Sadly (and ironically!), it’s only a shadow of its predecessor. The extra dimension should have added more possibilities to the puzzles; instead, as far as I can tell, every single puzzle in the game is solvable via a straightforward strategy of looking at a single numbered line in isolation, coloring/removing blocks based on the number on that line (taking into account whether it’s circled/squared or not, of course), changing lines, and repeating the process. In particular, you never have to consider interactions between lines, which you had to do all the time in the 2D incarnation. I say “as far as I can tell” both because I might have made a mistake on a puzzle I solved and because I gave up in boredom halfway through the “hard” puzzles; maybe there’s something more interesting waiting at the end, but, if so, they waited far too long to show it.

The interface isn’t great, either. It’s not that hard to accidentally delete a block you didn’t intend to; if you do so, there’s no way to undo that, so you have to either start the puzzle over from scratch or forgo the pleasure of solving the puzzle honestly. And, in what I assume is an attempt to compensate for the triviality of the puzzles, they have a prominent timer; I don’t mind that as an occasional variant, but not as a constant presence.

Fortunately, there are several good puzzle games available for the iPhone/iPad, so I’m not feeling puzzle-starved. But I wish this one had turned out differently.

Plants vs. Zombies HD

I’d gone through the computer version of Plants vs. Zombies a month or two before buying the iPad. It was great, but using the touchpad was a bit frustrating at times, enough so that I couldn’t complete a few of the minigames that demanded fast mouse action.

The iPad, however, doesn’t have that problem, so I bought Plants vs. Zombies HD as soon as I got the device. And it too is great: even though I’d just been playing a different version of the game, I dived right back in, went through the story mode twice, finished all of the minigames, and earned all of the achievements except for 40 levels of endless zombies. (Liesl also replayed the game on the iPad.) It’s my preferred version of the game: while I slightly prefer the puzzle mix on the computer versions (in particular, the extra Zombies vs. Plants levels), that’s only a slight difference, and the better controls more than make up for it.

Flight Control HD

I figured I should go through some of the popular app store games, and Flight Control HD was my first choice there. After all, it sounded like a perfect match of control scheme to the device: what could be better than the iPad for a game where you’re tracing out landing routes for planes?

And, indeed, the controls are great. But the gameplay is great, too. For endless puzzle games like this, the big question is balance: how long will you be able to play while in the range where you’re feeling challenged, like things could go wrong at any moment, but where if you execute well you’ll survive the challenge. And Flight Control HD keeps me in the zone as well as any game I can think of: there’s only one gameplay mode where I feel I can play forever if I don’t screw up, while there aren’t any gameplay modes where I feel that it just gets too hard for me too fast. They also vary the tension nicely within the play session, sending planes at you in gradually rising/falling waves, so you don’t have the lack of breathing room of, say, Tetris.

I’m still picking up this game periodically to play it at odd moments, and I bet that I’ll be doing that a year from now. Liesl’s played it more than I have, and various guests (especially Liesl’s dad) have quite enjoyed it as well.

Angry Birds HD

Given my experiences with Flight Control HD, I thought I should try other popular iPad games, and Angry Birds HD was my next choice. And it’s charming enough, and was fun for the first few levels, but I got tired pretty quickly. It’s a physics-based puzzle game, but I never got the feeling that I’d had mastered, or even could master, the physics: changing my launch point by a pixel or two would significantly affect the outcome (in fact, I’m not convinced that there isn’t randomness even if you launch from the identical location), so rather than thinking about a level and experimenting until I found the correct approach, I would instead basically do the same thing over and over again, and eventually it would work.

It also gates levels very strongly: you can’t play a level until you’ve solved the preceding one. Which I think is a bad idea (I’d much rather have them gated by, say, the number of stars you’ve earned), though in practice it didn’t bother me too much because I didn’t end up getting stuck. That probably would have happened eventually, but I gave up on the game before I got to that point.

Nikoli Puzzle Games

I’ve been a fan of Nikoli’s books of puzzles for a while, so I was really excited to see them bring their puzzles to the iPhone. They still don’t have iPad-specific versions of their puzzles, but I’m including them here anyways, because they are much more pleasant to control on the larger screen. (Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t relish having larger puzzles on the iPad, even though that would mean smaller UI elements: 10×10 puzzles are nice but don’t give you enough to chew on.)

As of this writing, they’ve introduced three of their puzzle types: Akari, Shikaku, and Nurikabe, with a free version plus four paid versions of each. But that’s constantly changing: they seem to average releasing more puzzles about once a month. The three puzzle types they’ve chosen so far all work quite well with a touch interface; Shikaku’s controls are particularly soothing.

