Game Review: Eufloria

I have a review of the awesome indie game Eufloria up on Bytten today:

Not since I first discovered Civ2 has a game made me late for so many things. Eufloria offers two of the same addictive qualities as the Civilization series, both the empire-spreading and the need to play just a few more minutes until the next mini-milestone. Eufloria simplifies the unit selection and improvement add-ons of the real-time strategy genre, presenting mystical space lifeforms in a surprisingly vibrant universe. You play not as a general or political leader, but as a collection of seedlings, and your goal is to grow, and spread, take over neighboring asteroids, and make the growers proud.

Read the rest over on Bytten

Popularity: 1% [?]

Flash Game: Music Catch

If you’ve ever zoned out watching your iTunes visually represent your favorite songs, this game is for you.

Music Catch is a game the way Frisbee is a game. You’re really enjoying the good weather and time with friends, as you toss the Frisbee and half-heartedly keep count. With Music Catch, you’re doing the same thing, enjoying relaxing music and images.

This isn’t a hardcore game by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a fantastic mental vacation. Shapes drift across the screen, changing color, size and flow to match the music. You idly try to scoop up yellow shape and avoid red ones, but no stress. This is one of the least copetitive games I’ve ever seen.

I’ve played a lot of games that claim to be different, but are really just a pretty version of match-3 or hidden objects. Music Catch really is different.

Bookmark this for a relaxing break on a busy day!

Via Reflexive Arcade: Music Catch.

Popularity: 16% [?]

ThumbGods in 2009

In 2009, I reviewed indie games like Funky Farm 2, A Case Of The Crabs, Rotoadventures Momo’sQuest, Slayer of Dragon,  Democracy 2,  Electric Box,  Faerie Solitaire, and CyberWord. I plan to keep focusing on creative, indie games next year. I also played major mainstream titles, like Cartoon Network’s new MMO Fusionfall, and James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club:  Games of Passion for the DS. ThumbGods reviewed the match-3 Atlantis, Totem Tribe, National Geographic’s Mystery of Cleopatra, Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, Sims 2 on the DS, and Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger! Major misses  this year were  My Boyfriend,  Create-a-Mall,  the disappointing Build-a-lot 3, and Jack in Lost in Blue 2. (Not all of LiB2. Just Jack.)

I tried to branch out a bit from reviews, and started writing some hints, including a guide to solving MyTribe mysteries and hints for Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger! I’ll probably keep doing this whenever I’m really proud of solving a puzzle and want to help out.

Thumb Gods had a great guest post when when Lexton Collins reviewed Runes Of Magic. I guest posted reviews of Cake Mania 3 and Ciao Bella, over on Casual Gamer Chick, Crayon Physics Deluxe review on Angry Gamers, Travians: Asterix Meets The Sims on SeeJaneGame, and contributed to several issues of Indie Game Mag.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Game Review: Cake Mania 3

I have a new review of Cake Mania 3 up over at Casual Gamer Chick.

Cake Mania 3 is an adorable time-management game for the Nintendo DS. Jill, our heroine from Sandlot Games’ PC versions of the Cake Mania imprint, is cheerfully preparing for her wedding day when she accidentally breaks a time-bender (I suppose it was wedding decor), and sends herself and her loved ones off through space and time, only to be saved through extensive cake baking! Jill must rescue her displaced friends and family, repair the time-bender and make it back for her wedding – all by making and decorating cakes.

Once Jill lands in a new location and sets up her bakery (“Oh look,“ Jill notices, “My oven works in ancient China! That’s not weird at all!”), the top screen is used for progress stats, like time spent and money earned, and icons of waiting customers. The bottom screen is Jill’s bakery. Players send Jill rushing from oven to customer with a tap of the stylus. A checkmark appears over the future actions in Jill’s queue so you can easily keep track of what she’s doing. Tap the checkmark to remove a planned action from Jill’s to-do list.

Read the rest of my Cake Mania 3 review over on Casual Gamer Chick.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Game Review: Cooking Mama 3

Game sequels are in a tough spot. Go too far from what we loved in the original, and players who loved the first game will lose interest in the second. Stick too close to the original game, though, and players feel like we’ve bought the same game in a pretty new case.

Cooking Mama 3 brings back all the usual chopping and frying fun, but adds new recipes and techniques. You’ll still use the stylus as a knife, a whisk, a rolling pin and almost any other kitchen implement as you practice cooking with Mama or prepare dishes for guests. You can also dress Mama in different paper-doll outfits, redecorate the kitchen or jazz up your picture diary, but that’s really secondary to cooking.

