2017-12-21 10:04:02

In terms of six swords, I'm afraid I'm having trouble finding any rewards at all.
I can go and beat up  jackals or horned cats or something, and occasionally I see a cave complex I can 
enter however the rewards for defeating them are just xp, no gold, and judging by level costs it takes a hell of a lot of xp to get anywhere. I did find a few gold when i ran into a goblin, but those are few and far between, and most other humanoid monsters I've met I need to runaway from since they're waaay to tough for me to deal with. This also limits the amount of teretory I can explore since too far from the starting location and I run into nasty things I can't do anything about.

In the six swords topic in new releases it said something about going to castles for bounties, but the only castle I found had nothing in it.

I've been to villages, but villages have either inns with nobody in them (the text said something about listening to rumours or buying drinks but I didn't find anything), empty temples with a healing pool I cannot enter, or shops full of armour, weapons and potions I cannot afford.

I am also not sure what exactly the point of having an active companion is, or if there are any tactics at all beyond wait and see if the gods of random numbers are on your side. Most party members have a couple of weapons and use them randomly, and I'm not sure which are best for which stats or even how to tell a party member to prefer one weapon over another.

I am sure there is an awesome rpg in there somewhere, but at the moment I'm having  getting into it, and my motivation for trying given I've not seen anything beyond single named monsters probably isn't as high as it could be (I'd love some quests, awesome monster descriptions, interesting stuff to find while exploring  etc).

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-12-21 11:59:03

@Dark

I got the Azabyt crosswords because I was having difficulty finding non cryptic crossword sources here in the US. At this point I've pretty much given up on Spoonbill's crosswords game for that reason.

2017-12-21 12:28:03

@Orko, Mrs. Dark has the same issue, she's finished all of the none criptic crosswords for spoonbill and is looking for more.

I did find this page which has a lot of none criptic stuff for download, so you might want to give them a try.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-12-21 13:25:25 (edited by Orko 2017-12-21 17:12:03)

@Dark, Thanks!

One thing about Alexa I find very frustrating and that is that several times a week I'll be in the middle of a game and out of the blue Alexa says, "I'm sorry but I'm having trouble accessing your skills right now." and the game abruptly ends, sometimes you loose all your progress, or if you try again later it says you've already played the day's game and to come back tomorrow.

2017-12-21 17:23:08

1. the monsters don't change based on location on the world map directly, but they do get stronger the farther you get from the road. Monsters are pretty easy if you stay on the roads.

2. Castles, forts, and outposts, don't have bounties quite like you are thinking. You go into them and go into the office portion of them. There you can look at stuff like a bulletin board (I've only been to forts and they tend to have 3 dungeons listed separated by the "more" command.) that tells the location of a dungeon and how much gold you will get for clearing it out. For example, it will say "You will receive 4000 gold for clearing out a dungeon 16 miles to the north and 3 miles to the west) which gives you directions to the dungeon in question. complete the dungeon and go back to the fort, castle, or outpost, which will specifically have those words in their name, just as you can tell a lot about a town depending on whether it is a city, town, village, or hamlet, which tells you the general quality of items you can find in the shops  and how many establishments there'll be in the city, with hamlets usually having 2-3, villages have 6 or so, towns have 10 or so and cities usually have at least one of every type of shop, several temples, often a bardic college which allows you to customize the narration voice, (I'm working with the high-elven female accent.)

3. If you cleared out a monster-infested castle, you will later, with money, be able to claim it as your own, a lot of smart monsters like orcs, goblins, and stuff like that actually carry deeds to different castle structures that dramatically reduce the cost of improving your castles. (note I just know this from listening around taverns, reading the help stuff, and paying attention to the news each time I get on.) Was particularly tickled when I found plans for the Dressing Room on some orcs.