Piczle Lines

Piczle Lines is another iPhone puzzle game that controls noticeably better on the iPad. It’s not quite as pure as the Nikoli games (in particular, there are puzzles with multiple solutions), but the core puzzle game play is solid, and the slight seasoning of a story mode turns out to work well. I really wasn’t planning to start playing it now, given that I’m not done with Picross 3D yet, but I downloaded it on a lark and it’s managed to hook me fairly well. (And I think it’s the better of those two games…) Incidentally, it’s free with additional puzzle packs that you can purchase in-game (and that you can transfer across devices up to a limit of five or so); that strikes me as the correct model for this sort of thing, I hope Nikoli follows suit.

So that’s what I’ve been playing; any recommendations for what I should try next? I’m hoping soon to find time to use Frotz to play through some text adventures; I’m a bit surprised that it’s made it through Apple’s approval process (I thought downloading interpreted code violated their Terms of Service), but I’m certainly not complaining…

Or at least mostly okay. In the earlier games, your responsibility as a defense attorney wasn’t to prove that there was reasonable doubt as to whether the defendant had committed the crime: you instead had to prove that some other specific person must have committed it. Given that, you’d think that acting as a prosecutor would be a piece of cake: you’d just have to build up a not-hopelessly threadbare case, and you’d be set. Which would, I suppose, lead to a morally and ludicly unsatisfying game, so the designers took a different path: the investigations didn’t take place in courtrooms, but instead took place in other settings where there was another prosecutor present, typically one with more power than Edgeworth, and who wanted to railroad somebody whom Edgeworth was on the side of. So it ended up with Edgeworth switching roles, acting more like a defense attorney.

Which, on one level, was a bit unsatisfying: if they’d found a way to pull it off, I would have preferred a bigger break. But I’m not exactly sure how they could have pulled off a real role reversal within the game’s legal system while leaving the protagonist sympathetic. And Edgeworth did do more ferreting out corruption than I remember Phoenix Wright doing, so from that point of view he did show prosecutorial virtues.

The mechanics looked a little more different, but ultimately ended up being functionally quite similar to those in the earlier games as well. Instead of switching back and forth between a half-dozen or so different areas in the city gathering evidence, you’d move around one or, occasionally, two rooms, looking at different items in the rooms, with key items (e.g. a murder victim’s body) expanding into a view that looked very similar to the views in the previous game. And, rather than having at most one NPC to talk to in each area, you had several NPCs to talk to, all in the same room. So the upshot is that you had about the same amount of stuff to look at, the same number of people to talk to, but there was less mindless clicking to go from place to place, and almost none of the hoping that you’d somehow triggered an action in location A by performing an unrelated action in location B.

Another key aspect of the design of games in the series is how it presents a search space for you to navigate in when finding the correct next action. The designers have continued to stay away from the very large single search space that largely characterized the second and third games, which helps reduce the frustration when you’re stuck and doing an exhaustive search; and they’ve continued their practice of introducing a separate search space in the form of a new mechanic, this time in the form of logical deductions based on separate pieces of evidence. Which, I thought, worked rather well: the new mechanic is a natural one (we’ve all been frustrated when playing the earlier games that we can’t just point out connections that are staring us in our face), and the search space for the new mechanic is always small enough that you never get stuck. So, yay for progressive refinement: I won’t say that this is hugely superior to the way the mechanics of earlier games played out, but it’s certainly no worse, and is a pleasant change of pace while leaving the series’s core game mechanics solidly in place.

And then there are the characters: as always, it’s nice to visit old friends. Edgeworth has certainly learned the lessons of the first characters; Gumshoe’s vulnerabilities show a bit more than before. Most interesting to me, actually, was the portrayal of Franziska von Karma: you see her as a tough but vulnerable young teenager, you see her as older and having learned a few lessons. (And, of course, you see her whip over and over again.)

The upshot is a game that fits rather more strongly within the existing contours of the Ace Attorney series than I expected. But I like those contours, and I like the different angles on those contours that tweaks to the series continue to provide. We’re five games into the series, and it’s still very much on my must-buy list; there aren’t too many other series that I can say that about.

Not a lot has been written about this game, but I did enjoy Harry Milonas’s musical take on it. And this Edgeworth/von Karma anime music video is rather charming…

My verdict: absolutely the right choice. Everything that I expected to work well did in fact work well; several things worked better than expected, and there was one complete surprise. And that was without my reading books on it: as I shift to electronic books, I expect its advantage to grow.

The advantages started when I was packing. Normally, whenever I’m going on a trip, I stuff my backpack full of books and electronics. This time, my backpack weighed at most half of what it normally does on a trip: lighter electronics and, even though I didn’t end up taking advantage of it, the availability of electronic books meant that I didn’t have to worry about potentially running out of reading to material. (JIT reduces queues.)

And then, when I was on the plane, I was reading a (paper) copy of The Progressive, noticed some bits that might deserve quoting, and I remembered the WordPress app’s offline mode; so I decided to draft a blog post right there. I was still getting used to the iPad keyboard, but it worked just fine; and the smaller size of the iPad compared to a laptop meant that it was easier to use in cramped airport quarters.

