March 2008

Plate Spinner, as previously reported, will have 50 ranks and 5 badges. The badges will be awarded at ranks 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50; the badge names are as follows:

Rank 10: Cookie Chef
Rank 20: Muffin Master
Rank 30: Pie Paragon
Rank 40: Brownies Beyond Belief
Rank 50: Perfect Pastry Wizard

We’re about to switch our home page from Pogo.com to Pogo.co.uk here!

Last month, Pogo UK’s Letters to the Editor covered the lack of Valentine’s mini items, and this month Ed has apologized (or should we spell it ‘apologised’?) the lack of St. Patrick’s Day and Easter mini items.

Regarding the lack of Easter (and, for that matter, St Patrick’s Day) items in the Mini Mall, for this we can only apologise. We did plan to re-release some of last year’s items to allow folks to pick up some Easter goodies for the holiday. Unfortunately, due to, let’s call it an oversight, this plan wasn’t put into action… Our sincere apologies for this - we’ll be more vigilant in future!

So far, from Pogo’s US contingent, all we’ve received is near radio silence regarding mini items and a message that the editor will be on vacation this week. Tsk, tsk.

As far as the Easter version of Sweet Tooth 2 goes, only UK’s editor mentioned it, too, although it is themed on both sites.

Don’t forget to play No Limit Texas Hold’em, High Stakes Poker, and Big Shot Roulette today and every day until the 24th for 2,000 tokens each day as part of Pogo’s ongoing, monthly Casino Night.

The badges for Plate Spinner have been created. There are five of them, and some seem to correspond with the in-game (test) challenges leaked through various forums.

• Meet your quota without losing customers! (Customers are considered lost if they leave while waiting for an order.)

• Serve 100 customers!

• Serve 50 humans!

• Serve 20 elves!

• Serve 30 dwarves!

• Serve 10 wizards!

• Serve 30 trolls!

• Serve 5 lime cakes!

• Serve 20 grape desserts!

• Give out 5 flowers!

• Win 3 rounds without any waste! (Waste counts as items trashed, or desserts left over on trivets at the end of a round.)

Each badge features a character and a fruit-flavored baked good. The first one shows a human female and a cherry pie. The second has a male dwarf and a lemon muffin. The third is a male elf and a grape pie. The fourth has a male troll with a piece of lime cake. The fifth and final badge shows a wizard with a whole blueberry cake.

From the challenges listed and the look of these badges, it appears that this game will be very similar to Makeover Madness but with a few special challenges added.

Poppit! - Pandemonium Badge
Release 20 Panda Prizes this week!

You may be pretty sure the pandas are in hibernation after a while of trying for this badge, but persistence is key. You can release more than one panda per game, so you’ll be releasing a lot of prizes. Also, there is a Mix-n-Match “Poppin’ It” badge that challenges you to release 4,000 prizes in three weeks, so it’d be a good companion to activate while you’re working on Pandemonium. (Be forewarned — at 15 prizes per completed game, you might only completely 1/4 to 1/2 of the M&M challenge when you have completed this week’s challenge.)

Bingo Luau - Orchid Lei Badge
Get 20 Jackpot Spins this week!

This one’s pretty straightforward: whenever you cover enough balls to fill the SPIN meter, you’ll get a jackpot spin. It may not be the most competitive way to get this badge, but to save time you’ll want to play in the Cover All Sharing Rooms.

Here are some hints and tips for Mahjong Safari that we have come up with since its release a week ago:

• The secret badges don’t seem to be in the game yet. For more information on that, see our previous post about Mahjong Safari’s secret badges.

• If you can, play on Hard mode — you will get 4 safari animal sets to match per game (3 in Normal, 2 in Easy). When you quit out of the game, it will currently reset itself to easy mode, so be sure to take a look at what mode you are on when you first open a room.

• Match all of the same animal tiles (two matches, four tiles total) in order to get a 30 token bonus.

• You may need to adjust your screen resolution in order to see the tiles better. We prefer this game on 800×600 on our laptop screens!

• You will get more tokens by matching tiles in rapid succession. These are called “Combos”. The more Combos you make, the higher your score and therefore you’ll get higher tokens at the end of the game. (You get one token per 100 points of score.)

• When you match a mini-animal, a large graphic of that animal will appear. To quickly dismiss the graphic, click (or right-click) anywhere on the screen and it’ll disappear and you may continue playing.

• Check out the tilesets available as well as the animal tiles you have received from ranking up. Some may be easier for you to see than others and the easier they are to see, the faster you can match them. Matching faster brings in more tokens and more ranks!

• Early on, try to match the star tiles. Clearing these out will give you one of each kind of powerup to use later in the game. Powerups will help you continue if you run out of matches.

• Use the Long Line powerup to both increase your score and delay the need to use a Shuffle. You will lose your powerups at the end of each puzzle, so use them if you need them.

• In order to get a time bonus, solve the puzzle within 3 minutes on Hard mode.

• If you really want to rank up fast and don’t care about earning tokens, hit New Game as soon as you’ve matched all of the mini-animals in the puzzle.

During the development of Mahjong Safari, we’d reported that there were going to be two special badges along with the five game award/rank badges when the game was released. However, we’ve heard from several people who have played well beyond the requirements of 50,000 matches (for the ladybug tile badge) and 1,000 gifts (for the gift-wrapped package badge) and have not received the special badges.

 
Mahjong Safari “Secret” Badges

The two badges are physically located on Pogo’s public web site now (see above) and the rules for Mahjong Safari online still mention secret badges, so we can only assume that either Pogo didn’t have time to put them in the game before release (and that they do not currently exist — and may never exist), or that the badge requirements have been adjusted much, much higher.

If you get one of these badges, please let us know, and if we figure this out, we’ll keep you informed!

Wow, Pogo sure has created a lot of mini items lately. It looks as if you’ll also be able to get full costumes of the mascots for Hangman Hijinks (both male and female), Tumble Bees, Sweet Tooth, and Hog Heaven Slots (pink piggie). It shouldn’t be long now before we get a whole release full of neat Pogo-related mini items in the mini mall, unless Pogo has even more mini items up their sleeve!

There’s a new game in development called (at least for the time being) Plate Spinner. It will have 50 ranks and 5 badges and will be recipe-themed. (Could it be a Diner Dash-style game?) We don’t have enough details to put together a more informative post, but we’re working on getting more for you soon.