4. The game taking a very long time to make progress is definitely a thing I've noticed too. Though I played it a ton yesterday, I  still only have some of my party 1/2 the way to level two and the others aren't to that "milestone" yet. But if you save up for magic items at stores, you'll be fine as that seems to matter a lot. Also, if you're like me, you got a lot of cruddy starting characters when you started the game and even if it holds back your Xp growth a little, you'll want to find better ones at various hiring halls around the world. Despite the fact they are called hiring halls, taking a character from one is free.

and for getting money, if the map isn't randomized, head south. I did and there are fire mephitis around. They tend to attack you solo and are easily driven away though they get two attacks per round and hit kind-of-hard. You scare one away, or better yet, kill one and they drop upwards of 100 a piece and they aren't shabby on experience either if you manage to kill it. You can find them on the road.

(I'm not sure if you noticed, but a lot of times you can say "more" after a little blippy sound to listen to more info, you can usually do that 3 times at a tavern, the buying drinks is just flavor as far as I know. Also, most shops, particularly in big cities, have more than just 3 things for sale and the cruddier stuff is on later pages, again... "more." and if you keep saying it it will give you the stats to a point and weight as well as name and price.

The temples can do special things for you, but only after you do favors for the respective God worshipped there. For example, you can get special bonuses, healing, and recently-added, free magic weapons by going to a temple after you have cleared out a dungeon that is a temple. For example, I know where there is an overgrown Srhine to Jupiter that is a dungeon crawling with Undead. If I were to clear it, I could then go to an active temple in a city dedicated to Jupiter and receive a special prize, though I think the prize is random, though you also get access to the pool after you please a god enough.

I hope that answers some of your questions and issues.

Also curious to how six Swords kids is different than the normal one.

2017-12-21 17:34:20

also forgot another thing about having a active companion. It serves a couple purposes. Your active companion always goes first in a round of battle. 2. active companions are easier to manage their inventories if you try to say "Equip X with Y" and Alexxa doesn't hear the name clearly, she'll just do whatever you were trying to do to your active character. This has proven quite frustrating at times. So here's a little tip I found about inventory management that took me over an hour to figure out.

1. If you have a list of inventory items that are similar in name such as "Shortbow" and "+1 Shortbow" Alexxa will only hear "shortbow" even if you add the +1 part at the beginning. If you are trying to give a character a +1 shortbow and you have regular ones  earlier in your inventory list. Give all the extra shortbows to characters that can use them, even doubling up where possible, until all the crappy stuff you don't want is equipped. Then equip the shortbow you do want on who you intended. Then take shortbows from the characters you gave them to that you don't intend to use. In truth, it is probably better you sell things when you no longer need them while you are at stores that will buy them, or unload at gypsy camps which will purchase any item.

Oddly, the lack of specificity of paying attention to full names doesn't cross over to equipped items, only into equipping them in the first place. So if a character has a +1 large shield and a +2 large shield and you say "Take +2 large shield." It will get it right.

2017-12-22 08:28:43

Hi Bookrage, thanks for the tips.
I gave the game another try today, but progress is moving rather like a tortoise.


I did find a shrine, but got my first party all killed within two  rounds  four skeletons (three were still up by the end of the first round, talk about extreme!).

Upon trying again I have got a little further The only castle I found has nothing in it at all, just three empty  rooms and nothing to do, the castle wass
called castle of the falcons of the stick"  so I wondered if it was another players guild hall or something, but either way there was nothing I could do with it.


I did find the bounties list,  the first bounty I checked lead me to another shrine, and after nearly dying again I gave up on that one. Upon my way to the second I ran into 8 orcs who nearly killed me, then 26 huge rats who also nearly killed me, so methinks I'll give up on that one too.

I have cleared out a good few cave complexes, but I am getting a little tired of finding nothing in them and also earning experience that goes no where.
The only practical good I seem to have done is one fight I got with two orcs which gave me eleven coins anda mark permit, but  since I can't get the game to examine specific items I have no idea what this permit thing is for.

