Category — Games

So I’ve been struggling a bit with level 331, and I decided to open up Candy Crush on the computer to see if the board looked differently online.  Suddenly, I was invited into a Candy Crush Dreamworld (and no, this is not a hallucination.  Er… okay, maybe it is… so I took screenshots just in case).

Do you see that?  The owl in the top left corner?  So I clicked on it.

And it asked if I wanted to enter the Dreamworld.  Did I?  HELLS YEAH!  I’ve learned nothing from reading Alice in Wonderland, and if Candy Crush offered me a little cake or a vial of questionable liquid, I would ingest it in a heartbeat.  Give me entrance to a wonderland of dreamy candy, and I am inside in a New York minute.

So the Dreamworld is a beautiful space where all the boards are like the ones when you’re just starting out Candy Crush.  And you cry because they feel so good to play after you’ve been banging your head against the wall with level 331.

Look at that sweet board!  You only have to score 2500 to pass.  What the hell is up with that?  And you get 15 moves.  And each match makes that little blue thing under the owl light up until he flies up and the screen says MOON STRUCK!

At that point, most of the colours fade off the board, making it (for a limited time) very easy to make special matches.  And then you cry with happiness as the points stack up because everything is popping and exploding and sliding around.  And it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.

And then you take a bunch of screenshots because you can’t believe this exists.  I am so tired.  I have to be dreaming, right?  I’m dream blogging.

If you click on the owl, you get transported back to the normal board.  I went back and forth a few times to make sure I could still enter the Dreamworld.  It is the loveliest place I’ve been all day.

A prize wheel ALSO popped up on the computer.  I spun it and got one of those hand things that look like a Mickey Mouse glove, which I have no clue how to use.  So I let that be.  But you get to spin the wheel every single day.  You better believe I’ll be spinning.

Thank you, Candy Crush, you just made my Thanksgiving.

Is anyone else seeing the Dreamworld while they’re online?  Will it disappear if I log out?

P.S. How do you use the Mickey Mouse hand?  It switches two candies?

Update:

It’s still there!  It’s still there!  I thought I’d wake up in the morning and it would be gone.  I took a picture of the prize wheel too.  It shows up at the very bottom of the map screen. (You can see it in the background in the picture below.)  When you click on it, this screen opens:

So you click “Stop Wheel” and it starts to spin…

And then it lands on one of the prizes.  Today I got the jellyfish.  Not sure how one releases the jellyfish to use them during a game.  But I have them.

This is going to become my morning joy: spinning the prize wheel and shouting, “Big money!  Big money!  Show me the big money!”

Oooooh, I just love Candy Crush.

Update again:

Just played through level 10 (where a dotted line appears on the Dreamworld map), but all that happened was that the episode was complete.  No new prizes popped up.  Still a lot of fun, and it was nice to tear through levels instead of remaining on the same one day after day after day.  Plus, keeping the owl balanced is harder than you think.  We had him tip off his perch once when we combined a speckled doughnut and a regular candy.  But I’m really loving the Dreamworld.  Please don’t disappear, little Dreamworld, don’t disappear.

Remember when I said I was going to stop playing Candy Crush when I hit level 300 (since I missed my other promise to stop playing at level 200)?  I lied*.  Obviously.  Since Level 305 just turned me into a pathetic, frantic, credit-guzzling loser.

Level 305 wasn’t that difficult a level, and I thought I’d pass it in a try or two.  But one or two tries became something more like (cough) 20… maybe more.  And suddenly I wanted it done.  I convinced myself that I had to pass it last night.

So I went online to play because it seemed like the type of level that was less difficult online than it was on a device. (You know that, right? That different levels are easier online vs. on a device?) After a try or two, I got it down to only a few jellies unpopped; the closest I had come to winning up until that point.

I was so tired, and I just wanted to go to bed, and that is why I did what I did.  I had those free Facebook credits they give you when you pass level 35, and I used five of them to purchase five more moves.  That got me closer, but I still couldn’t clear the board.  So when the offer to pay eight credits for more moves and a wrapped candy came up, I took it.  I spent 13 tickets to get past this board.  And the worst part is that I cleared it with one more move, so the other moves were purchased but unused.

After the board cleared and it allowed me to pathetically beg for tickets, I didn’t feel that sense of relief I usually feel.  I felt like those times when I was babysitting as a teenager and I ate all of the family’s sugar cereal.  I mean, yes, the parents usually told me to help myself, but I never knew if they meant it.  So I would eat the cereal and then wash the dish so no one would know that I had gotten into their Count Chocula in a major way.  Because there was a shame in it too, a sense of gluttony.  I was there to do a job, keep their children alive, and instead I was taking food from their mouths.  Well, not actually out of their mouths because that’s gross.  But you know what I mean.  I was stealing breakfast.

