things in the Outlands are quite different from things in Hyrule and Link must search far and wide if he is to recover his possessions and free the Tetrarch Fairies.

EGADS!!!

LoZ: Outlands is a comprehensive hack of the original Legend of Zelda.  Pretty much everything you know has been changed.  The world map is completely different, the locations of all items, enemies and labyrinths have been changed.  Enemy, NPC, and item sprites have been given an update as well as aspects of the scenery.  The core gameplay is the same: find 8 items and a special weapon, enter the final dungeon and defeat the boss.  The structure of the adventure that accomplishes this, however, has been rather radically altered.  The biggest question, in my mind anyway when I first heard of Outlands, is: has the game been changed significantly enough to make this more than just a new coat of paint on an old horse? (and why are we painting a horse in the first place?)

Overall, I think the answer is "yes."  The hack does many, many wonderful things to create a whole new world and adventure for our friend Link.  However, there are a few areas where the hack falls short of perfection.  It is the purpose of this Closer Look to highlight the many things that LoZ: Outlands does right, and to analyze those places where it misses the mark.  As always, I am coming at this from a fairly neutral perspective.  I have a deep seated love for the original Legend of Zelda and the entire Zelda series and mythos.  I go into this game with only the knowledge provided in the exceptional instruction manual and the overwhelmingly positive buzz that has surrounded the hack in the ten years (!) since its creation.  As this is clearly the labor of love of a member of the classic gaming community, I would like to close this introduction with a hearty and heartfelt appreciation for the time and temerity that it took to make this hack.  Your hard work is greatly respected.

What the Hack Gets Right

We'll start off with the things that Outlands gets right, and there are so many cool things that this hack knocks clean out of the park.

Bagu, you say?

 Retro-fitting  If you took a big fat bucket of charm and dumped it all over this game, the label on that bucket would read "retro-fitting."  I have no idea what that means, but perhaps the most striking thing about this hack is how successfully the programmer has taken beloved aspects of subsequent Zelda offerings and integrated them in the confines of the original LoZ.  Small touches like boulders which now resemble the liftable stones from Link to the Past and the inclusion of handy gloves and ocarinas are just the tip of the iceberg.  The Outlands are populated by familiar faces such as the Gerudo and Gorons which add a layer of depth that the original LoZ only hinted at with its occasional merchant or old lady living in caves.  Of course, at that time the legendary races that populate the Zelda universe were yet to be invented (with perhaps the exclusion of the Zora or Zola...), and it is only through the magic of retro-fitting that these peoples can now take up residence in the 8-bit world.  Furthermore, the labyrinths have been given the themes and colors of what are now classic dungeon types first made famous in Ocarina of Time.  In seeking out the Tetrarch Fairies, you'll plunder a Water Labyrinth, Desert Labyrinth, Spirit Labyrinth, Forest Labyrinth, and so on.  All very cool touches that somehow reach forward in time and give the Zelda fan a twinge of nostalgia.  Another nice touch is that the programmer didn't feel the need to include everything from future Zelda stories, but just enough to firmly plant Outlands into the mythos.  Outlands is worth playing just to ferret out of all these nice touches.

The Desert Temple

Bring a ladder to the Water Temple!

Fairy by the waterfall, very cool!

Map Revision  You may have memorized the old Hyrule map backwards and forwards, for both quests, but you can throw all of that out the window.  The geography of the Outlands is radically different from the Hyrule you know.  Oh sure, there are still bushes to burn and rocks to shove around, but the layout of the land is like nothing you have seen.  As a matter of fact, when the game opens you'll only have access to about 30% of the total world, unlike in LoZ where you can pretty much go everywhere right from the start. (more on this aspect of the topography in a minute).  In the redesign there is a closer attention to creating distinct areas of the Outlands.  There is an icy maze of crystal, a shadowy desert, and foreboding red mountains to explore along with the usual assortment of forests, graveyards, and bodies of water.  As icing on the cake, the landscape is peppered with fairy statues.  The hack really excels at taking the familiar terrain of old Hyrule and turning it into its own land. The Labyrinths have also undergone some nice improvements.  The are basic cosmetic changes to the walls and doorways, but there are more substantial changes to the placement of objects and obstacles in rooms that make the labyrinths feel very fresh.


