Passionfruit Games

New development studio Passionfruit Games plans to release a casual adventure game Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box, based on the paramornal romance novel Tiger Eye by Marjorie M. Liu. Romance games are a wildly popular genre in Asia, but in the US, they’re hard to find and usually pretty second-rate games.  (Did I mention how bad My Boyfriend was?) We have high hopes for this one because new Passionfruit is made up of many HER Interactive veterans — the game team who put together Nancy Drew Dossier: Lights, Camera, Curses! and NDD: Resorting To Danger.  The game is currently in beta.

From the Passionfruit press release:

Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box also officially marks the launch of PassionFruit Games and represents a unique moment in the history of gaming.  Although a market for romance themed video games has existed abroad for years, these games are essentially unknown in the U.S.  Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box will be one of the first romance casual games to hit the U.S. market when it goes on-sale in April 2010.

In discussing PassionFruit Games’ decision to launch their company with Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box, Melissa Heidrich, Studio Director, expressed her enthusiasm for reaching out to romance readers: “The majority of casual gamers are women aged 25-65, who report they play casual games mainly to escape.  Interestingly, those same attributes apply to romance novel readers – so it’s surprising that there are currently so few romance casual games on the market.  That’s why we’re excited to bring Tiger Eye to life as interactive entertainment.”

For Marjorie M. Liu’s fans, it will be a great chance for them to experience a game written by, designed by, and created for women. Mari Tokuda, one of the designers translating Marjorie’s novel into game form, says: ““There just aren’t many romance games in today’s market.  And, for many women, romance novels are not interactive enough.  That’s where we come in – we are giving players a chance to experience the romance through fun gameplay and sensual cut scenes that further the relationship.  This game will really appeal to players who want a storyline and those who want to BE the smart, down-to-earth romance novel heroine.  And of course, we’ll have a sexy leading man heavily featured in the game.  A game like Tiger Eye is one of the most engaging ways for readers to experience characters’ relationships.”

Fans will also be able to experience things that weren’t in the book and to search for hidden objects, play minigames, listen to a film quality soundtrack, and solve puzzles, all the while following the storyline as the main characters’ relationship deepens emotionally and grows in intimacy, though there will not be explicit sex scenes.

PassionFruit Games acknowledges the challenges of turning a popular book into digital entertainment and of adhering closely to the book’s storyline.  In their quest to stay true to the novel,  all members of the team—from artist to programmer—read Tiger Eye, as well as other novels in the Dirk & Steele universe, to get a feel for the “essence” of the game.  The producer and lead designer held regular video conferences with Marjorie to go over the latest design ideas and Marjorie herself wrote the script for the game and is involved with the game every step of the way,  giving input on scene art, character design, and voice actor selection.

Says Marjorie, who is well known for her New York Times bestselling Dirk & Steele and Hunter Kiss series and for co-authoring the hugely popular Dark Wolverine Marvel comic book series, about playing the game’s early build: “I was amazed by the beautiful cinematic cut scenes and the way players could actually experience things my characters had done.  It’s an incredible feeling to not only see favorite characters brought to life but to experience life through their eyes as you progress through the game.”

The Tiger Eye novel, which Publishers Weekly praised as a “first-rate debut” and “a striking paranormal romance,” tells the story of Dela, a woman with psychic abilities who buys a riddle box in Beijing’s Dirt Market and opens it to find an ancient warrior, Hari, bound to serve as a slave to the person who has opened the box.  The action moves between China and the U.S. and PassionFruit Games will mirror this international scope through two games, the first to take place in China and the second in the U.S.  PassionFruit games also plans to involve readers in the release of Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box with the chance for a select few fans to be Beta testers and with fan voting on looks for the character, Long Nu.

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Indie Games Mag Issue 9

Issue 9 of Indie Games Mag (the one with my BeeAppi article) is on sale now!

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Heathen Aliens

Attention heathen aliens. The galaxy is not big enough for both of us.
First we tried leaflets, and you would not repent…
Then we tried hymns, and you would not repent…
Now we confront you with holiest persuader of all. Space-borne thermonuclear missiles. Prepare to die.

Cliff Harris of Positech Games (We’ve blogged about his other indie games like Democracy 2, Kudos and Kudos 2, and on Positech’s business model) has just added a new DLC pack for Gratuitous Space Battles. You’ll be fighting The Order, alien zealots who plan to wipe you out with shiny new weapons:

Radiation Guns

Bullet-firing weapons which deliver a radioactive payload which eats away at your ship from the inside, even if you manage to restore your shields after the initial impact. They also come with a free creepy green glow effect!

Nuclear Missiles

All the fun of radiation guns, in missile form!

Limpet Mines [

Tiny robotic drones which seek out fast moving enemy fighters and attach to them, slowing them down and allowing your heroic gunners to take an easy shot at those heathen alien swine.

Firefly Rockets

Think of them as ‘Rockets 2.0′, faster and more deadly.

You can get it here.  And, yes, there’s a strong possibility that I posted this just to share “then we tried hymns, and you would not repent.”

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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: 25% [?]

Alan Wake Trailer

Alan Wake is an upcoming XBox game that reminds me of a Stephen King novel. A horror writer goes to a small town to get away from it all, mysterious disappearance, information from his next book that he doesn’t remember writing…

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One More Turn…

The rumors are true — Civ 5 is on the way.