Candy Crush gave me the credits as a thank you, but that doesn’t mean I was really meant to spend them.  And not on such a nothing level.  It would be understandable if I spent them on level 350.  But not level 305.  I could have passed that on my own if I hadn’t taken it so damn seriously.

I act as if I’ve never played a game before.

There is no way (that I know of) to get more Candy Crush credits unless I purchase them.  So now when I need a ticket or when I get to a truly hard board, I am screwed.  I feel as if a genie just offered me three wishes and I used one up by stupidly muttering to myself, “I wish I had a camera so I could take a picture of this genie!”

I deserve it.  I deserve it for playing Candy Crush so stupidly.

By the way, I’d like to publicly apologize (now that I’ve admitted to it) to all the families I babysat for: I ate your cereal.

* In my defense, I thought about quitting.  But then I got confused: do I quit before I play level 300, or do I quit after I play level 300?  I decided to go with after level 300, since beforehand, I would only be able to say that I passed 299 levels.  But once I moved onto level 301, it felt uneven again.  So I continued.  It’s a never-ending cycle.

It hit my three email threshold: I was asked multiple times how I solved level 275 of Candy Crush. So here is the answer. It is What it Is, avert your eyes. Or run screaming. Whatever you need to do because the world wants to know how I beat the chocolate and the bombs and emerged triumphant from level 275. Or… at least a few people do.

This level figuratively asks the player a thought-provoking what if: if you were to, let’s say, to have your hard drive crash, would you rather have it happen before you’ve written your Great American Novel, or after you’ve written 300 of the best pages that you’ve ever written?  If you’re someone who doesn’t care if you’ve just done a ton of work for nothing, play this board however you wish.  On the other hand, if it would be more maddening to not only lose your hard drive but lose all of your hard work, then follow my advice.

You need to work the top half of the board before you work the bottom.

So look at those two pieces of chocolate in the top two corners of the board.  They are holding back 3-move bombs.  You do not want these bombs to drop; ever.  So don’t break that chocolate.  There is no jelly beneath, so you’ll never have to touch it.

Every other square on this board has jelly.

What you want to do is get rid of those two squares next to the chocolate machines first.  In the picture above, there are green candies in the two squares.  Do NOT worry about the two squares next to that chocolate — currently the red candy and the orange candy.  Those will likely get wiped out by cascading candy at some point or you will get them with a vertical stripe.  Either way, there are ways for that jelly to pop that will not break the chocolate and release the bombs.

You want to clear those green candies first because if you mess up and the bombs drop, you only wasted two seconds of your time.  If you wait until the end and try to clear them and those bombs drop, you just erased your hard work.  So do them first and get them out of the way.

Next, clear the top half as best you can while holding the chocolate at bay.  At some point near the beginning of your game, open those fish at the bottom and release them so they eat a little jelly too. You want to do this early-ish because you have no control where those fish go.  And they could end up inadvertently releasing the bombs too.  Even better is if you can combine a striped candy (and colour) with a fish.  Again, no control, but it can clear a lot of jelly.

This is a level where vertical stripes (and if we’re talking about beneath the chocolate machines, horizontal stripes) go far.

So that’s it.  That’s how you beat level 275.

Currently: I’m on Level 288, and I’m happy to go backwards and explain how I did any board before that. Sometimes it was stupid luck but other times, there was actual thought involved (here are the other advice posts I’ve written). Let me know the level you’re struggling with.

I finally got to see the Fun-o-meter on Candy Crush.  It popped up while I was playing level 254 online.  There wasn’t a setting for “makes me feel as if I’m in the Goonies with Mama and her boys chasing me and the rocks are falling while we’re trying to get out of the cave.”  If there had been that option on the fun-o-meter, that’s where I would have set it.  Because level 254 of Candy Crush sucks.  It sucks hard.

Make and explode a two-doughnut combo, a two-striped combo, and a two-wrapped combo.  You are probably already seeing the problem here.  It is highly unusual to ever get two doughnuts to fall next to one another.  They are also immovable unlike other pieces.  If you try to shift over a wrapped candy or a striped candy, for the most part (unless the pieces you are switching it with lines up three of the same colour or is an opposite combination) you can move them into a different space.  But if you try to move a doughnut, it will explode all of the candies that are that colour.  So you can’t move them.  You can only hope to have another doughnut fall next to it.

The game board provides you with a single striped candy, doughnut, and wrapped candy encased behind a wall of whipped cream and reinforced with jelly.