New Enemies  As part of the retro-fitting, there are many new, yet familiar foes to do battle with in the Outlands.  You'll recognize classic LoZ enemies like Goriyas and Wizzrobes, but you'll also see enemies from other games like bots and lowders from AoL.  As an added touch, all of the bosses have been given a face-lift as well.  Giant Stalfos that shoot magic, huge cycloptic blobs that ooze across the floor, and a Wizzrobe Master that is a dead-ringer for the evil Magician Carock from AoL all await you.  Bear in mind that this is merely a hack, so the key to defeating these bosses are exactly the same as their LoZ counterparts, but that doesn't make seeing them for the first time any less exciting!

New Formula The original LoZ was wide open at the same time that it was straight forward.  On the one hand, you could roam the entire world and see just about everything; on the other, the item you found in one labyrinth often played into some aspect of the next.  Outlands eschews that formula for something a little less linear while opening larger sections of the world as the game progresses.  Not every labyrinth contains a new item or tool.  Some labyrinths have more than one heart container and you don't always find them in the wake of defeating a boss.  The captured Tetrarch Fairies are sometimes right inside the door of the labyrinth and sometimes hidden in rooms not even located on the map.  While some things operate the same, trade Bagu's note for the ability to buy medicine, you'll not get everything the way you did in LoZ; you'll have to buy the white sword from a Goron salesman instead of earning it with heart containers. Expect trickery from the get-go and don't assume that the thing you need is waiting for you around the next bend.  Case in point, you'll not be able to complete the first labyrinth without finding a hidden item in the third that lets you get an item from the second which in turn grants you access to the fourth wherein you can find the weapon that will allow you to complete the first. Oh, and you'll not find the wooden sword until you locate and venture into the first labyrinth to even the game started!  This new formula makes a great challenge and gives a fresh take on an old adventure.  (that said, it's not all roses and birthday cake, as you'll see in the next section)

Zelda is along for the adventure and appears in the labyrinths to give you important items and information!

Innovation Finally, perhaps the most impressive aspect of LoZ: Outlands are the innovations added by the programmer.  I know I said earlier that this was a hack, but somehow the programmer managed to sneak in a few new tricks.  The biggest and most influential new feature is the use of one-way passages. These passages come in a couple of shapes and sizes, the least of which are rock walls that Link can pass through in one direction, but not the other.  The flashier passages come at the hands of devilish wizzrobes who can either transport Link to just the right place or exactly where he doesn't want to be.  Learning these passages will be essential to success in your quest and will open the game up in very new and exciting ways.  Innovations like this in a hack are very welcome surprises!

And now, the other shoe...

Where the Hack Misses the Mark

This is a very, very ugly place to be

Difficulty  My first real problem with Outlands is that the difficulty never seems to ramp.  Unlike the original LoZ, in which the enemies became more powerful as you explored the far reaches of the world, and the dungeons more treacherous as you gathered more and more Triforce, Outlands' difficulty peaks right at the very beginning and has no where to go after that.  You start the game with no offensive capability and must explore a good portion of the available world in order to locate the first labyrinth and therein, the wooden sword. This wandering results in lots of early deaths at the arrows and stones of the overland foes and is unnecessarily difficult.  On the reverse, once the white sword is obtained and the fourth labyrinth is breached, the difficulty actually drops off considerably, only seeing a slight resurgence in the final two labyrinths.  There has been an effort to overload many of the screens with a wealth of enemies, but this lends more to the annoyance factor than the difficulty.  There are certain choke points in the game that are maddening early on, like the coast line with the dock, that become pedestrian after a few necessary items are acquired; with the ladder it can be bypassed entirely.  The wizzrobes that inhabit Ganon's Mountains are plentiful and annoying, but not as terribly troublesome when you approach with the Goron shield and red tunic.
The biggest problem with this imbalance of difficulty is that it kills the fun factor very quickly for the player, even a seasoned Zelda fan like myself.  I don't want to wander around and be killed ten times just trying to find my damn sword.  It gets old fast. I have heard tell the second quest multiplies the difficulty exponentially.  If this be the case, I would hope for better balance in it (and more on this to come).

