Dedicated to Feathermint

Although you might remember me writing way back that Feathermint would be my pony name, it's also nowadays the name of my mobile phone. And that's what I'm going to write in lenghts of today. And phone accessories. And game apps. Since that's pretty much what my days have been about lately XD



First off, I've had some charms dangling from the back of my phone, more specifically from the speaker grill, against all warnings from Valentine. Well, just as Valentine predicted, the grill finally broke (I have a habit of playing with the charms constantly, which might not have helped at all...), leaving me with a very dull looking phone. So, off to Ebay we go, looking for a replacement, since Fyrd forbid my phone must have dangly cute things ^_^

Found a store in UK that had many nice covers for my S3 mini. I tried to peer at the pictures to determine whether they were selling the actual battery covers, or just protective covers, which only have holes in places of camera/speaker/etc. and hence would not help me with my conundrum. Picked a few, placed the order and they got here very quickly. Too bad they were protective covers >_< Still cute, but not the remedy I was in immediate need for.

Well, dug up some more, found actual battery cover and just waiting whether my bid wins today or if I have to buy them from yet another store. And then to wait until it arrives...

Luckily by this time, I had also stopped to think about how Samsung had thought that phone charms would be connected to their device. Well, might very well be that they had not even thought it necessary to have them at all, but I then remembered that charms plugged into the headphone slot were now pretty popular. I had dismissed them before, since I would have to remove charms if I then wanted to listen to music with the device. But since I had not actually listened to music from my phone for ages and I wanted the charms more that this minor inconvenience would harm me, I searched for my plug piece and voila! I have charms again. And a cute protective cover that looks like a nibbled chocolate bar. And another case as a spare that has cute romantic roses. (I don't know what's up with me and roses lately...) I still want that battery cover, just because I hate having broken things.

Well then, Feathermint looks good, and looks very much like my phone should look like ;) But what's inside? As I said, I don't really use it as a MP3 player anymore. And when Velvet asked me what Apps I use, to find some fun little apps for her own device, I replied with a very boring answer: I only really use social media apps (Flickr and FB mostly, then Skype, Tumblr), the useful apps (Gmail, my bank's app, calendar, calculator, clock) and then some games.

As I've written before, I've been very much into HoDA lately, but my love for it has quickly gone cold. Playing the game is more like a nuisance now and it gives me more of a headache than pleasure. I've mastered all the quest nodes of the game and the only thing left for me to actually do and achieve is collecting all the available characters. And this has been made almost impossible... I'm constantly struggling with my roster limit, and with every new character I (finally) find/get the limit is squeezing me even tighter. And now my patience with the constant false promises from the developers is running thin... They promised updates "soon" and "in  a few weeks" in the middle of Feb, and we're still waiting. Now they told that updates would be early April, but I'm not holding my breath, since the "imminent" news on upcoming updates "today" was posted a few days later. And now that they are falsely advertising their pay-to-get character packs, I'm glad I've not spent more than 2$ on this game. There is just so much greed from the developers, with so little given for the money spent. A digital character that you can't even keep forever is not worth 80$ for me...

So I needed to find some new games and then ventured to my other favourite universe: Star Wars. I found this fun new App game Little Death Star and have been delighted to play for over a week now. You can see a screencap of my bustling Death Star at the top of this post.

Firstly, the game has no refill bars so that once you've played your energies, you have to wait for a designated amount of time for the bars to refill again. Sure there are time-based things in the game (your supplies stock and sell for set periods, and building new levels take time), but even when waiting for those to complete, you can still do stuff in game. There are constantly "bitizens" coming through, and you might find a new rare character come in, which in turn might unlock new special scenes for you or help with your Death Star as a VIP or decorator.

Secondly, the game pays in the background when you log out. So the Death Star is still making credits even if you take your eyes off it. So after a few hours you can come back with the Emperor announcing that the Star has made thousands of credit while you were away.

And then it's just purely fun game to watch. There are some little jokes on Star Wars, as in Darth Vader giving you a mission because he was behind schedule and then yelling at you because now you are late on that assignment XD All the characters are rendered into 8bit very cutely and the 8bit version of SW music is very nice. The game also plays smoothly, with very few crashes and very little frustration with mechanics.

You can of course pay real money to speed things up, but it's not as blatantly needed as with HoDA. You get a nice flow of Bux (the currency purchaseable by $$/€€) by free anyways. If I enjoy this game for another few weeks, I might spend some money on it anyway, if only to get some nice outfits for my bitizens (whereas my ingame earnex Bux go towards upgrading my elevator...).

The game also advertised to me Star Wars Assault Team, which I downloaded and tried yesterday. It seems like a collecting card game with more sophisticated PvE system than HoDA, where you get some Star Wars characters, can upgrade them and then take them to play events (or against other players, which I haven't tried yet). The battles are turn based and you can control every action your characters make.

I didn't go through the whole tutorial portion yesterday, since I really prefer simpler games like LDS, but since I'm home sick today anyway, I might give it another go. The graphics were nice even on my little phone, the system pretty easy to grasp and no hiccups to be found so far.

Well then, I'm now off to see if my Cantina is stocked and whether some bloody Rebel spies have infiltrated my Pet Emporium...