Pixie lists & trivia from Make 10

Make 10: A Journey of Numbers's various lists & trivia:

all Pixies and their profiles, unlocked locations, every minigame instruction, etc.

Spoiler heavy!!

Make 10 - where math and adventure meets!

German box art

Here comes a refurbished and enhanced post from 2017 about a game I really enjoyed: Make 10: a Journey of Numbers. It's a quirky little game that I wanted to revisit again!

My mind couldn't let go of its unusual, definitely not stock-looking boxart for over a year. Eventually, I bought the game at my local used-games shop, curious about what the game is about. Yup, it was there on the shelf for over a year. It seems like no one was crazy enough to invest in a kid's math game in a German box (thankfully it's a multilanguage game).

I made a game on GB Camera and here's how I did it! (save file included)

Attack of the Fluff Monster,
gameplay captured in an artsy photo

 

"I have 30 screens, 4 colours, and a screen resolution around 160x144px to use.
You get a bonus if you correctly guess what I'm planning to do."

~ Yours truly, on Twitter, 11:49 AM · Jan 23, 2021 

What IS a GameBoy Camera?

Since it's a quite niche piece of hardware from the ancient late '90s era, I feel it will be a good idea to describe it shortly, before I write the bigger post about the silly game I made on it. It's super quirky so it perfectly fits my blog too!

Two GameBoy Cameras, my GameBoy,
and GB Operator to bring my saves to the computer.
Also a dinosaur, for a good measure.

Gift - a tale of an odd gift

Fanart by yours truly.

Gift (known as Gift: Le Cadeau des Étoiles in France, and Gifty: Ein Geschenk des Himmels in Germany) was a result of a collaboration between Cryo Interactive and artist Régis Loisel, and was developed by Eko Systems (now called Eko Software). With its cheeky humour and challenging gameplay, it was aimed at an older demographic. Released in 2000 on PC, and later ported to PS2, it's definitely an odd game, perfectly fitting the theme of this blog. It's hard to find in a search engine due to its name, it's quirky, and has personality. But it also features a pretty solid gaming experience, accompanied by fantastic promo and concept art! But there is actually another secret reason I wanted to write about it. And it's a rather hilariously turbulent personal story, in fact, of experiencing a truly awful GBC port. Feel free to skip the next 2 small-text paragraphs, as they will be mostly my ramblings about the past. They are there to accent the disappointment I felt at that time. Note: since I played those games on original hardware, please excuse the potato quality of all my photos.

The Four Horsemen of Bad Minigames!

Good grief! I began writing this in November 2019. Now, since my own game is out, I think it's the right time to go back and finish this entry...

So, on my voyages through the low-end of the Nintendo DS gaming library (and beyond the DS as well), I noticed a notorious pattern in the minigames department. The same minigames (or iterations thereof) kept popping up, again and again. It reached the point where it's both hilarious and sad to me seeing them in a game, or even in a trailer of an upcoming product.

If there's a low-end game (be it a kids game, a girls game, a knock-off game, a quick-made game, etc, etc...), then it's guaranteed that one of the Four Horsemen (as I like to call them ;)) appear. And this isn't only a "cheap games" specialty, as these can be found in the more defined works - games considered good, or classic, as well.

Fossil League [DS] p.1 - Gameplay & Story

Contents:

1. The game begins... | 2. More about the gameplay | 3. The plot again (spoilers ahead!) | 4. End/postgame | 5. Personal notes and the score

Around early 2019 I played a rather obscure Nintendo DS game released in the West in 2007 (according to the Fandom Wiki), similar in gameplay to Pokemon. It was Fossil League: Dino Tournament Championship (Jap: 恐竜王者決定戦 恐竜グランプリ). Yeah, the full title is quite long. It was developed by MTO (in 2006) and localized by D3Publisher of America. Any other information is really scarce on the Internet, but MTO's website still has a page for this game (link). And it looks like they have yet another, and even more obscure, DS dinosaur game in their record... Hmmm, tempting.

But anyway! About 7 months have passed since I played Fossil League, and it's time to write about it, till I still remember what it was about. This post will focus more on the gameplay elements and the plot. The next one will be about the dinosaurs themselves.

Some screenshots were taken during my original DS playthrough, while others were taken via DS emulator to supplement the text.

Fossil League box art: Japanese and Western (US). Shows a quite change from the Japanese release, doesn't it?
I enjoy the clipart quality.