Change for Change's Sake is not always a Good Thing  For all of the delightful graphic changes that make this game so very special, there are also some changes that simply do not make sense and create discord in an otherwise respectful re-imagining.  What is the thought behind exchanging Keese for Peahats?  Is there logic in Like-Likes that split into Dark Fairies or Pols Voice that divide into Peahats? These changes are not only unusual, but are in defiance of standards set forth by the Zelda Universe.   Peahats are generally regarded as giant creatures that require all of outdoors to soar the sky, only to be attacked when they land.  They do not fit in the underground, despite the programmer's attempt to explain this away in the manual.  And there is absolutely no sense in the idea that a Pols Voice would split into two peahats!  The hacked Like-Likes, called "Unlike-Likes" do not leech unto Link and steal his shield (that honor is now bestowed upon the red Zols), but instead split meekly into dark fairies (which are cool new enemies, but make little sense to be contained within the purple pancake monsters).  There is nothing in the Zelda mythos that reconciles these madcap changes. Furthermore, smaller changes also don't make much good sense either.  There is needless swapping of sprites in the case of deelers for octoroks and octorocks (AoL versions) for river Zolas.  These small swaps seem inconsequential, but if so, then why make them?  I would much rather see land-based octoroks and some new sea creature plaguing me from the water's edge, than to see these throwaway alterations.  Another senseless swap is the exchange of Wizzrobes and Lynels.  Not so much for the placement of either, but for the haphazard nature of the swap.  The programmer thus far has shown absolute brilliance in his ability to alter the game's mechanics to his will, yet this change lacks any depth and the result is a curious betrayal of characterization.  Are we to believe that because the wizzrobes now roam the surface, they can no longer become immaterial and skulk through the scenery as they did in the labyrinths?  Perhaps it is the sunlight that does them in? And have they forsaken their deadly magical rays for mystic bolts shaped like daggers?  To what end?  Likewise, the Lynels, by virtue of being underground have suddenly revealed the ability to traverse walls and blast Link with devastating spells?  I don't see a problem bringing the wizzrobes into the light or casting the Lynels into the pit, but why not take a few extra pains to make the exchange complete and keep both races in the manner to which they are known?  Or even better still, to grant them new Outland abilities that do more than simply juxtapose those well known in Hyrule?  If the full change could not be accomplished, then perhaps it would have been best to leave things as they were. A similar case can be made for the Wall Masters who have also been relocated to the overworld and have taken on the behavior of ghinis.  This problem is compounded by the fact that there seems to be no way to actually destroy the Wall Masters that are generated from touching the gravestones.  This makes travel in the Graveyard of Serenity a chore.  (on the reverse, the substitution of the new enemy Cages for the subterranean Wall Masters is exceptionally well done, if entirely underused).  I wouldn't have minded seeing a few ghinis in the labyrinths...

With so many amazing graphic enhancements in Outlands, these aberrations are confusing and disappointing.  The programmer has demonstrated a loving appreciation for the Zelda mythos and extraordinary attention to detail, but these maligned changes seem needless and incomplete.

Yes, but where is level 6??!!

If You're Going to Kiss Me, Do It  Given the challenge of the game, the programmer does throw a few bread crumbs to ease the burden of locating the well hidden secrets of the Outlands.  In the first four labyrinths, Zelda will appear and provide a valuable clue as to the location of the next labyrinth's entrance.  These clues are often just telling enough to point you in the right direction without plainly telling you where the entrance is.  And then, after completing the fourth labyrinth, it is over. You'll get absolutely no help whatsover finding the entrance to the sixth or seventh labyrinth.  None.  As a matter of fact, the sixth labyrinth is so contemptuously tucked away in a forgotten corner of the overworld that I nearly deserted the game over its discovery.  I cannot discern the motivation to lead the player so far along and then simply turn them out on their own when the quest is in full swing.  Thankfully, the clues resume in the seventh labyrinth, but by then it is probably too late as the search for the previous two labyrinths has most likely uncovered the entrances to the final two.  I really like the inclusion of the clues, but their sudden disappearance mid-quest seems cruel and unnecessary.  The result is a lot of time spent endlessly wandering the countryside, burning every bush, bombing every wall, and pushing every stone.  While the original LoZ featured some of this, I never had that much trouble finding the essential stuff. (I admit there may be clues in Labyrinths 5 and 6, but I scoured them pretty completely and found nothing.)