Translated instructions are still a bit vague, but the game isn’t too punishing for failure to understand what the arrow is telling you to do.

I could spend all day talking about the cutely addictive qualities of cooking with Mama. The stylized utensils, cartoon meat and produce, Mama’s unfailing ability to recover my burned food, and of course the fun of pretend cooking and pretend serving. Recipes come from all different cultures, with an definite Asian focus — some Western dishes are plated just like the UBC coffee menu.  Tempura and sushi offered my favorite minigames (chopping!) and prettiest final dishes.  I was especially fond of the dried-squid recipe, although the minigames were nothing special, because it reminded me of the rows of hanging squid, an everyday scene in beachside Shandong province.

CM3 has quite a few options involving de-veining shrimp, gutting salmon (slit the fish’s belly and rub the stylus over opening to clean), de-inking squid and other fish-preparation tasks that would be quite unpleasant off Mama’s pink cutting board. My kindergarten-age niece and Cooking Mama partner-in-crime found some of the seafood preparation tasks a little icky, which led to a long discussion about different cultures, and what we find gross, and why. Foreign customs through Cooking Mama! And people say games aren’t educational.

I loved CM2, so finding more of the same in CM3 was great, but there are also some new playmodes. One of the major changes in Cooking Mama 3 is a new multiplayer mode for competitive chopping, egg breaking and other prep tasks. (I often rant about technical issues interfering with game enjoyment, so it’s worth noting how fast Cooking Mama 3 found and connected with the second DS.)  There’s also a chance to make up your own recipes, using ingredients and techniques from other parts of Cooking Mama to make something new.

Cooking Mama 3 also offered a new shopping game, which sends players out to pick up ingredients without running into annoying store characters who’ll slow you down by trapping you into annoying minigames. It was uncannily like shopping in China. I enjoyed the cuteness of the supermarket  — Cooking Mama really is adorable without becoming an all-pink disaster –  but lost interest in the actual games pretty quickly, just like I did with Gardening Mama.

Overall, I found it a great new addition to the Cooking Mama series. If you liked Cooking Mama 2, and you’ve finished unlocking the recipes, rush out and pick up Cooking Mama 3!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Game Review: My Boyfriend

I was way too excited for the new My Boyfriend game. I anticipated all the fun of Sim dating, plus my favorite guilty pleasure (changing my avatar’s clothes every five minutes), without all that tedious eating and sleeping and meter-watching of actual Sims. I really wanted to like it. I wasn’t lying in angry-feminist wait for objectionable themes, I wanted to blog about frothy dialogue, cute outfits and imaginary boyfriends.

But it was awful.

The game opens with you and your best friend arriving at a resort full of  fun activities and hot guys! Unfortunately, the dialogue is stilted, partly because it’s EFL, and partly because I hoped for witty banter. There’s a lot of clicking ok, only “ok” is an awkward agreement. The dialogue was so awkward that I couldn’t always tell who was supposed to be an attractive possible friend and who was a mean girl to be thwarted with my killer wits. I could tell which guys were potential boyfriends, though, because the minor NPCs only had one line to say.

As you walk around the resort, white stars appear over activatable items, and you have the option to participate in different resort activities. Whether you choose to relax in the sun, rent waterskiis, or swim in the pool, you don’t play a minigame or even watch a little cutscene animation. You watch a clock tick. I’m not exaggerating. You watch a pink clock tick. Um, when does the fun start?

Other activities do involve minigames. These are activated by talking to an NPC. I’m usually a big fan of minigames (see also: all my recent hidden objects game reviews), but these minigames were awful. AWFUL. We’re talking incomprehensible directions, repetitive gameplay and bizarrely uneven difficultly levels. For Step Aerobics, you need to click the right color in the right order five times to complete level one. For Kareoke, you need to click the right color at the right time FORTY EIGHT times to complete level one. Wait, one is more difficult than the next by a factor of ten?

Your character can also experiment with makeup, but the extremely limited choices forbade either adorable looks or hilarious fashion trainwrecks. (If you think makeup doesn’t lend itself well to a videogame, check out the facial minigame in Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger for a makeup game done right, or Sims 3 for recreational avatar decoration.)

I really wanted to like My Boyfriend, but we have to break up. This just isn’t working out.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Game Review: Women’s Murder Club

James Patterson’s Women’s Murder club has been a successful series of novels, a TV show and a series of casual mystery PC games before coming to the DS. The new Women’s Murder Club: Games of Passion seems designed for a casual DS gamer to tuck her into her purse, instead of a Patterson mystery novel. Most of WMC is played with the DS turned sideways, using the read-only screen to display a list of objects to find, instructions, or images to accompany the action in the interactive screen, which creates a book-like format for more of an interactive novel feel.

