Might and Magic Book One is done and I’m getting ready for Book Two, which I hope to start playing after I’m done with The Walking Dead. In the meantime, I used some of my spare time to compile all of my notes and maps into a guide. I split it into three parts…Continue reading
Category: Genre
The Walking Dead [1] – Episodes 1 and 2 Completed
Here’s what happens when you read about a game and how good it is for months, and then finally end up playing it after getting it for cheap on the Humble Weekly Sale. The first two episodes of the Walking Dead did not impress me.Continue reading
Offspring Fling [1] – How to be a Great Mom
After Might and Magic Book One, I wanted something light. Offspring Fling fit the bill nicely. It’s cheerful and colorful, short and not too hard on the noggin, though it is a puzzle game at heart. In fact, it was so fun for me that I managed to beat all 100 levels in one day (or about 4 hours).
How did I do?
Let’s get that out of the way. As I said, I beat all 100 levels. Out of those 100, I got gold or better in 75 levels, and four of those actually got the rainbow flower. As soon as I was done, I also beat a few of the early levels again to earn the gold flower, which got me to 80 gold flowers total.
So, I have 80/100 gold flowers and obtaining all of them seems pretty reachable. I also have 4/100 rainbow flowers and at this point, I’m not at all hopeful about getting all of those. All of that got me 51,5% completion of the game.
Of course, in my blog, this sort of completion counts as 100% Completed, which is a whole separate category to just Completed. For now, Offspring Fling is Completed. Will it ever be 100% Completed? Probably not. I do, however, intend to aim for the gold.
Now for the game.
What is Offspring Fling
Offspring Fling is a platforming puzzle game with the aim to aesthetically emulate old SNES games, all the way to the fake box art the game is marketing with.
The plot is that you’re a mom with a lot of babies and some weird monster things scares off your babies while knocking you out. You wake up and now you have to find your babies.
Most levels are single screen, though some stretch a bit further. Your goal on each level is to find your babies and carry them into the exit. The thing is, they usually aren’t in very convenient spots. You can carry up to four of them at a time, but with each additional offspring, it gets harder to move and jump around, so your goal is to figure out how to fling, drop and move your babies to get all of them to the exit, all the while avoiding natural obstacles and monsters.

This is a typical early level. You need to figure out the fastest order to get the chicks out and get them through the door.
Each level also has a gold time, which gets you the Gold Flower, as well as an even more difficult developer time, which gets you the Rainbow Flower.
On Steam, the game supports badges and cards and boasts a total of 10 achievements. I only unlocked three of those after completing the game, so if that’s how you want to get to 100% Completion, it won’t be easy.
As I said, Offspring Fling is relatively short, but the point is to repeat the levels in order to master them and finish them as fast as possible. Basically, the game is a puzzle at first, but once you figure out the solution, it’s mostly about executing it perfectly. There are exceptions, though. Some levels require you to find an alternate, not as obvious solution in order to break record time.
Offspring Fling is annoying and not very good.
This was my thought for the first fifteen or so levels. The controls felt stiff, the solutions were too simple and there was almost no danger to the level. Basically, I didn’t find the game very fun, but I decided to stick with it, because I thought it must be extremely short, based on the level list I had.
After a while, I figured out I can pick up multiple babies. In hindsight, the level design did try to show me this, but I wasn’t interested, so I wasn’t paying enough attention. This realization made the game slightly less annoying.
Then I started getting used to the controls…
Hey! I guess Offspring Fling isn’t that bad!
This thought slowly started to set in around level 15, but gained a lot more ground around level 30 or so. I got used to the controls and I realized that, while they aren’t very precise, they do work well with muscle memory.
I started repeating levels at this point, because I realized the Gold Flower wasn’t as unobtainable as I though and I actually do want to collect them.
Basically, I started to get hooked, and it was only getting worse.
At this point, I was about 2 hours in, but my nephew got interested to, so I let him play for a while from level one. He actually managed to get a few gold flowers I skipped on my first run because, well, he apparently has an easier time figuring it out, even though he’s six and I’m 26.
After about an hour, he had enough and I had to satisfy my itch for more. Yup, I was now hooked.
Actually, Offspring Fling is an excellent game.
Thinking about it, it has the looks, the music and the humor, so aesthetically, it’s close to perfect.
The puzzles make you think, but it’s not slow and methodical. You need reflexes as much, if not more than you need your brain. This, for me, is absolutely great, because It wasn’t mentally as demanding as I thought it would be, but it was demanding enough not to feel like a waste of time for me.
