Every Day We're Shufflin'

I don't know a thing about party rocking (thanks, LMFAO), but at least one line out of their song holds true. ☺

As I've said in the Pokémon Day post a while back, I've only been able to consistently play one Pokémon game nowadays, and that is Pokémon Shuffle on my 3DS. With the business I'm undertaking within the next few days, this fact will seemingly hold true for a little longer. But that's not a bad thing, because the way Shuffle plays, it seems to lend itself to busy people like me.

Pokémon Shuffle, if you don't know it, is a puzzle game reminiscent of certain popular match-3 puzzle games that people in recent times play on their smartphone. And coincidentally, Shuffle is also available for smartphones as Shuffle Mobile, so even those without a 3DS can join in the fun. Like those other puzzle games, the gameplay is divided into stages corresponding to particular species or forms of Pokémon, and your objective is to engage them in puzzle combat with your Pokémon to defeat and catch them, so you can use them for future battles. Along the way you can use items and enhancements to help you and your Pokémon win battles.

The crucial point of playing all these stages is that they (mostly) depend on Hearts. Each time you play a stage, you expend one Heart, in rare cases more. You can regain one Heart every half an hour, and you can also buy or earn bonus Hearts and play those after you've depleted your timed Hearts. The beauty of this approach is that once I've run out of timed Hearts, I don't have to continue playing my bonus Hearts, and I can stop playing and go about my other business. When I'm done with my other business, I have a full set of timed hearts ready to deplete and then replete again as I move on to something else. In this way I can also multitask as I play.

While this seems to be also a common property of those other puzzle games, what makes Shuffle different is that it appears less tedious than the other games as its playing field is smaller (6 by 6) and you often work with less than 25 or so moves. Combined with the Heart system as above, this makes for a more pleasant and not-so-brain-breaking experience, which helps when I'm also busy with other things.

I'm going back to my business and Shuffle now, and perhaps within a few days we can shuffle... and perhaps try that party rocking thing again.