WMC follows the usual pattern of story cutscenes, hidden objects and minigames. The hidden objects casual adventure game is a pretty crowded genre, so it’s hard for a new game to really stand out. Probably the most unique characteristic was the James Patterson characters.  Players solve crimes and meet with the WMC ladies as Patterson’s detective Lindsay Boxer, and supporting characters with solid personalities made this more that just a reskinned HO game.

The story progresses via cutscenes and dialogue options. Players have some choices for what to say, but it was more of a quiz on recent plot events. Believable banter makes the cutscenes worth reading, and the linear storyline makes it feel like reading a novel, not being hemmed

Random side note: The mysterious Chinese markings found on the victim actually do say bu zhong, Not Loyal. My Chinese  literacy is just good enough to be completely thrilled with the developers for using real words when dramatic red scribbles would have acceptable. (It always cracks me up when I see upside-down characters or random other words.) Good work, THQ.

A lot of the game was hidden objects, whether it was tidying a crime scene or looking for clues, but this was a particularly bad HO. The small DS screen doesn’t really lend itself to searching, and players search a picture that’s larger than the screen, for maximum squinting-at-the-screen annoyance. It was also the Highlights magazine type of hidden objects, instead of the cluttered-room HO. It felt oddly childish to look for giant peace signs and lightning bolts, especially on crime scenes with mysterious dead bodies. The game does mix up the hidden objects a bit by giving players a clue instead of a list of items, but still gives the feel of an activity book more than an adventure game.

The story leads to several minigames, which were much more engaging than the picture find. When I got the Women’s Murder Club press release, I was pretty excited to see the game included a science lab minigame, and the puzzle’s gameplay didn’t disappoint.

One of the minigames was a mah-jong game, which is also accessible under an icon that says China (This character is a different zhong, an object lesson on why I am not so good at Chinese!). I usually consider mah-jong games to be computer solitaire 2.0, but I found something charming in the tiny tiles and stylus interface, and ended up playing this minigame more than I’d expected.

Women’s Murder Club: Crimes of Passion offers a solid storyline and characters from the popular novels to fans of the hidden objects mystery.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal

I’d been meaning to play the new Monkey Island game since I first heard about the Telltale Games release, but it was the pirate-day free download that finally got me started.

Telltale’s new Monkey Island is not to be confused with the LucasArts updated re-release. No, the Screaming Narwhal is an all-new tale in the saga of Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate. Elaine and LeChuck (and at least one other familiar character!) are back as well, revamped from their grainy 2d incarnations, but following the spirit of the originals.

Goofy dialogue, creative uses for found items and pirate-y silliness are the hallmarks of the Monkey Island games, and the Screaming Narwhal has them all. Guybrush uses his razor-sharp wits to deal with the wacky denizens of Flotsam Island, whether that’s a clever ruse of selling fine leather jacket, an amazing use of misdirection (Look! It’s Louis XIV!) or coming up with a believable excuse on the spot. The dialogue is not a memory test of in-game facts, but a chance for zany interactions.

The freedom of the old Secret of Monkey Island and LeChuck’s Revenge options was in stark contrast to the thousand ways to accidentally off the protagonist in the punishing other adventure games I played around the same time. (Getting killed by a passing car when Laura Bow crosses the street still sticks in my memory as the finest example of the I Made This, You Play This, I Hate You mindset.) Guybrush can stick a bomb in his pocket or attempt all sorts of athletic feats without any ill effects.

The Monkey Island games make you wonder What would happen if I…? and then encourage you to try it out! When you try to pair two objects that didn’t belong,  use something in the wrong way, or say something ridiculous, Guybrush makes a joke instead of a beep, an error message, or a score punishment. LucasArts rewarded creativity by offerings zany responses to zany questions and zany actions. The object was not to beat the level, the boss, or the game, but just to see what would happen next!

The Screaming Narwhal contains the old Monkey Island mechanic of an old pirate map for Guybrush to decipher. I don’t want to give away too much, but this isn’t the usual hidden object standard, there isn’t any squinting at the screen to find map pieces. If you’d like to make the puzzles easier or harder, the hint frequency is on a slider in your options menu, so you can adjust how much Guybrush tells you.