This is the entrance to the 6th Labyrinth.  Screw you Outlands!

Brave New World, What You Can See of It  As I mentioned earlier, when the game begins you only have access to about 30% of the entire overworld.  Certain areas can only be accessed once the raft or ladder have been obtained and that takes a while.  The result is a world that is very confining early on.  There is a real sense of accomplishment once you are able to open the world up a bit, but the difference is jarring when you are used to the original LoZ where the entire world is yours to explore.  This is a minor quibble, but when coupled with the difficulty disparity mentioned above it makes your first few hours in the Outlands a touch frustrating.

Labyrinths, I Hardly Knew Ye  In the section above I praised the face-lift given to the labyrinths in terms of their appearance and the smart use of retro-fitting, however there is one area in which the newly revamped labyrinths fall short of their well designed predecessors.  The labyrinths in the original LoZ's first quest were all shaped like animals or other recognizable shapes.  The second quest's labyrinths spelled out "ZELDA" and then got nasty.  In Outlands, most of the labyrinths aren't shaped like anything in particular, and many of them look like the skeletal remains of labyrinths from the original. (looking at you Dragon labyrinth that shows up again as Level 4...).  Again, for a hack that changes so many great things so completely, to leave this kind of detail unfinished is disappointing and unexpected.  This might seem like a small nit to pick, but if you got the most incredible ice cream sundae and there was no whipped cream, I think you'd feel a little let down (you can have that damned cherry, I have no use for it).

Final Look

Anyone who truly loves The Legend of Zelda, will find LoZ: Outlands a well-crafted re-imaging of the classic adventure.  Great pains have been taken to shape the clay that molded the original game and transform it into something very fresh and new.  The greatest delight is found in the exceptional retro-fitting and innovations that enhance the basic game engine.  The challenge level is greatly improved and is on par with the difficulty found in the original game's Second Quest.  The hack is not quite perfect, but the troublesome elements would only turn off those not intimately acquainted with the original game, and those people are clearly not the target audience for this hack.  Seasoned Zelda players will tough out the imperfections and be rewarded with a gaming experience that both invokes nostalgia and introduces new levels of challenge. I played The Legend of Zelda: Outlands on an emulator, but it is available on cartridge as well and I hope to one day acquire it for my collection and so that I may tackle it the way it is meant to be played, on the actual hardware.  After all, I never found the Master Sword or Book of Mudora in my first outing.  And I made a stab at the second quest, but got so annoyed because the second go round feels like it has been made overly difficult for difficulty's sake alone.  I get the challenge of scouring 4 labyrinths armed with nothing just to find the wooden sword, I appreciate just how hard it is to defeat a four-headed Gleeok with only a wooden sword and the green tunic, but there is only so much repeated beating you can take before all of that loses its charm.  I like a challenge, but I also like to have fun. Maybe having the game on cartridge will inspire me further...

You have to admit, that Thunderbird looks cool in the final Labyrinth!

(please note, some images in this article have been taken from the Instruction Manual provided with the download of the hack and credit for them goes to the original programmer)

A Closer Look at the Karate Kid for the NES

 It has been far too long since I have sat down and written a good ol' Closer Look on a NES game.  Long time masochists will recall that is how this whole thing got started.  However, a few weeks ago I broke down and bought the Karate Kid for the NES.  With LJN's reputation for crap games (some of it earned and some of it unjust, but that is a tale for another time) and my fear of ruining a childhood admiration for the Pat Morita classic film, I have passed over this game many, many times in the past.  However, like the daft fool I am, I have the delusion that I can one day own all of the NES games made (for North America anyway...), so it is inevitable that this was going to be in my collection at some point anyway, so much like Ezal, I saw an open window...