Once muscle memory started to set in, I was doing insanely impressive moves, flinging my offspring left, right and center, using them to push switches, knock out enemies, catching them in mid-air just to throw them again…
Basically, I did everything any good mother would do to save her babies after putting them in harm’s way.
It’s not perfect, though.
As much as I would like to excuse it, I can’t. The controls aren’t responsive enough and it gets frustrating sometimes. Muscle memory simply cannot compensate for it completely, especially when you need precision, such as when you have to jump onto a narrow ledge, or through a narrow crack in the ceiling. You end up moving left and right to hit the correct spot, which wastes your time, which frustrates you because it really wasn’t you who messed up – it was the game.
Still, those moments aren’t too common and they can definitely be forgiven. Overall, Offspring Fling is a fun and mostly fair game.
There’s one more thing, though. Some of those developer times are simply too perfect. There have been several levels where I did everything perfectly and I’m still 2 milliseconds short. I can even repeat my perfect result as many times as I want, to the millisecond, but I simply have no idea how to do better.
The game gives you a ghost replay of the developer run when you get close enough, so I know he isn’t doing anything special. He’s just a millisecond or two faster than me. Maybe this is also an issue with the controls. Maybe the game would work better on a gamepad, which I admittedly haven’t tried yet, because I don’t have a decent one available at the moment.
To Recap
Offspring Fling is a great puzzle platformer, not to heavy on the puzzle, but definitely heavy on the technical skills. It also has charm and atmosphere which not many games have. I recommend it and I’ll be playing it until I at least reach the gold, which I don’t think will take too long.
And one more time, I can’t stress this enough – the game looks amazing. It has that washed out color palette and beautiful animations of some of the very best-looking SNES games, except the animations are ever so slightly more detailed, so it actually improves the retro look.
History repeats itself.
Now, the thing is, everything you read up to now was written on the day I played the game for the first time, so I was heavily under the impression.
A day later, it seem that the process of being annoyed and then gradually loving Offspring Fling repeats itself. I tried getting a Gold Flower on the level Tight Fit and I was extremely, extremely annoyed. After about 20 minutes of repeating this 16 second level, I got gradually better again and managed to get the Flower. After that, I was in the zone and easily got three more Gold Flowers, and now I love Offspring Fling again.
It’s weird how that works, isn’t it?
Might and Magic Book One [19] – Game Completed!
Over the past few days, I’ve been playing Might and Magic Book One intensively, exploring everything that was left to explore, finishing uncompleted quests and getting ready to end the game. That’s exactly what I did! I’ve completed a game that’s as old as I am and I loved every moment. The first thing I did was to explore the left-over areas… Continue reading
Might and Magic Book One [18] – King Alamar and the Fabled Building of Gold
At this point, I’m practically tasting the end game of Might and Magic Book One. Well, I think I’m tasting it. The reality is, I could be anywhere in the game right now and not know how far I got, since these ancient games really take an alien approach to design and storytelling.
King Alamar’s Castle
As I already said in my previous posting, the southwestern part of King Alamar’s Castle contained the prisoner. One thing I didn’t say was that I managed to botch up the quest line. I accidentally sold the item King Alamar gave me at Castle Doom. Basically, this means I had to go back to Sorpigal and redo the whole quest line all over again.
Luckily, not having the quest didn’t stop me from exploring the castle. The room on the opposite side, to the northwest, had the same layout as the prisoner room, except there wasn’t anything good at the end of this encounter series. Instead, I got a catapult which ejected me into the wilderness. What’s worse, after so many encounters, the catapult threw me straight into an encounter, where I then accidentally pushed S on my keyboard, which causes my party to surrender. This almost never works, but when it does, you go to a safe spot in the area and lose all of your money. Basically, I had to reload. I got the exploration, but I lost all the experience and loot.
Similarly, there’s a chute like the one in Castles Blackridge which also takes you outside, but at least I didn’t lose any experience with that one.
Outside of that and the fake King Alamar, there wasn’t anything else in the castle. As I said, I had to redo the entire quest line to get the golden key, so that’s exactly what I did. By trying to rush through it with Teleport and Etherealize, I discovered a few things. Apparently, through the use of anti-magic fields and similar special tiles, there are some measures put in place so you can’t just straight rush through some parts.
For instance, there are anti-magic fields in castle Doom which force you to do two things:
- You need to enter the castle through the secret entrance to reach the prison area.
- You need to have the Gold Key if you want to get to the imprisoned King Alamar.
So I guess you simply must do the main quest line to advance in the game and there’s no way past that.