When I think about it, the only thing that could possibly be improved is the inventory. Oh, no, not the actual inventory, the U-tube and manatee monocle and breathmints leave no room for improvement. But the way to access the inventory is to mouse over the right hand edge of the screen. This is also the way to walk off the right hand edge of the screen or look at things on the far right of the screen. It is not a game-breaking mechanical failure, but a minor annoyance that came back every time I mean to look at something on the right and opened my inventory.

Go check it out and remember why Monkey Island was such an awesome story.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Game Review: Lost in Blue 2

I’ve been playing Lost in Blue 2 on the DS, and while I always love games about island survival, like MyTribe, Sims 2: Castaway, etc., there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Cool minigames make use of the the DS’s capabilities, but the hundredth time you have to light a fire, it stops being fun. The same can be said for cooking, fishing, catching animals, and every other repetitive action. I’m a big fan of Cooking Mama 2, but this is no Cooking Mama. Also, the actions you need to perform repeatedly are hidden in sub-menus or are only available after a chain of choices, instead of being accessible, one-click actions.

The story begins as two high-schoolers are washed up on a beach after a shipwreck. Players can choose Jack or Amy as their primary character, but they are responsible for the survival of both.

Jack, your companion on the island, is not the brightest bulb in the box. You need to feed him, making him more like a rather dim pet than a boyfriend. Every time he gets hungry, you need to let go of his hand (one click), target Jack (varies), select Talk (one click), tell him you have something for him (one click), wait for him to ask what it is, tell him it’s something to eat (one click), wait for him to ask what he’s eating, and then select the item from your backpack to feed him (varies, but you select, choose ‘give’ and confirm), he says it’s delicious (one click to confirm). Early items, like raspberries and coconuts, fill his meter between 3 and 5 percent, out of a possible hundred percent, so even if he doesn’t perform any physical labor — like a million walks to the stream to quench his inexhaustible thirst — which makes the hunger meter empty faster,  you’ll need to do this series of actions between 20 and 33 times in a day to get him full.

Items must be fed from Amy’s backpack to Jack. You cannot feed him items that he’s carrying, and he will literally die of starvation with a backpack full of lunchboxes and fruit.  To exchange items between backpack, you need to let go of his hand (one click), target Jack (varies), select Talk (one click), tell him you have something for him (one click), wait for him to ask what it is, select give  (one click), wait for him to ask what you’re giving him, and then exchange items between the backpacks. If you play as Jack, Amy becomes similarly dim-witted.

A lot of the game involves learning about the island… read the rest here.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Game Review: Nancy Drew: The Mystery of the Clue-Bender Society

I’ve been pretty busy recently, but I managed to review Nancy Drew: The Mystery of the Clue-Bender Society for the DS in under 140 characters.

Related: Nancy Drew Dossier: Lights, Camera, Curses!, Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger!

Popularity: 16% [?]

Game Review: Create-A-Mall

I recently reviewed the unimpressive Create-A-Mall:

Unfortunately, Create-a-Mall took mindless consumerism and crossed it with repetitive, challengeless gameplay. You play as Kelly, a corporate drone tasked with leasing stores to create a mall.

Time and resource management games all have some similarities. No matter what the game theme is, players will need to manage resources and time to complete goals. But Create-a-Mall felt like a clone of the repetitive playstyle and unrewarding rewards of Build-A-Lot 2, reskinned as a mall instead of a neighborhood.

Via Simpson’s Paradox » Create-a-Mall.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Game Review: Sims 2: Castaway on the DS

One day, you’re standing on the dock, waving goodbye to a friend, when you slip and fall and land in a crate, which is sealed and loaded onto a cargo ship, which is caught up in a storm and your Sim is shipwrecked on a deserted island! Your poor shipwrecked Sim must survive on this island, at first by finding food, building a shelter and starting a fire.

The zaniness we love about the Sims arrives in Castaway once you’ve gotten a handle on sleeping and not-starving. Your Sim can build an SOS sign for Dharma initiative-style airdrops of random things, like a victrola or a candy bar.  As you collect island items, you can cook tasty dinners (your Sim was getting tired of bugs and raw fish), make new clothes, make tools or decorations, build a new house, make a canoe and just create all kind of island crafts. You can even make and play an ocarina! And, as you explore more, you’ll also befriend the other island refugees, and check out the ancient temple. All tropical islands have an ancient temple, don’t you know?

I’ve written such angry things about sparkly pink shopping games as “girls’ games”, that I hate to admit when I fall into a traditional girl pattern, but, well, I love pretend cooking. I like it in World of WarCraft, too, if that make me sound any less like an eight-year-old girl. I also like making Sim clothes and playing dress-up. Castaway avoids being an unappealingly feminine game by also having survival puzzles and mini-games about fish-catching and fire-building. Oh, and the game’s not pink, which is always good in my book.