I also cannot read the news at all, since though when it starts six swords tells me to say news to find out about the latest updates, it does not recognize the word "news", neither does it recognize "read the news", "latest news", "latest updates", or "read the bloody news you moron!" big_smile.


I probably wouldn't be as frustrated if the game had a little more text to it, since I find simply  around well described landscapes and examining fascinating monsters can keep my interest even if I am having to grind,  when a game just says "you encounter x amount of single name enemy" it just doesn't give me much of a sense of exploration or progress.

Any thoughts? As I said I definitely! think there is an awesome rpg in there somewhere, I just wish I could get to it a little more.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-12-22 13:51:09

I'm glad you two started talking more about six swords because, based on what you've said, I disabled it. The game sounds very frustrating if not unfinished, and while I do play some RPGs, they aren't my favorite game genre.

2017-12-22 16:57:58

I don't get the  impression that six swords isn't finished, but I do suspect it is one of these games where you have to know how things work in order to get some good out of it. It reminds me in some ways of  the times I've played  old dos rpgs such as Fallthru.
With those sorts of games, there is a learning urve that is fairly steep, and usually involves frustration, but said frustration tends to be rewarded eventually when you know  where to go, how to progress etc.

Indeed, Fallthru at the beginning really! got on my nurves (especially for it's highly clunky parsing), now it's one of the major games I miss having  access to on my 64 bit system. 
So, hopefully Bookrage can shed some light on this.


Lol, I was just about to give my thoughts on some of the rpg games I have seen on Amazon, but since I've already done that in the  mini reviews on the list I'll be lazy and just let you have a look at that, though any questions about the games on the list feel free to ask, since I have personally tried all of them.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-12-22 19:27:21

there isn't a lot of handholding I'll give you, but I have a couple more tips that some dungeon crawling has given me as I've now cleared two shrines.

1. If you are in a dungeon, such as a shrine, temple, cave complex, or abandoned castle, if you come upon a really big batch of monsters and you don't think you can beat them. Fight them and kill a couple. As your heroes begin to fall, retreat to a room you've already cleared or one you know to be empty. Rest until you are full strength again and go back. For example, if you fight 15 orcs, and kill 7 of them before you are forced to retreat,  when you re-enter that room after resting there will only be 8. you suffer no penalties for any of this. The one exception is with some strong undead that can steal your levels off you where of course that can be a more permanent problem (though you can get that fixed by getting healed by a god that likes you for clearing their holy places.) The enemies will not follow you. In temple they will say, "the gods are smiling on you." when you have cleared it.

Also, there is a very hefty XP boost for finishing a bounty and reporting back to the fort/outpost/castle you got it from.  I made some enormous jumps in level today in the course of an hour and a half (bringing all but one of my characters to level 2 and 3 of them halfway to level 3) of playtime from the somewhat more challenging monsters in the temples plus the bonuses for the bounties. Plus I'm filthy stinking rich now.

Also, with bounties, the cheapest ones are the easiest. I can do a 1000 gold one easy, but a 4000 one is still well beyond my capabilities, so go cheap and play it safe.

Also, to be honest, I think Orco is right in saying that it is not quite finished, but that is not a bad thing as I see it. Six Swords is Massively-single player because although you don't interact directly with other mercenary companies, you are able to visit their castles and there are several ways you compete, including building castles, earning badges, and trying to kill every type of monster in the game, explore as many dungeons as possible, go as far as you can from your starting location, visit every town, and many others. The game has a major content update almost every week, such as the divine weapons, new kinds of castle structures to build, and Gypsy caravans (little shops and fortune tellers that move about on the map rather than being in one specific place like towns are.) all in the past 3 weeks. Don't think of it quite like  you would a game that is finished, think of it as more of an mmo game. Also the creator is trying to find ways that things in the game will be procedurially generated rather than deliberately set out as they are now completely written into place. I'm not sure if that has started yet but I epect it is coming. The updating on the game is very rapid and frequent.

2017-12-22 19:41:39

oh, sorry Dark didn't see all of your post. Here's a bit more.