Anyway, confronting the fake king revealed his true identity and I was thrown into the Soul Maze.
The Soul Maze
The goal of the Soul Maze is to find my captors name hidden within the walls. The problem was, using the location spell simply returned ”Unknown” instead of any coordinates. I decided to take the bait and map it anyway. For a while, it was extremely confusing, but then I figured out the level simply wraps around on itself. Leaving it from the top tile in the first column puts you in the bottom tile of the first column, and so on. With that realization, I kept mapping, hoping to find a note of some sort. I didn’t.
Eventually, I mapped it all and then two things became obvious:
- I was mapping it upside down, switching north for south.
- The name was Sheltem.
How did I realize that? Well, when the map was drawn, some of the walls spelled Help directly on the map. Help doesn’t really work as a name, so I abandoned my excel graph paper sheet and redrew it on a piece of actual paper. Rotating it upside down spelled out a pretty obvious hint:
My name is Sheltem.
I used this name and I got the following:
Agent Orango Seventeen Reporting: Imposter XX21A7-3 Voided! Starphase 5281.6 at 120-Varn-161 Pod #41, you are now rank 1 and eligible for transfer. Find inner sanctum for new assignment. The walls begin to fade…
I was back in Sorpigal.
Back in King Alamar’s Castle, the real king was sitting on the throne and he told me I should go to the Inner Sanctum. I’m not sure if this is just an item in my inventory doing it or something else, but if it isn’t, this might be the first persistence in Might and Magic Book One. I left the game and got back in and the true Alamar was still on the throne.
Clerics of the South
The clerics of the south are at the lowest level of castle Dragadune. Their finding you worthy means that you get to reuse all of the permanent stat increase locations within the game. I’m not sure how far you can increase your stats this way, but the action of gaining worth definitely is repeatable and I already got a few stats above 30 this way.
It can be a bit confusing, but to make them find you worthy, you don’t need to ring all the gongs, or you might need to ring them several times. The key is to keep hitting gongs until you hear all three of the tones – sharp, mellow and loud. You can’t ring the same gong twice in a row, but you can keep alternating between two gongs until you hear all three sounds.
Just for future reference for myself and everyone else, here’s a little something…
Might and Magic Book One, Permanent Stat Increase Locations
- Might – The dungeon below Portsmith, B-3, 0-12
- Intellect – E-2, 3-13
- Wisdom – D-2, 12-12
- Luck – Ruins of Castle Dragadune, E-1, 1-1
- Accuracy – The cave below Dusk, E-1, 15-15
- Speed – The cave below Dusk, E-1, 14-5
- Endurance – A-1, 12-1
I actually completely forgot about endurance, so now it’s lagging behind the rest of my stats a bit.
The Six Prisoners
The Clerics of the South task (not exactly a quest) is awesome and provides an awesome reward. The six prisoners task, on the other hand, does almost nothing. You need to treat the six prisoners in the six castles according to your alignment and then you go to the scale statue in E-1. Based on how well you did, you get more or less experience. The amount is pretty high, but nothing you can’t get otherwise. Honestly, it’s not worth the trouble.
Might and Magic Book One, Character Age, Rejuvenation
First of all, I had very little issues with character age in Might and Magic Book One. None of my characters got even close to dying of old age up to now and the oldest one didn’t even reach 50. That being said, you have options for reversing old age, natural or magical.
Firstly, there’s a crater in the southeast of E-1, which you can only access with Etherealize, since it blocks teleportation. In there, you are forced to fight at least two difficult encounters against dinosaurs before reaching the center.
At the center, there’s a device which reverses everyone’s age by a certain number, though I’m not sure how much. Why am I not sure? Because casting Rejuvenate (Cleric, 6-4) is an order of magnitude faster and easier. Sure, there’s a chance you’ll end up aging your character instead, but then you can just cast it a few more times.
By the time you can reach the center of the crater, you’ll easily have access to Rejuvenate, so there really is no point not to use it.
I’ll repeat, the easiest way to reverse old age in Might and Magic Book One is to cast the clerical spell Rejuvenate.
E-4 and the Fabled Building of Gold
With a total of 5 overworld areas left to visit, I decided to start from the east and flew to E-4. The E-4 wilderness is a pretty OK area to train in. Most of it is empty, but there’s an island in the swamp to the south, with a lot of fixed encounters, most of them being against dragons. Dragons provide a lot of experience in Might and Magic Book One, so now that my level is high enough, they seem like a good way to quickly gain levels. However, there’s a downside – I’m hemorrhaging gems like crazy. I’ll probably have to find a place to collect some in the near future.