In fact, that was the major issue that this trip resolved for me: the iPad is a fully capable machine for writing blog posts, as evidenced by the fact that I wrote almost 6500 words of blog posts on the trip. I did bring a wireless keyboard in my suitcase, but 4000 of those words were written on the iPad’s software keyboard, and it would have been fine if I hadn’t had the physical keyboard at all. (Incidentally, the WordPress app is somewhat buggy; it’s obviously very useful for offline work, but for online work, I ended up using the regular web interface as often as not, once I learned that you can use two-finger scrolling to scroll panes in it.)

For gaming, the iPad worked great, better than the iPhone ever has for me. The Nikoli iPhone apps control rather better when blown up in size (though I still very much hope Nikoli produces iPad-native versions with larger puzzles), and Plants vs Zombies HD and Flight Control HD are both lots of fun. The platform is obviously very young, and I don’t get the impression that there are a huge number of other games on it that I would enjoy as much as those ones, but for me, the larger real estate is making a big difference, and I imagine that many game developers feel the same way.

And it also worked well as an e-mail reading machine—I checked my work e-mail periodically during the conference, and I could make it through a couple hundred e-mails pretty quickly. (I occasionally wished for an undo button there, though.) And, as I’ve already noted, it works shockingly well as an RSS reader. In both of those cases, the main lesson was: hold the iPad vertically, with only one item at a time visible, and you’ll really be able to focus.

I bought the 3G model, but I ended up not activating a 3G subscription, because both my hotel and the conference had good Wifi. Still, that’s an advantage that the iPad has over my laptop; there were times on vacation last summer that I wished I had 3G on my laptop, and it may well come in handy this summer’s vacation, too.

So: a great choice. Which, incidentally, I wasn’t the only one making: during sessions I frequently was sitting at a table with three iPad users and two or three laptop users. Maybe I was at non-representative sessions, but it felt to me like there were actually more iPads at the conference than Windows laptops, which I never would have expected.

(And, after I hit publish on this post, I will turn off this computer and spend the rest of the evening using my iPad instead. Well, actually, I’ll probably sneak in some time playing Edgy too…)

One thing that helped was that guests brought two of the side dishes. Another thing that helped was that we did some of the cooking on previous days. Which is a double-edged sword: we’re not exactly perky and bustling with energy evenings after work, so it’s not always a good idea to offload work to weekdays. In this case, though, it was the right move: on Tuesday, Liesl made cranberry-orange relish, which basically means dumping cranberries, an orange, and sugar in a food processor. And on Wednesday, Liesl made the dough for the pie crust (I didn’t realize how easy that is), and I made the marquise au chocolat (I should post the recipe for that some time; like many good chocolate desserts, it’s a simple preparation of high-quality ingredients), neither of which took as much as half an hour.

So on Thanksgiving all we had to do was finish the pie (pecan pie, so basically dump a bunch of things together, mix them, and put them in the pie crust), make the other side dish (a spinach dish that was made much much easier by our buying pre-cleaned baby spinach. We should get into the habit of making fresh spinach dishes much more often, given the availability of that stuff), and make a double recipe of the following:

2 pounds skirt steak, about 1/2 inch thick, cut into twelve 4-inch-long pieces
12 slices prosciutto
12 fresh sage leaves
1 pound pancetta, cut into 1-inch cubes
olive oil, salt, pepper
skewers

Put a piece of prosciutto and a sage leaf onto each slice of steak. Roll them up, and put them on the skewers, alternating with the pancetta cubes. Brush with olive oil; season with salt and pepper. Grill or broil, turning once, until the beef is medium-rare, about 3 minutes per side.

And even a doubled recipe of that is really easy, especially since I wasn’t, say, sweating about the fact that my pieces of beef were all different sizes. Really good, too, in ways that I’m not used to. For one thing, it’s the first time I’ve cooked with thick slices of pancetta. We had to go to a butcher to get it (we got the steak there, too); first time I’d been there, but I’ll be happy to do so again in the future. Thick pancetta turns out to be a quite different beast from the thin slices I’m used to: much more of an aroma, and you just can’t ignore the fact that, at times, you’re biting into a big chunk of fat. Which, normally, is a huge downer for me, but it wasn’t in this dish. Probably because of the broiling, which is something that we almost never do; the skirt steak was also much fattier than I’m used to cooking with, but I didn’t notice its fat at all while eating.

We had the meat too close to the broiler’s heating element, so it smoked up the place; fortunately, our smoke alarm is not hyper-sensitive. (No way to turn it off, and it’s wired to the townhouse complex, so if it goes off you will at a minimum annoy your neighbors and at a maximum, if you don’t get on the phone soon enough, have fire engines at your doorstep.) Because of this, the beef ended up being a lot more rare than medium on the inside (though the outside looked lovely); it tasted delicious nonetheless. We really should use the broiler more.

So: easy food, which I think was more than good enough to stand up to almost any Thanksgiving I’ve had. And quite nice company. Followed by three more days of weekend. (Not that I don’t enjoy work, but the occasional break has its benefits.) And no gifts. What more could one want from a holiday?