Ten Years of Puzzdra

June 3rd, 2023

A post unrelated to my trip today, but one ten years in the making. Today marked my 3650th day of cumulative logins to Puzzle & Dragons!

Ten years ago today, during a trip to Japan, I installed the game. And I’ve played every single day since then. Since I play for an hour at least every day, this means I’ve been playing Puzzle & Dragons for about 150 days!

I’ve got 2835 cards now, including every single top-tier leader and multiple copies of most everything else. I have so resources used to power up cards I will never use them all, and I’ve beaten every single dungeon in the game, including the very difficult super-endgame stuff.

The game has become extremely complex over the years. The above shows all the possible ‘awakenings’ a card can have, and making teams to beat the tough dungeons require a complete understanding of all of them.

The above is the most recent rare card added to the game (only a few days ago). I managed to get him, but haven’t yet built a team for him. In time I will. In a few months he will no doubt be superseded by a new more powerful leader, but one of the strengths of the game is that few cards ever truly become obsolete.

The game has had a massive amount of ‘collaborations’ over the years. Naturally my favourite was Ultraman and I was able to get every character. Above you may see a few cards from various other collaborations you might recognize.

I still play the game daily, still enjoy it, and still look forward to new content. I do however feel that while the game has done an extraordinary job of updating often enough to keep popular for a decade, that it has started to decline. I don’t know how much longer it will last, but I don’t doubt I’ll be playing until the day they close the servers 🙂

A Review In Three Photos

June 1st, 2023

Save The Whales

June 1st, 2023

Today Sue and I went to a place called Norah Head lighthouse, about a half hour south of Newcastle on the central coast.

It was a lovely and picturesque spot, and below the lighthouse was an expansive area of rockpools. Since it was low tide, we were free to explore them at our leisure.

We saw some brave souls fishing from the edge of the rocks. Fools, some may call them, since they ignored the many warning signs and many fisherman are lost every year from being washed off rocks.

From up on the cliffs near the lighthouse, and only minutes after we arrived, we saw out to sea many sights like this one:

Can you see the little black dot? Here’s a zoomed-in view:

It’s a breaching humpback! The east coast of Australia at this time is ‘humpback highway’ since whales are in the middle of migration north from Antarctica. I had read it was ‘easy’ to see whales off the east coast at this time of year but we were unprepared for just how easy it was!

These are extremely zoomed-in snaps of different whales, but we spotted them dozens and dozens of times in the hour or so we were on the rocks. It’s hard to saw how many different whales we saw, but at one point there were clearly four surfacing at once in different spots. Sue says we saw fifty, and far be it from to suggest that’s an exaggeration 🙂

Afterwards we had some fish and chips for lunch and headed to a lookout further south that we had read was a better whale-spotting point… but saw none there! No worries though, since we had been so lucky before lunch. It was a remarkable experience in a beautiful location 🙂

Ramen 22: The Power And The Chook

May 31st, 2023

Incredibly, I found four more as-yet-unreviewed chicken ramen noodles! Let’s get to tasting…

Coles Chicken Brown Rice Noodles (283 Calories, 3.4 g fat, 1470 mg sodium)

This was very good! I was still a little jet-lagged when I tried this one and the rich broth and tasty noodles gave me an energy injection. If I lived here in Australia, I’d eat this one again: 8/10

Supreme Noodles Chicken Noodle Cup (372 Calories, 13.7 g fat, 1610 mg sodium)

By comparison this was absolutely terrible. Wretched stringy noodles and a bit of overly-salty flavoring led to a woeful ‘meal’ that belongs in the bin. A miserable 1/10.

Coles Chicken Instant Noodles (1285 kJ, 13.4 g fat, 1095 mg sodium)

I had the brick version of this last year and it is at best acceptable. This is a ramen you’d eat to stay alive but not ever choose. I’ll give it bonus points for the abundance of veggies but as an uninspired example it’s only worth about 5/10.

Maggi Wholegrain Chicken 2-Minute Noodles (960 kJ, 1.3 g fat, 900 mg sodium)

Brick noodles seem less common here than in the USA, and chicken examples are quite rare. This unusual wholegrain version of Maggi chicken noodles are very low in fat and sodium, and I enjoyed them quite a lot. A good chicken taste combined with some slightly chewy noodles meant a nice dinner after a 35,000 step walk on a sunny day. I’ll probably eat this one again: 8/10

And so the series that I thought ended years ago racked up yet another installment. Could there one day be another (which would introduce the 60th noodle)? I hope so, and I know you do too 🙂

The Usual Suspects

May 28th, 2023

Name: Mum
Motto: “Be careful”
Strength: Her friends
Weakness: Painting dragons on walls

Name: Sue
Motto: “Be kind”
Strength: “I’m a worker bee!”
Weakness: Insecurity

Name: Adam
Motto: “If not now, then when?”
Strength: Endless curiosity
Weakness: Low HP