Sims 2: Castaway seemed to make much better use of the DS interface than Sims 2. In the regular Sims 2, you’re forced to ignore the stylus, and use the clumsy buttons to navigate, but you can’t put the stylus away completely, because you need it to select menu options that really should be hotkeys or at least accessible by arrow keys. Sims 2: Castaway takes better advantage of the DS-specific interface, using either the stylus to move, and even creating minigames that require use of the microphone. The top screen is used to display the meters that are very familiar to Sims players.

One interface annoyance is the crafting book. When crafting, your Sim cannot create multiples of the same item. You need to select the crafting spot, tap Craft Things, then click the item you want to make,which leads to a screen showing you what materials will be reguired. On this screen, you must click Make. Then you’ll see a picture of what you’re making, and you must click OK. Then you see a picture of what you made, and you’re forced to click OK one more time. If you want to make a duplicate (or a second item), you’re back at the crafting book, and you need to do it all over again. And if your item is on the second or third page of the crafting book, it can be even longer. And if you need three of one item to make something special, well, seems like EA figured out how to most of the suck the fun from a crafting game.

I was a big fan of Sims 2 for the computer, so I expected to like Castaway. It was even better than I expected, with the exotic island theme, a zany but cohesive storyline, and all the adorably realistic animations we expect from the Sims.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Game Review: Sims 2 on the DS

I wrote this up for my own blog, but I wanted to share it here, too.

You’re on your way from someplace much cooler to someplace much cooler when your car breaks down in Strangetown, and the Sims 2 game begins. A local yokel says he can fix that, but while you’re waiting (it goes without saying that the required part’s on backorder in Strangetown), you take over as manager of a creepy, rundown hotel, in this little town of odd events.

Almost everyone who’s played the Sims knows that the ghosts, alien abductions and general parmanormal silliness are the best part of the Sims, so the makers of Sims 2 for the DS toned down the time spent watching your Sim sleep or cook dinner, and increased the zany encounters.

You play as one Sim, not a household, and the story is much more linear than the PC versions.  It’s also no longer a sandbox game. Players have limited control over hotel guests, but important penthouse guests arrive, check in, and send players on unavoidable missions. I happened to like the penthouse missions, especially goth cultist Ava Cadarva, but it wasn’t the almost-unlimited sandbox play style we knew and loved in other Sims games.

Via Visiting Strangetown: Sims 2 on the DS on Simpson’s Paradox.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Game Review: Akoha

I sent out my first Akoha cards the other day. Akoha is a cool new game of social-media-meets-CCG-meets-Where’s-George. Akoha players start with a deck of real-life missions, from sending someone a book to reading a new blog, thanking someone or sending someone flowers. When they complete their missions, they give the card to the receipient, who needs to pass it on. Players can track the progress of their missions and good deeds across the country.

I sent my first missions (which I got from Gypsy Bandito… Akoha pay-it-forward magic in action!) to friends in distant states, to spread Akoha cards and coolness as far as I could.  Only one of them has been continued on, but it was a fun excuse to spread silly presents and share books. Like any social game, the coolness depends on the number of active players. Right now they’re still in beta so it’s a bit sparse, but it has the potential for a lot of chatter and connections.

If you’d like to try out Akoha for yourself, you can order your own deck from their website, or you can leave a comment and you can be the recipient of one of my Akoha missions! (At least until I run out of cards!)

Popularity: 15% [?]

Game Review: Faerie Solitaire

I’m a bit late posting this because every time I went to get another screenshot or check a fact, I got sucked into playing a few hands of Faerie Solitaire.

Faerie Solitaire from SubSoap is a new casual game, mixing a cute fantasy story with basic solitaire. I’ve said before that the best games have simple rules, with many variations and strategies. In Faerie Solitaire, you are given a foundation card, and you can either play one card higher or one card lower than the foundation card. A played card becomes the new foundation card, and you do it again. You could easily teach a child to look for a number one higher or one lower than the selected card.

As you play more hands, different hands have a different card layout, including special layouts with unavailable  cards in thorn patches or ice. Special cards and events pop us randomly as well, offering bonuses and minigames. The random element made the solid solitaire game that much more addictive for me.

Because the hidden object games have a finite pool of backgrounds and items, it soon became more of a memory game than a hidden objects game. Which is great because I think hidden objects are overdone, they start to feel like filler because they’re the default of the casual games genre.