I have no idea why the news isn't working for you. It works fine for me. You have to wait until the narrator is done talking before you say anything though.

2. I wish there were more descriptions of the monsters too, but being a D&D buff and most of the monsters  coming from there, I know what they look like.

3. There actually is more description  of scenery to a point, but you have to use the 'more command."

4. The castle you were in was probably a player castle, that name sounds like one of the random generated names given to adventuring parties.
5. don't try the shrines until you have 6 GOOD mercenaries and each one has at least one magic item, either weapon or armor (magic stuff usually has a +# or some special thing to its name.), or you're gonna get stomped, even in the easy ones. You'll want all your guys to have upwards of 8-11 hp at the least and have no low physical stats. Strength, constitution, and Dexterity should all  be 14 at the lowest and the other two ought to be higher if that's the case. If you are going to drop a character to switch them out, strip them of their equipment first in case the new guy you hire has craptacular starting equipment. If you have exceptional non-magical equipment like really good armor  you don't need to follow the magic rule I gave you. You'll want their mental stats "Charisma, Intelligence, and Wisdom," to not bee too bad and at least 2 of those should be 10 or higher. March around the roads from town to town to find some good characters.

6. I'm not sure how to examine items myself. I usually scroll through the info in shops and commit the stats such as damage and stuff to memory, guessing at things like the word "flaming." and so on.

7. If you sell those permits, I imagine you could make quite the profit, they certainly cost a lot when I find them at the gypsy camps. I might sell the deeds and permits I have myself come to think of it. They are to help you build castle parts. I have no castle at this point myself and am more interested in getting some nice magic items first.

2017-12-22 21:11:32

Well added a few more skills to the list, so people can check them out.

Thanks bookrage I'll  bare those tips in mind, though i've not managed to get the rest command to work either, the program  usually assumes I say "west" or something, indeed even though I did get a message about needing to sleep at one stage I sort of assumed this was flavour text  since I couldn't get a rest command to work.
Ditto with the  news.

I've seen some of the descriptions related to the moe command, though they don't say much, and also some of them seem a little odd in terms of your surroundings. ;

I do hope the game's interface at lest gets tightened up a bit since while moving, fighting and the more command are fine, others such as rest and news don't seem to be, and the game could really do with a bit more going on I think, indeed procedural generated content might be a good thing since as I said right now it's difficult to find much I can do but wander around the roads and fight.

i'll give things another bash however, though as Mrs. dark and I are at my parents now and  space is a bit more  limited I'll probably have to wait a bit.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-12-22 22:10:43 (edited by Orko 2017-12-22 22:12:55)

World Detective sounds like it was inspired by the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? geography game.

And even though I voted for him because I trusted him more than I did Hilary Clinton, I love the Trump versus Humanity game!

2017-12-22 22:29:17

@dark, I don't have a bit of trouble getting it to understand me at all except for one little bug, and the rest command is sort of a necessity and the News is really important to keeping up with stuff.

Do you have your alexxa near anything that produces any ambient noise? or how close are you when you play. I don't use my chess table so I have the device on the corner of that but I'm usually no more than 7-8 feet at the most away when I'm giving commands and I'm facing directly towards it. I can tell you that things can be screwed up on it if you are listening to music or the TV at the same time.

You probably speak clearly but maybe I think you said you're British and maybe it doesn't get that voice accent as well?

Also maybe try the following for a couple of the commands. Most of them have a few separate words that work.

Instead of rest, say "sleep" instead, they have the same effect and even I find that the thing is more responsive to sleep.
2. instead of  saying "news" say "updates" or "new features" the effect is the same and then say "more" to scroll through the most recent stuff.
3. "buy" does not work to purchase stuff you actually need to say "purchase" when in the shop. "sell" however works.
"look" and "surroundings" are pretty useful commands.
4. say "who" to get into your party information and "about" for your big game stats.