To be honest, I expected the six dollars I chucked down for Karate Kid to have gone the way of the six dollars I spent on Total Recall, Wayne's World, and so many other movie-based games in the past.  But damn it, I just keep playing it!  And it's not like the game is exceedingly long or difficult, but I keep playing it!  I beat it like last week and yet I keep playing it.  I checked, it was released by LJN.  So what is going on?  How is this possible?  This, my friends is why the Karate Kid for the NES is getting a Closer Look (and now that I think about it, Back to the Future, the first game to get a Closer Look is also an LJN title, I think someone is spiking my Shasta...).

So what is is about this game that makes me keep playing it?  Is it the adaptation of the story?  Not even close.  And by "not even close" I mean the adaptation is not even close.  One might go so far as to say that this game has been entirely mis-titled, and not in that "tossing bowling balls and Guidos" kind of way that Back to the Future is mis-titled, but in that "hey, this game is actually the sequel" kind of way.  You know the type.  I'm not kidding.  The "plot" for the NES Karate Kid game is actually the plot of the film, the Karate Kid Part II!!  What the what?  Exactly.  And here's the kicker, it is actually very, very faithful to that plot.
You start the game at the pivotal tournament from the climax of the first film.  From there you travel to Okinawa where you do battle with Sato's thugs outside the Miyagi dojo.  Then the typhoon hits and you must battle your way through the storm to save the child atop the bell post (shocking level of detail!).  Finally, you must make your way to the festival where your new girlfriend is being menaced by Chozen.  Defeat Chozen and keep Kumiko from killing herself (more on this in a minute), and Miyagi will honor you with great praise (perhaps too great?).  See, pretty much just like the second film.

So why is this game, for all intents and purposes the Karate Kid Part II, in a Karate Kid case?  I have no idea.  Logic says maybe they felt odd about releasing a "sequel game" for something that had no foundational title, but that didn't stop Konami for hitting us with Goonies II.  Maybe there was a Japanese release of a game based on the original film and this was the sequel game, but we only get the sequel game because back then America only got a portion of the kick ass games from Japan?  Honestly, I have no idea, and the research that could confirm that last one really stretches outside the scope of this article, so I am happy to chock this one up to a mystery. Either way, the curious mismatch of title and game content is not the reason I keep playing this game.  It is however a really nice bit of icing on an otherwise unexpectedly moist and delicious cake.

Perhaps what makes this game so much fun is its sheer simplicity.  As previously stated the game isn't terribly long.  Four total levels and only three of those are actual platforming levels.  The first part of the game is the tournament where you face off against four opponents in single elimination bouts.  Four fights, that's it, and to top it off they are easy, really really easy.  The remaining levels are of moderate length, but all in all the game only takes about 20 minutes to complete.  Yet I keep playing it, and here's the biggest shocker, particularly for you younger audience members for whom the next statement may have little meaning at all:  I'm playing for score!  Yeah, that's right.  If you have ever asked yourself who the loser is who has been beating Karate Kid for the NES at least once a day for score, the answer is this guy:

Me

Now the question to ask is why?  Why would anyone do such a thing?  I own a shameful amount of NES games, and this is how I spend my time?  Something must be wrong with me or very right with the Karate Kid.  The answer might be a little of column A and a little of column B (see picture above).
My personal idiosyncrasies aside, there are some very right things about the Karate Kid.  It's not without its faults: comparatively short levels, unfair stuck points where the enemies can drain your health to zero in seconds, fairly uninspired level design, but it manages to overcome those things with an almost ridiculously simple formula of uncomplicated game play, short play time, charming theming, and just enough challenge to keep things interesting. Not surprisingly, this is the exact same formula that makes Jackie Chan's Action Kung-Fu a sleeper hit of the Konami library (the only real difference in the games is the theming and game length, JCAKU takes almost an hour to beat).
(Dude, I go on FOREVER about this game, but keep reading, I promise it is worth it...)

A Closer Look at Smurf’s Village app for the iPhone and iPad

 UPDATE!
This article is still great, but the NEWLY REVISED Poor Smurfer's Almanac for 2012 just hit with all new information about the Dreamy Smurf update, all new crops and more! Check it out today!