I sometimes find it annoying when there’s a lot of game to be unlocked. In some cases, it seems like a tacit aknowledgement from the developers that some parts of the game are good and some parts are lame, and to make the game longer, you’ve got to grind through the lame to get to the good bits. When I reviewed GardenParty World, I talked about how  not needing a game for the system of working at a dull minigame to earn spending points. GardenParty World is hardly the only offender here, I was also frustrated by unlocking the chance to play indentical levels in Fashion Solitaire. But Faerie Solitaire had a system of power-ups and unlockable features that kept me excited about the next add-on without leaving me feeling like the developers had greyed out most of the game.

In their Faerie Solitaire press release, Subsoap promised strong production values. They delivered, there are no awkward cutscenes or grammatically painful instructions, the usual hallmarks of an indie studio. But what really ties it together is the movie-score music.

This is not an all-encompassing story game but I don’t think it’s meant to be. You won’t be daydreaming at work, thinking about getting home to play Faerie Solitaire.  This is a quality solitaire game that had my boyfriend looking over my shoulder. Drawing  in other people to kibbutz  is a mark of a great solitaire game!

Popularity: 16% [?]

Game Review: Travians on SeeJaneGame

I have a review of the addictive browser game Travians up over on SeeJaneGame:

The game opens with a message from your Travian’s uncle Horatio, asking you to come and help him with the ancestral estate. As he sends you on basic intro quests, it becomes apparent that Uncle Horatio has had a few drinks in his day, and that the ancestral estate is more of a run-down farmhouse. Uncle Horatio’s hiccups and rambling tales set the tone for the game, everyone in Travians is full of character. Some of the first NPCs you meet are a sheep-loving, Horatio-hating guard and a travel pig with memory issues.

As a sidenote, this review also contains my favorite screenshot, of boozy Horatio having yet another drink. I’m not that great with with screenshots, I usually get a capture about two seconds after the cool part ends, so I’m pretty pleased with this one!
Via Travians: Asterix meets The Sims | See Jane Game.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Game Review: Don’t Look Back

Don’t Look Back is a new game on Kongregate based on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. This Greek myth tells the story of the lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, who are tragically parted when Eurydice dies. Unable to live without her, Orpheus journeys to Hades to bring back his lost love. Hades, the god of the underworld, and his wife Persephone are so moved by Orpheus’ love and his musical gifts, that they agree to let Eurydice follow him out of the underworld… on one condition. He can’t turn around and look at Eurydice until they leave the underworld.

As they are leaving, Orpheus is overcome with love for Eurydice (in some versions he hears her breathing or her footsteps) and glances back. Eurydice fades away and returns to the underworld, never to see him again.

I really love that tragic love story. In college, I majored in classics, which has greatly helped in my career path of being freakishly well-read. Just a few days ago, I reviewed Electric Box, another Kongregate game and really liked it, so I expected the combination of classical myth and Kongregate to be great.

No.

Don’t Look Back is an arcade platformer, which means jumping, shooting and, in my case, dying. I’m not good at jump-on-the-platform games, and since I don’t really like them, I doubt I’ll ever get good. I’m willing to try platformers with cool slants — I made an exception for the cute jumping game Momo — but they’re not really my thing.

The game opens with a blocky figure standing next to a grave, but there’s no text or explanation to tell you what’s going on. Thank goodness I have my classics degree for moments like this! Don’t Look Back was much better about telling you to use the arrows to move or spacebar to shoot than it was about telling the story.

I found that Don’t Look Back had lots of jumping and landing on platforms, but not a lot of pretty things to look at while you’re doing this. Each new screen is a surprise, with creepy crawlies set to attack Orpheus on entry, so I spent a lot of time dying.

The graphics are cutely retro, in gothy colors, but that just wasn’t enough to distract me from the problems I had with gameplay.

I really wanted to see how the developer interpreted this myth, and when I’m going to write a review, I usually play games to the end. But, even sondiering those, I never made it to rescuing Eurydice.  After repetive scenes of shooting blocky bugs and hopping over obstacles, I just wasn’t having a good time at all.

I hope that other players really liked Don’t Look Back, and that it inspires a whole trend of classical games! And I hope they’re more fun.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Game Review: Electric Box

Electric Box, by Twinkle Star Games, is one of the games available on Kongregate. The object of the game is to get the electrical current from the On/Off switch to the goal. You can use wires, generators, wind, light and steam power to get to that goal!