I tried all sorts of things.  I tried getting rid of all the whipped cream and then trying to make a doughnut.  I tried making a doughnut and THEN getting rid of all the whipped cream.  I tried making a wrapped combo first using the wrapped candy encased in whipped cream.  I tried making the wrapped combo before I touched the whipped cream at all.  I tried exploding the whipped cream away, I tried gently moving the whipped cream away piece by piece, I tried lovingly talking to the candies and begging them to align.  I tried walking away from boards that felt as if they had a bad aura on the first move.  I tried talking really loudly in front of the game, telling people in the room how I was likely going to walk away from Candy Crush if I didn’t win right away.

This level made me jumpy.  I would finally make two doughnuts and they would be a candy or two apart.  And then the whole board would explode because I accidentally dropped a candy that set off a wrapped candy.  Every time the board would accidentally explode, my body would tense up.  This happened several times each round, so that by the time I reached my fifth life of the evening, I had listened to a 25-minute cacophony of bursting candy.  And while exploding candy usually is a sweet sound in Candy Crush, in this case, it was the sound of erasing hard work.  Okay, so “hard work” is perhaps a bit generous.  But still, it can take many moves to manipulate a wrapped candy to form.  And then to lose it because a striped candy formed too close to it?

The whole thing sucked.

I finally won it while waiting for Josh to get our drinks at Starbucks.  I decided that the hardest one for me to make was the doughnut.  So I cleared the whipped cream and then focused on that center line of candies, trying to find a situation where there were two on one side or the other of the same colour, and then manipulated candies of the chosen colour into the other slots, finally moving down the fifth, middle candy to form a doughnut that I was able to move down the column until I exploded it with the other doughnut.  I then lucked out and made two candies next to each other (I think I used an egg for one of these).  The striped one was the easiest one, but I only had 10 moves left.  I was going to lose it in a big way if I messed this up, so I took my time and within a move or two, had exploded the striped ones.

And then I almost wept as the game told me the level was complete.

Strangely enough, to calm my frayed nerves, I’ve had to set the game aside for a bit.  I felt like I could do that because it was my choice vs. the game’s choice.  So suck it, Candy Crush.  You’re on notice.

Everyone who reads this blog regularly knows how I feel about Candy Crush.  It is a passionate love affair that knows few limits.  I am not above calling friends and whispering into the telephone, “pretty please, I’ll cook dinner for you for the rest of the week.  Just give me a ticket to the next level.”  I have reset the clock on the phone to get more lives, paused the game on timed levels in order to think through my moves, and begged for advice.  But now, I am really and truly cheating on Candy Crush.

I’ve started seeing Dots.*

I love it so so much.

Dots is a game very similar to Candy Crush except there is only one level.  And you never need to ask anyone for anything.  And you never run out of lives.  And you can remove dots by connecting just two of them (instead of needing three to clear out the pieces).  The dots cascade down like the candy in Candy Crush, making a square clears all of that colour temporarily off the board, and the game makes a happy noise as you get rid of the dots.  Plus, it doesn’t have that creepy man who oversees Candyville who gives me nightmares.  And you can turn the sound off easily so no one knows that you are obsessively playing Dots.

See? It’s the perfect game.

The game is the electronic equivalent to consuming Doritos.  In the same way that you may look down at the bag and realize that you mindlessly ate 3000 calories worth of artificially-flavoured corn chips, you may end up playing Dots for several hours before you realize that you just missed the entire episode of Saturday Night Live because you were too busy trying to best your score of 206.

But I’m strangely okay with that.

So there are two ways you can play Dots.  You can set a personal goal and keep playing until you reach it, such as “I will best my score” or “I will get over 150 dots.”  You get cute badges for completing certain tasks on the screen, so I’m currently working my way through the badge system and will sometimes tell myself that I can continue playing until I earn a new badge.

Or you can challenge someone else in the room and pass-and-play the same board.  Meaning, you begin with the exact same dots in the exact same order, and from there, each move creates a different path. I am constantly challenging everyone in our house to games of Dots.  For instance, Josh and I played each other this weekend to see who would have to go downstairs and get dessert (I did… I lost big time).

Plus, because you can always play and you don’t need to wait for lives to regenerate, I tend to stay on it much longer than Candy Crush.  It works the exact same part of my brain, searching for moves that will cause the dot I need to cascade into place so I can wipe out a long row of dots or form a square.  It is so relaxing.  Like popping mental bubble wrap.

So I’m cheating on Candy Crush.  It’s not that the Crush is going anywhere; I’m now on Level 241. Believe me, I’m still going strong with the Crush.  But sometimes I need a game that is a little less complicated.  That doesn’t make me jump through hoops.  That keeps the same difficulty for every board, and it’s up to me to find the good moves.  Sometimes I just want a clean white screen, neat rows of dots, and a little less noise.  You know?

* It seems to be for iTunes, Kindle, or Android.  I haven’t seen a place you can play online.