  I know what you are saying: “Stan, you have to be smurfing me here!  Are you smurfing serious?”  Yes.  I’m not smurfing your leg.  Trust me, I never would have imagined that this would be something I would ever pay attention to, much less devote my precious time, and yours, to. (watch that preposition dangle!)  But two weeks ago, a friend of mine on that devilish social networking timesuck posted that there was a Smurfs app for the iPhone and better yet, it was a game.  Now, I am a child of the 80’s, two things are very dear to me: Pee Wee Herman, and the Smurfs.  I will always love both with a bizarre and clinical unconditional love that can really only be understood by twins and those who have climbed Mt. Everest.  So when you tell me there is a Smurf game for my phone (which, let’s be honest isn’t really a phone anymore), you have to know I’m going to give it a look.

The Smurf’s Village app, for all intents and purposes, is basically a pretty skin for the already epidemic Farmville or Frontiersville or Petsville or any of those other horrid social networking games developed by Zynga. Well, almost.  There are some important differences and I’ll get to those in a minute.  But first let me tell you how asinine I find those social games like Farmville.  Perhaps the most obnoxious thing since spam emails, these social network “games” are thinly disguised marketing tools used to monitor network activity and promote online interaction to increase the potential to exploit the bottomless resource that is the internet.  Games like Farmville seem to be built not around playing a game that is fun, but in asking your friends for supplies and otherwise cluttering the pages of everyone you know with insightful messages like “Stan, I need 4 nails to finish my fence,” or “Pam just stole a pig from your pen, click here to see what else is going on in Farmville.”  And you get these wonderful missives regardless of whether you partake in the madness or not.  I do not.  Worst of all, Farmville, and its cohorts, entice you to spend REAL MONEY, not video game money, rupees or gil, but REAL MONEY to buy things to speed up the progress of your farm.  And most of the things you spend your REAL MONEY on can be acquired by playing the game, it just takes more time.  So, much like the real Capitalist system, if you don’t want to earn your achievements, you can just buy them.  I pretty much hate everything about these kinds of games.

So how? How can I advocate Smurf’s Village?  My defense is shoddy and rests mainly on the phrase, “but dude, they are smurfs.”  However, I will tell you why I am sinking hours of valuable game time that could be going toward Kirby’s Epic Yarn or EA NFL Training Camp into this stupid little app, and I’ll try to make it sound convincing.

First of all, Smurf’s Village differs from its extremely obnoxious cousins in some very important ways.  Most importantly amongst these ways is that the game play is much more passive than something like Farmville.  There are no pushy messages from friends (even though the game is linked through facebook to your network) to give them things or to harvest their crops.  You can give gifts to your friends, but no one ever contacts you, and if you never connect to the social network, no big deal, the game plays on.  So, right off the bat, SV is not as self-effacing as its predecessors.

Second, the game is simple and fun.  If you are not familiar with these kinds of games, they are basically micro-management games reminiscent of SimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon, or the Sims.  The premise is minimal: Gargamel found the Smurf village and destroyed it, scattering smurfs far and wide (and apparently spawning multiple clones of distinctive smurfs like Papa, Hefty and Smurfette, since each new village has one…).  Your job is to rebuild a new smurf village and make it flourish so that the smurfs will have a new haven to call home.  This reclamation project requires you to build mushroom houses for the smurfs and then put them to work farming in order to generate more revenue to keep the revitalization going.  Apparently, Papa Smurf is able to sell the produce generated by the farming to an undisclosed outside buyer who will in turn give the smurfs money (not REAL MONEY, let’s get that straight) with which they can buy building supplies, tufts of grass, and moss covered rocks.  Why you have to buy such things is really beyond me.  But those are the tools you use to beautify and enhance your new smurf village.  As you progress in the game, you will gain access to more and more décor items like colored fences, flower patches, and even different kinds of mushroom houses.  The game goes on like this at least up the level 25, the last level in which it is indicated that you can unlock new items.  If you like micro-management games (and I tend to) and the Smurfs (see above), then this game is a fun little diversion.

