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Puzzle Agent 2 previewed at Adventure Gamers

I’m not at E3, which is a relief to my feet and stomach and sanity, but I keep seeing all this exciting game news posted by people who are at E3 and wishing that I were there. I worked a couple of E3s doing Telltale’s PR but my fondest E3 memories are the two years I went with Adventure Gamers—a three-day whirlwind of press appointments and new game announcements and candy bar lunches followed by a day at Disneyland. Ahh, memories.

I did, however, get a chance earlier this week to play Telltale’s latest, Puzzle Agent 2 — which they’re showing to press at this very moment at E3 — and Adventure Gamers has just posted my hands-on impressions. So it’s almost sorta not really like I was at E3, if only for a brief moment. Okay, really not really. But regardless of where I played it, Puzzle Agent 2 promises to be a fun sequel, and if you like this type of thing you should go read all about it.

I still wish I were spending tomorrow at Disneyland though.

While we’re on the subject of Puzzle Agent, I’ll take advantage of YouTube’s handy embed feature to slip in two other movies that are sorta kinda related. This first one, The Smartest Dog in the World, is one of Puzzle Agent creator Graham Annable’s Grickle shorts, which tend to carry you along on a wave of tantalizing curiosity until unexpectedly delivering a stomach punch that leaves you asking, “Wait, was that funny or terrible?” Watch it, you’ll see.

And this one is a clever recreation of Graham’s The Hidden People (the short that inspired Puzzle Agent), which won the grand prize in Telltale’s Halloween contest last year. The human actors get the job done, but I’m most impressed by the dog. He just rolls with it.

Half-scale how-to: IKEA-inspired sofa and chair

I wanted a corner couch for my Rosedale’s second floor TV room, and unable to find any modern sectionals in half scale, I decided to make my own. IKEA furniture tends to have clean, straight lines—perfect for miniaturists like me, who don’t have the tools or the patience to get too fancy—so I checked out their website for possibilities.

The Karlstad corner sofa caught my eye, but it would be much too large for the Rosedale’s small room. I modified the design, coming up with my own dimensions to fit the space where I intended to use it. (Ironically, I ended up doing a standard couch rather than a sectional.) My few attempts at upholstery haven’t turned out so well and I thought if I tried to cover the sofa in fabric, it would be difficult to maintain the clean lines. Instead, I picked out neutral-colored scrapbook paper with a leather-like pattern.

After posting pictures of the result on the Greenleaf forum, a couple of people asked for a tutorial, so I made a complementary chair with fuzzy “suede” paper and took step-by-step pictures. I hope some fellow half-scalers find them useful!

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Rosedale shingles

The Rosedale is shingled! I used Greenleaf’s diamond shaped speed strips. I needed about two and a half packages. I stained them with Cabot semi-transparent Mission Brown stain that we had a sample jar of (Geoff bought it for a house project and didn’t like it).

My first step was to cut strip wood to run along the bottom of the roof edges. In theory I could have stained the bottom of the roof, but it already had paint on it from when I did the trim around the bottom of the roof and there were also some gaps that needed to be covered.

The Cabot stain is water-based, and the strips curled up as I stained them. They more or less flattened out when dry, though, and I didn’t have any problem gluing them onto the roof. A few times I had to tape the strips down while the glue dried but in general this wasn’t an issue.

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