If you enjoy the special pieces having special moves, as in chess or Stratego, you’ll like these electric puzzles.  I know some people find this style of game frustrating, especially in the type of game that keeps adding new pieces with new rules, but I thought the pacing of Electric Box’s new additions was perfect to keep it challenging.  Each level adds complexity, by adding icons like batteries, which provide a back-up charge, in case your power supply runs out or changes, and electro-magnets, which pull your other pieces towards them.  Each level has only one solution, and it’ll use all the pieces in your inventory to reach that solution.

My one complaint — and this is a common one for me — is that some of the icons looked too similar. I was confused a few times when I though I had, say, a stream-powered generator but it was really a refridgerator.

Using all the pieces in my inventory to move the power around the board made for a really interesting puzzle game, although I don’t know if it has much replay value. But that’s not a real problem. The free games portal Kongregate has dozens of other free puzzle games for when you finish one game or get bored.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Crayon Physics Deluxe on Angry Gamers

My new Crayon Physics review is a guest post on Angry Gamers today!

In the first couple of levels, the red ball reaches the star by means of stairs or a slide, while later levels involve levers, weights and all kinds of moving parts, for an irresistible mix of coloring outside the lines and Rube Goldberg contraptions.

Via Crayon Physics Deluxe Review – Latest game reviews, Independent Game Reviews, Indie Games.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Grow Tower

It’s no secret that I prefer open-ended, creative game to the Press B to Shoot type. I wrote about GrowCube about a year ago, and I really think the whole collection of sandbox-y Grow games are addictive flash games at their finest.

Grow Tower is the newest Grow game. The mechanics of adding interactive parts in different orders is the same, but this time, you add different pieces to build a tower to the sky!

Go here to try it for yourself.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Game Review: Funky Farm 2

I really like farm management games, which is odd since I can’t keep a real plant alive, but after playing Harvest Moon, FarmCraft, Farm Frenzy and so many others, I wasn’t sure there was any more room left for new farming games. I didn’t know if Funky Farm 2 by SortaSoft could bring anything new thatother farm sims hadn’t alreayd done.

The premise begins just like any other time management game. Raise your chickens, sheep, and pigs to maximize profits, unlock new animals and farm tools as you improve. But when I saw the rewards, I quickly realized this is not another rinse-and-repeat farm sim. Players don’t receive the typical bigger watering can or a new seed to cover more ground. As you play Funky Farm, you unlock a mailbox for government farm grants, a pet llama, a pet duck and other funny farmyard surprises.

Your sidekick, Piper the hep cat, wants to help you get the farm going so you can throw a happening party.  He guides you through the first levels with beatnik words of wisdom, explains the rules, and encourages you to pick up some new duds for the party. Even the error messages arrive with hep cat style!

Any money you earn above your level goal can be spend on accessories. I was a little apprehensive about this part, because I expected the casual-game cliche of a portrait of your hep cat friend wearing each new accessory. (Much like the annoying rewards screen in Tropical Dream and others) Oh no. When you buy accessories, your new livestock appears wearing the Chucks and shades you selected.

Each animal type needs a different type of care, sheep (and your pet llama) need to be sheared, pigs need to be slopped and slaughtered, and cows need to be milked. I was a little grossed out by turning the cute piggies into plates of bacon, but then I took a harder attitude and harvested* all my cows, sheep, chickens and pigs at the end of the day to save herding them into the pens at night. Did I mention that your new animals come with names like “Count” and “Basie”?

Like all time management games, this is all about balance. Players need enough farm products to sell and continue to buy new animals. With too many animals — especially those messy pigs! — you’ll spend the whole time reseeding the ground. With too few, you won’t be able to make the cash for your beehive hairstyles and bowties. This is a very well-done farm management game, with the right level of difficulty and reward, but it’s the wild beatnik personality that really makes the funky farm stand out.

*special Meg euphemism for “killed off”

Popularity: 15% [?]

Game Review: Nick Bounty

I wrote about Nick Bounty: A Case Of The Crabs over on my personal blog, Simpson’s Paradox.

The Nick Bounty mysteries are flash games (or free downloads) from the independent Pinhead Gamescompany. The first mystery is called A Case Of The Crabsand the second The Goat In The Gray Fedorawhich gives you an idea of just how serious they are.

Nick Bounty is a parody of a hardboiled detective, with deadpan painful metaphors and black-and-white sketch noir graphics. You don’t have to love trenchcoat detective stories, old movies or retro gaming to enjoy this free flash game, but it helps.