Also to Orco, the game "world Detective" really does seem like a Carmen Sandiego-style game.

2017-12-22 22:34:03

oh, and the bug I mentioned, sometimes the game for me will get stuck and go quiet for about 20 seconds and then Alexxa will say "you might want to [command example]" or suggest a command action basically and then it will accept my commands again but there will be some time where it does nothing and won't listen to me. It can be a bit of a pain because it seems at first like my Echo is losing connection to the internet, which is frequently does despite our great internet and router.

2017-12-23 03:08:32

Here's another game I discovered, it a follow up to Yes, Sire. and is called Yes, Mr. President, as it's name suggests you are the president of the United States and are tasks with running the country.

2017-12-23 14:31:26

@Orko, annoyingly  Yes Mr. president isn't available on the Uk  amazon store.  as I said earlier and n the list, though I'm  tempted to  volley games and suggest they remove the region lok since my lady would love to play it, and  so long as it didn't get too heavily into Us political stuff it should be fine over here.

@Bookrage,  nope, I was playing six swords in a completely quiet room, sitting about six feet away from the alexa, though even sitting in a chair next to it made no difference. Itried sleep and it didn't work, I also tried  updates, though i didn't try new features.
It could be an accent thing, but then again, my echo's default language is set to English uk (one reason my lady is having a little more  trouble making herself understood), so there should be some compensation.

I think the speech is just rather buggy, though I'll  give it another try and submit a  bug report if necessary .

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-12-23 15:32:16

again, haven't had any trouble on my end, and speech works brilliantly for me, but still look into it. Maybe you just got a bad download/enabling, try disabling and then enable it again?

2017-12-23 17:26:53 (edited by Orko 2017-12-23 17:28:16)

There is no download, the skills all run on remote servers , but if your WiFi signal is experiencing interference, that could cause speech recognition problems, try rebooting your Echo to force it to look for a clear channel.

2017-12-24 12:37:20

I doubt it's the wifi since I haven't had similar issues in other games, it just seems to be six swords, though I'll try again after christmas and if it is a problem I'll send in a bug report.
also played a couple more games and will be updating the alexa list.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-12-26 22:54:16

Updated the alexa list again with another one, Memory match.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-12-27 03:25:36

Hi.
So unexpectedly I just received an Echo Dot for christmas, and I'm loving dungeon adventure. 
Jepardy is proving surprisingly tricky!  Though it didn't help I hadn't heard of half the subjects today. smile

2017-12-27 07:28:07

@Dan  I will admit being married to an American definitely helps for a lot of ther  the questions since quite a few are Us specific big_smile.

Unfortunately, I submitted a bug report that double jeopardy wasn't working even though i had prime, and basically was told it's a known issue that is being worked on, Mrs Dark will enjoy it especially when  it is fixed I think.

Btw, updated the list again with another one, the  higher lower game. I'll be back at my flat on Thusday and there are a couple more adventure games I want to try, I also hope we see Dungeon crawler at some point that  people mentioned earlier (again perhaps someone can contact the developer).
i'd like to start updating the db with pages, for  Alexa games, since it's such an inherently accessible platform, though  being as Alexa seems available on multiple devices I'm not sure what the os is called for the platform section big_smile.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-12-27 12:54:55

@Dark

Double Jeopardy not working must be isolated to the UK because it works over here. I hope they get it fixed quickly, until they introduced the Double Jeopardy round I was considering disabling the Jeopardy skill, because only six questions per day wasn't enough.

When you get around to adding these games to the database, I'd suggest just calling the platform for these games Alexa. The servers the Alexa system runs on are more than likely running some form of Linux.

2017-12-27 15:07:30

If you've got double Jeopardy, it means you've got prime I think, but maybe that isn't available in UK fro some reason, I don't know. I love playing it every now and then. And if you have prime, you also can play days you missed in the week you missed them if you don't play every single day. For example if you missed Monday, you can play it on Tuesday-Sunday.