But you have to maintain that perspective.  See, it’s not all sunshine and roses.  The Smurf’s Village app is absolutely 100% free, but as you well know, you don’t get something for nothing, that’s not the American way.  And this is where shades of Farmville creep into your otherwise smurfy world.  You see, some of the best stuff you can buy: Smurfette’s house, Hefty Smurf’s House, friendly snails and caterpillars (which grant lots of XP daily) cost not in-game money, but smurfberries.  Smurfberries are a rare commodity in the game and you only earn a small amount per day (1 per level early on, after level 10, 2 per level and so on).  No big deal, right? It’s all part of the game.  Wrong.  You see, those great things that cost smurfberries, don’t just cost 5 or 6 berries, they cost 25 or more.  Thus, it could take months just to add Painter Smurf and Farmer Smurf to your village.  It could, but it doesn’t have to.  You can always spend REAL MONEY (again, let’s be clear), and BUY smurfberries from the game.  See the shades?  You don’t have to wait; you can have all of the best things right now, for a price.  Now to be fair, the smurfberries are pretty reasonably priced, if we abandon the idea that paying for video game content is unreasonable to begin with.  Fifty smurfberries only cost five REAL DOLLARS. And fifty smurfberries can net you at least Smurfette’s and Painter’s houses (with a little help from the berries you’ve accumulated along the way).  To make matters worse, smurfberries aren’t just for buying the rare stuff, you can also spend them to speed up the harvest, shorten build time for mushroom houses, or instantly increase your population.  And therein lies the trap.  If you can restrict your smurfberry usage to just those rarities and not things you can get just by being patient, the impact of this otherwise exploitative option is greatly minimized.  If the villages of my friends are any indication, the lure of instant villages is too great.  For some of my friends this appears to sing to the tune of upward of twenty or thirty dollars or more. Guilty admission, I spent $5 to obtain Smurfette’s and Painter’s houses, and I may break down and spend five more REAL DOLLARS for Hefty and Farmer, but after that I will probably be done spending REAL MONEY on video game content for my iPhone.  I justify it by emphasizing how little I am really spending and that I am spending it on having fun like I would if I were going to a rock concert or live theatre.  I justify it with just a twinge of shame. (see my rant about downloadable content from several months ago for a full understanding of my cause for shame)

Honestly, though, the game is fun.  It is fun running the little smurfs around, having them farm and build fences, growing the village and adding new décor elements.  It is fun, plain and simple.  I like micro-management games and this one manages to find a soft, nostalgic spot in my heart.  The game is limited in several important ways, however and I am hopeful that since this is fluid software those issues will be addressed.  Most pressing is the fact that the game is quite limited in scope at this time.  As I stated before, the game stops giving you things to unlock after level 25.  I’ve been playing for about a week and half at this point and I am already nearly level 17.  If they do not release updates or expansions soon, my time with the game will be smurfed.  There is also a lack of diversity in things to do.  Once you have all of your smurfs busy farming and you’ve built everything you can build, there isn’t much else to do.  Sure, there are mini-games to play like Papa Smurf’s Potion Mixing Game or Greedy Smurf’s Baking Challenge, but these are only available for credit (XP) once per day and the games only last about 45 seconds.  The game simply needs other things for you and your smurfs to do.  There are some plot (very loosely understood here) driven tasks to undertake (as in “grow some tomatoes to rid the village of skunk stench”), but the later you get in the game, the more scarce those become.  It can become really easy to lose interest if there aren’t more things to do in the village as the game progresses. I guess I cannot complain too much, however the damn thing is free after all.


FINAL LOOK
So if you are looking for something fun to waste some time with while you wait in line at the DMV or are on a long car trip, Smurfs Village can be a fun way to accomplish just that, but you’ll need to keep things in perspective lest you get seduced into blowing your hard earned cash on something as ephemeral as video game content.


The Poor Smurfer’s Almanac
How to get the best productivity out of your village

Planting Schedules and Yields:
Know your crops!  By planting the right crops at the right time you can maximize your productivity.  Planting certain crops will enable you to generate large sums of coinage or experience in shorter amounts of time.  Not all crops are created equal and planting the wrong crops can several retard the growth of your village.  The chart below details which crops give you the best yields respective to whether you are looking to harvest $ or XP. 