I’ve written about feeling trapped in games with set answers, and the need to pick the “correct” choice or highest-point choice instead of the funniest dialogue choice. In Nick Bounty games, when you pick a sarcastic comment, instead of the obvious plot-advancing choice, the game shoots sarcasm right back at you.

This is a free flash game so check it out!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Game Review: Totem Tribe

Totem Tribe was sort of a cross between MyTribe and Age Of Empires. You start out as a young chief with a small tribe, and you complete building, combat and searching missions to improve their fate.

Totem Tribe uses building and unit training without the usual resource management side of things. There’s no real harvesting involved and no resource requirements to build new items, which takes some of the challenge away, and lets you focus on building an aesthetically pleasing settlement. Or maybe that’s just me. Your buildings each create specialized units, which you can then use to explore, build, fight, and so forth.

It’s no Momo, but this game is cute. Your villagers fight mushroom people and funny animals, and they live peacefully with giant ladybugs and lazy turtles.

Each island has gems, seashells and other clickable collectibles. It took me a little while to realize that what I’d thought were some funny-looking flowers are actually the gems you are meant to collect. Oops. Because there are surprise activitable items, I found myself clicking on everything, old-fashioned hand-activate style, to see what might happen.

Totem Tribe blends a civ game, a strategy game and the good kind of hidden objects game, all things I like, into an addicting casual game. My only real problem is that the story falls flat.  While I actually liked the gameplay of repeatedly finding a new object of Epic Supreme Destiny on each unlocked island, I found  the chief’s requests for and the general quest text about each Super-Duper Supreme Epic item to be stilted and annoying.

Overall, a solid casual game, even if the story arc leaves a bit to be desired.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Game Review: RotoAdventures Momo’s Quest

RotoAdventures Momo’s Quest is a PC game about a baby squirrel (so much cuteness!) who is trying to find his way back to his owner, having adventures along the way. Platform games can get a little repetitive for me, but I was completely intrigued by cute little Momo, so I had to try this.

The controls were quite simple, although it does use the mouse instead of the keyboard for jumping and directional control. Momo’s Quest starts out pretty easy while players become accustomed to the controls and the goal, but quickly becomes challenging. I think the best games have very simple rules, and then add content and challenges, and Momo’s Quest did. The challenge was the usual platform game, jumping and grabbing gems for points, and finding objects. Oh, and not falling and letting little Momo get hurt, of course! But the new cute content on each level, like new backgrounds and new special things that Momo learns, kept me playing.

On each level, sweet Momo can either go to the light side, with fluffy bunnies and cuteness overload, or the dark side, with gothy woodland creatures and another style of cuteness. The whole game was like an interactive kids’ book, very light-hearted and fun.

When you play Momo, your cursor becomes an acorn. This is usually something I hate, funny cursors belong on a preteen’s MySpace page. But it was so fun to watch the squirrel chasing the acorn! I guess Momo’s magical powers of cuteness made me like things I wouldn’t normally like.

Finally, Happy Nutz Studio has won my love by making such a sweet game and NOT saying it’s for girls.

You can get download a demo or buy a full version from Happy Nutz Studio for Mac or PC.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Indie Game Focus: Slayer of Dragon

Slayer of Dragon RPG is a stripped-down system for tabletop storytelling by Grant Gigee. The focus is on fast, simple combat, with room -but not hard rules – for roleplaying and story.  “The core of the game,” Gigee says,  “is like rock-paper-scissors in the sense that there are many ways to achieve victory but no one ‘right’ way.”

Gigee’s game system attempts to bring tabletop roleplaying away from the dice rolling and swords of +1 towards playing pretend. The rules exist to keep group storytelling from devolving into playground claims of who killed who. If you enjoy creating stories and playing pretend more than rolling dice, this is a game for you.

Inspiration for Slayer of Dragon comes from across the globe. Gigee was influenced by the simple rule systems of European strategy games, and he tries to bring that clarity and accessibility to a tabletop RPG system. His other influence is a love of martial arts movies, from Kurosawa classics to the flimsiest B-grade films.

Instead of leveling and learning new skills, Slayer characters have “revelations” in which they tell the other players what their character has always known but never mentioned before. This method of leveling, like many other elements of Slayer, is a nod to Gigee’s love of martial arts movies.

“Slayer of Dragon RPG is designed to recreate kung-fu movies,” designer Gigee says, “So I needed it to be fast: fast to make characters, fast to get into the action, and fast to move from scene to scene. A complete session can be played in two hours, only a bit longer than the typical film takes to watch.”

The Slayer RPG rules are available on Gigee’s website, StandardDeviation.cx

Popularity: 13% [?]