On the same island, there’s the Fabled Building of Gold and there was a dragon town, which I could decide to attack. Doing this meant taking on one of each dragon type, as well as two high-level demons, able to cast Eradicate. Even with all of my protection spells, I wasn’t able to clear this battle. I might be able to with a few extra items, but for now, I’m not even going to try.
The Fabled Building of Gold
The Fabled Building of Gold is the first dungeon that I’m aware of with non-linear level progression. From the first level, you can get to either level 2, 3 or 4 via one of the three stairways.
Going straight to level 4 takes you to „dungeon under construction“. This level has a lot of walls which aren’t really walls from the opposite direction, or doors which end up being walls from the other direction, etc. The level also contains three rooms with very difficult encounters behind some barrier walls. Two out of these three encounters rewarded me with a black box, but I didn’t get any upgrades, because all of the item drops required evil alignment.
Getting to level 3 directly from level 1 takes you to an isolated area with nothing of importance in there. Level 2 simply contains a lot of rooms with weird encounters against a lot of different, unrelated monsters. It also contains a large maze, which is pretty much completely empty, other than the stairs to the „real“ part of level 3 at one of the dead ends.
Level 3 is just a bunch of teleport traps, all leading to the same spot with an encounter. Either I missed something, or there’s nothing of importance in there. You’d expect there to be something, since there’s to ways to get to the level, but I didn’t find anything.
Overall, I got a huge amount of experience in the Fabled Building of Gold, and I found two checkered rooms, one of them containing the White Queen Idol. Sadly, it turns out I managed to sell or somehow lose the Black Queen Idol, so I’ll have to find it again. Good thing I’m taking notes, so I know where it is. It’s in level 1 of the Wizard’s Lair in the B-1 area.
Character Advancement
Lorelei the Knight
Lorelei gained four levels, 51 hit points in total and is now level 18.
Priscilla the Paladin
Priscilla gained two levels, 24 hit points in total and is now level 15.
She got a Belt of Power from the Soul Maze, so she gave her Undead Amulet to Alana.
Rax the Robber
Rax gained three levels, 27 hit points in total and is now level 17.
She got a Blue Ring Mail. This excellent item dropped from a Black Box in one of the trap rooms of castle Alamar. This time, I did the smart thing and immediately teleported outside and to Sorpigal. It increases AC by 9 and probably adds resistance, I’m guessing to either frost or electricity. The Blue Ring Mail replaced her Ring Mail + 1. This was an amazing upgrade.
She also got a brand new pair of Boots of Speed, giving his old Defense Cloak to Robin.
She got an Elec Shield, which replaced her Large Shield + 2, adding one more point of AC and increasing her electrical resistance.
Alana the Cleric
Alana gained three levels, 28 hit points in total and is now level 17. I’ve seen her destroy mummies with Turn Undead now.
She got an Undead Amulet from Priscilla.
Robin the Archer
Robin gained three levels, 26 hit points in total and is now level 15. She gained access to her fourth level sorcerer spells.
Robin got Rax’s Defense Cloak, which was a nice AC bonus.
Aleen the Sorceress
Aleen gained two levels, 14 hit points in total and is now level 16.
Maps
I believe I can now safely assume E-4 and E-3, including the Soul Maze, are fully and properly mapped, so I finalized the files related to these two areas. As usual, you can find all of my other files in my Google Drive folder, including the word document files you can edit.
Vagrant Story [3] – Snowfly Forest
After some dabbling at the workshop (I really need to figure out a proper plan on equipment development), it was time to move on with Vagrant Story and maybe even get past my furthest point in previous plays.Continue reading
Might and Magic Book One [17] – Approaching Endgame
It’s been long since I’ve devoted so much time to a single game and got so much enjoyment out of it. I’m not completely sure, but slowly, it seems like I’m approaching the finale of Might and Magic Book One.Continue reading
Vagrant Story [2] – I’m Still Learning
I guess I somehow thought I’d breeze through Vagrant Story now that I’m older, that I’ll have an easier time figuring it out completely. It turns out Final Fantasy and Grandia inflated my ego too much. Compared to Vagrant Story, those games are child’s play.
Might and Magic Book One [16] – Sex Change and Ruby Whistles
The E regions had nothing for me, so I decided to back to some of the regions I’ve already been to, to wrap some stuff up.
Might and Magic Book One [15] – Science Fiction
I was at a loss in Dusk, so I started wrapping up some loose ends while figuring out where to go next. Note for self: Find a way to cure petrification on the go.