Best Quick Growing Crops (grow time of 1 hour or less)
XP Yield                    $ Yield                      All Purpose
Cucumber (120)         Blueberry (120)         Blueberry
Blueberry (120)          Raspberry (36)          Raspberry
Currants (120*)          Blackberry (12)         Currants
Raspberry (96)           Currants (10*)           Blackberry
Blackberry (60)          Strawberry (9)           Cucumber
Strawberry (45)          Cucumber (8)             Strawberry

Best Mid-Level Crops (grow time of 2-6hours)
Brussels Sprouts (37.5XP  $7.5)
Peas (25XP  $5)
Carrots (16XP  $3.6)
Tomato (13XP  $2.6)

Best Long Term Crops (grow time of 9-24 hours)
XP Yield                      $ Yield                      All Purpose
Onion (14.5)                Corn (15.4)               Artichoke
Artichoke (13)             Sarsaparilla (6.25*)   Sarsaparilla*
Sarsaparilla (12.5*)     Artichoke (2.6)          Watermelon
Watermelon (10)         Watermelon (2)          Pumpkin
Pumpkin (10)               Pumpkin (2)              Corn
Potato (6.25)               Potato (1.25)             Onion
Corn (4.4)                   Onion (0.8)                Potato

XP and $ amounts are calculated on average yield per hour.  The amount of $ is calculated to reflect net profit (gross profit minus seed cost).  (Example: Brussels Sprouts yield 75XP and $20 in 2 hours growth, hence they yield and average of 37.5 XP per hour and $7.5, $15 gross profit minus $5 seed cost)

*The amounts for Currants are averaged up to reflect 2 yields per hour even though they can only be harvested every 40 mins.  This is for simplicity sake, adjust your planting accordingly.
*The amounts for Sarsaparilla are not reflective of their steep 1 Smurfberry seed cost.  Since there is no in-game monetary equivalent for Smurfberries, there is no reasonable way to evaluate seed cost.  You will have to decide the value of this cost and its overall effect on the profitability of planting this crop.

Plant smartly.  A well organized farm can accumulate a great deal of coinage and XP every day.  Depending on when you have time to play, figure out how to harvest the most crops in a day.  If you have a routine sleeping pattern, plant crops just before you go to sleep that will be ready to harvest immediately upon your waking up.  Maximize your grow time the same way for the rest of your day.  Make your farm work for you when you cannot work it.

It is strongly recommended against planting Potatoes, Strawberries, and Tomatoes.  These are the worst of the respective groups and will not accelerate your growth.  Also, with a seed cost of 1 Smurfberry, Sarsaparilla is a poor investment unless you have REAL MONEY to burn.

If you have the time, Blueberries are VERY lucrative!

Once your village is up and running, start populating it with snails and caterpillars.  Both generate a lot of XP daily if you check in on them.  Smurfette is good in the same capacity, but snails and caterpillars are much better and you can have multiples of them.  Plus, with a productive village you can add 2 snails or 1 caterpillar each day. This will help you advance in level much faster than with crops alone.

Later in the game, after you have built your village to your satisfaction and have nothing new to build, you can put your money to use buying XP by buying scenery and then deleting it.  Sure, this is a bit unethical, but it can turn money you are not using into valuable XP.

Design your village smartly.  You may want to consider dividing up your field into sections.  One section should be devoted to generating XP and the other coins.  Or simply design two separate fields and dedicate each to a task.

Unless you just have lots of REAL MONEY to burn, don’t waste Smurfberries on instantly growing crops or building houses.  Save your Smurfberries for things like the special smurfs or rare items.

Farmer Smurf is very important.  He can increase the yield on crops grown in fields that touch the perimeter of his house by 50%.  This means that up to 8 fields can see significant yield increases due to his presence.  He should be the first smurf you spend Smurfberries on.  You can arrange it so that he influences a full 8 fields, if you stagger your fields correctly.

Build bridges as soon as possible.  They greatly increase the size of your village and thus the arable land available.

Upgrade Smurf houses regularly to increase your population.  There are limits to the number of houses you can have per level, so this will help grow your village and get around this limitation.

Thanks for taking a look and have a smurfy time giving these hapless smurfs a new home!  Enjoy the smurf out of this fun little game!