Storm Center: Cyodrake's Gaze

Eye of the Storm is an extremely easy puzzle game, needing a bit of luck for some parts of it. You see, the Gaze is under one of the two hundred and forty tiles on the game board, along with its crew and a few special tiles thrown in just for fun. This guide will show you just how easy the game is, the different ways that you can play it, how you can win it and what does what. Let's get started!

Tiles

There are four different crew members that appear on most of the tiles, each person pointing in a different direction. Whichever direction they're pointing is where you should start clicking around to find the Gaze. Hoban (the Yellow Aisha) points south, Shumi (the Green Scorchio) points west, Linae (the Pink Kougra) points north and Bonju (the Orange Blumaroo) points east. One thing to remember about all of these tiles, though, is that sometimes they point in a very, very, very general direction. For instance, you might click on a Shumi tile and even though he's pointing west, the Gaze tile is actually one tile west of it and five tiles north.

Of course, the game would get boring pretty quickly if it only had those, so the designers decided to add in a few bonus tiles; every single one is to your advantage and, even though the game's description says that some might sink the Gaze, none will. So anyway, there are four more types of tiles:

The Cannon tile, which blows up its own tile and the tiles directly above, below, to the east and to the west of it. If the Gaze is under one of them, it counts as you clicking on it (instead of blowing it up and losing the game).

The Loot tile, which gives you twenty extra points. That may seem like only a little, but if you add up one for every five levels its usefulness becomes quite clear.

The Storm tile, which simply reveals what's on the tiles around it instead of destroying them. With this one and the Loot one, they both turn into blank tiles when they flip back over, just so that you can't enjoy the benefits again.

The Cyodrake's Gaze tile is the fourth and, obviously, the aim of the game; the reason you're going around clicking on a bunch of tiles is to find this one, since it's lost. Just remember that some tiles don't have anything on them, so they don't help you even slightly.

Game Modes

There are three ways that you can play the game: Zen Mode, which doesn't remember your score after you've finished playing so that it can't be sent in and won't be counted as something for your High Scores List. Each level does, however, have a time limit of ninety-nine seconds, or one minute and thirty-three seconds. You can play as many levels as you'd like, so it's a good idea to play the game in this mode first, just to get a grasp of what it's like, and get to real playing later.

The second is the Normal Mode, which I recommend when you want to play for real; you have twenty seconds to find the Gaze on each level with a total of twenty levels. For every level you finish you get a bonus of fifty points, whatever your regular bonus is and a point for every second on the clock that's left. Plus, on the later levels (and this applies to all the modes), there will be more and more blank tiles, meaning that there are less crew members to point you in the right direction every level.

Last but not least is the Timed Mode, where the goal is to win as many levels as possible before your total time runs out. You start with two hundred seconds, or three minutes and twenty seconds, and it keeps ticking away throughout the game; you also don't get a time bonus at the end of any levels. That doesn't mean that you should start clicking wildly until you find the Gaze; instead, follow a strategy I've devised, which I'll get to later.

Options

There are two different options in the game and you can only have one of them; they're called Brief View and Extended View. The differences between them are the amount of points that your bonus goes down for each tile you flip and whether the tile stays flipped or not.

In the Brief View your bonus will go down by six for every crew member tile you click on and three for every other type, highly encouraging you to find the Gaze as fast as you can. Plus, the tiles you flip over will flip back over after a couple of seconds so that if you get lost, you won't know which tiles you've already clicked on.

The Extended View takes away ten points for every crew member tile you click on and six points for all of the others, although the tiles that you click on don't turn back over. I recommend the Brief View as it saves you some major bonus points.

Strategy

Well, it's not perfect, but I do have some advice for you for trying to find the Gaze. Before I explain it, though, I'll go ahead and tell you to mute the volume on your computer, since the sounds from the game may distract you. Now then, click on any tile on the board until you run into a crew member; when you do, click exactly two tiles in the direction that he or she pointed. If you find another crew member, click exactly two tiles in the direction that he or she pointed and repeat. Of course, you might always run into a Loot tile or one of the other non-crew member tiles, so where do you click then? Simply click two tiles ahead of it, still in the direction that the last crew member you encountered pointed in.

You might run into a wall before you find the Gaze, though; if you do, just start backtracking by clicking on the tiles that are in between the ones that you've already clicked on. Sometimes, though, you'll have the feeling that you're really close to the Gaze and that if you keep following this strategy, you won't find it as quickly as you could without it. In that case, go ahead and click around where you think it is, because by no means is my method perfect.

Also, if you've just been redirected by a crew member tile back in the direction you came from, you should follow the same method as explained above; just start clicking in between the tiles that you've already clicked on. (And for practice, you might want to use the Extended View before you go for serious Neopoints, just so that you can easily see where you've already clicked.)

Rank

There's just one last thing that you might want to know about, although it affects your score in no way. In fact, it's an effect of your score; when you finish the game, whether it be by loss or victory, you get a ranking attached to your score. The only thing that determines the rankings are what the score is, like if it's over four thousand it'll be "Excellent". Keep in mind, though, that it isn't quite on the dot; it might be off by a few points, but that doesn't really matter.

Meager is given if you got a score of less than eight hundred; hopefully this guide will make sure that you get better.

Good is given if you get a score between 800 and 1,600, which isn't as good as you should be getting.

Great is probably an average for people going after the Neopoints that this game gives, and you need a score between 1,600 and 3,200 to get it.

Excellent is the best rank of all, given only if you get a score above 3,200; go for it, man!

And that concludes this guide, fellow Gaze-searchers! I wish you luck in finding that elusive ship as quickly as you can every level you ever play, and if you need any more help than all that I've just given you, feel free to Neomail me with the issue. Bye-bye!