In its latest, unyielding attempt to subvert societal productivity, 2K Games has announced Sid Meier’s Civilization V, the latest entry in the venerable strategy series. Set to debut on PC this Fall, Civilization V brings “an astonishing new engine” to the polite, turn-based proceedings and promises to excel the franchise with “the introduction of hexagon tiles allowing for deeper strategy, more realistic gameplay and stunning organic landscapes for players to explore as they expand their empire.” Most hexcellent news indeed.

Via Joystiq, more info at Civilization5.com

Popularity: 1% [?]

BlindGiRl

GLPeas, the British indie developer behind the Xbox Live Carcophony, announce their new project BlindGiRl, also for Xbox Live.

GLPeas’ stated goals are very Meg-friendly, with a promise to develop innovative, unique, non-violent games with an emphasis on gameplay over pretty graphics. No guns and no 3d shininess. Sounds fantastic, but they’re mysteriously silent about exactly what BlindGiRl is. You can follow their evasive Twitter stream in hopes of finding out more.

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Prancing Around The Forest

Publisher Paradox Interactive (of Majesty 2, East India Company and Elven Legacy), and new developer Arrowhead Game Studio have released a new preview trailer for the upcoming console game Magicka.

If you watch game trailers and read games news as much as I do, you’re probably sick of hearing how this release is completely groundbreaking and new and the most epic awesomeness EVER. But Arrowhead Game Studios knows that a fantasy RPG really involves running around the forest in your bathrobe, waving a glowy weapon.

Yeah, sure, Magicka will also have a fancy elemental magic system, when you can combine your water power and your fire power and make a steam attack (could you also combine water and earth for a killer mud attack?), but I think they had me at “prancing around in a bathrobe.”

Arrowhead Games is brand new to me (Have you heard anything about them? Comment and let me know!), and Paradox Interactive also expects to release Arsenal of Democracy later this month and Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West later this year.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Indie Games Updates

TayKrOn, the folks who did the PC game Slide Colors, as well as bunch of Kongregate games, announce the launch of Slide Colors for the Xbox.  I reviewed Slide Colors fir Indie Game Mag a few months ago, and my IGM review was quoted in the press release announcing the XBox version. The XBox version will cost 80 Microsoft points, which is a dollar in non-stupid currency, so it’s well worth checking out this match-three.

SubSoap, behind Faerie Solitaire (did I mention how much I liked this game?) are planning the launch of an episodic sequel.  I thought the original Faerie Solitaire was adorable and I can’t wait to see the new features.

Finally, don’t forget that Indie Game Mag is running a sale through Valentine’s Day!

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How To Afford An Indie Game – gamedrinkcode

gamedrinkcode has a quick comic about how to afford a $15 indie game.   It’s funny how a pretty box and shrinkwrap will dramatically change the perceived value of a game! I don’t hate mainstream titles just because I also like indie games, though.

Via gamedrinkcode » Archive » How to afford an indie game

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Do Tell

The new party game DoTell sets up simple rules for a social game of truth-or-dare. Players race a simple spiral path, moving ahead for completed tasks, but I use “race” loosely, since the focus is on the journey, not the destination. (Quick sidenote: Play makes use of clear icons that didn’t rely on distinguishing between colors or, my personal game hate, squinting at tiny symbols. I’m looking at you, Magic:The Gathering.)

We quickly came up with game mods, swapping the game’s two six-sided dice for two four-sided dice to regulate movement. Even through Do Tell is not very competitive, the variation in 2d6 for movement can frustrate the player who rolls a 3 early on and never catches up.

The game offers eight pastel tokens, but it’s easy to add a mancala gem or a Monopoly boat to mod it for a larger group. Do Tell is so interactive that it works well with a large group, and each turn is independent of what’s gone before, so it’s a perfect choice to begin with on game night as you wait for guests to arrive.

Tell cards ask players to answer a questions and share something (The DoTell Facebook page offers a list of possible questions), and players quickly begin to share stories and laugh.

Do cards ask a player to sing a song, do an impression, dance, pose or act something out. These were a hit with strangers and long-term partners alike. Other players loved dancing or singing along, or just clapping after performance.  One Do asks the player to be the devil preparing his to-do list, which is a fantastic chance to see if your friends would plan plagues and worldwide floods, or just legions of telemarketers and poorly designed parking lots.

A Mirror question has one player asking a Tell, instead of answering, and all the other players try to figure out what he or she would answer.  When we started playing, Mirror questions slowed the game to a crawl, as players who didn’t know each other fumbled for some innocuous answer to a soul-baring Tell.  But after a little while, answers to other questions made it easier and easier to guess. For a group of long-time friends, the Mirrors were hilarious.

The official rules for Mirror questions have a note that some Tells don’t make very good Mirrors, so they should be skipped. No legalese about how they should be skipped, no tiny icons in the corner of the cards to let know which ones should be skipped. We think this refers to the Tells that ask the player to draw a Risk or a Do, but we really liked this rule. Think this is a bad Mirror? Draw again! This is exactly what we were looking for in a party game.

On my second playthrough, we opened up the, ahem, adult Risk cards, glanced at them, and added house rules.  Take a spicy Risk instead of a regular Risk at any time, but it can be swapped for a regular Risk if it’s too risque. Don’t like the card you’ve drawn? Swap any underwhelming Tell or too-wild Do for the next spicy Risk! (You can also get the Family Version for Spicy-free play, or just put those cards away when you have the fam over to play)

With the exception of one reference to American Idol, DoTell does not require pop culture knowledge (my one complaint with usual party games like Cranium or Apples to Apples is the number of celebrities I don’t know), but feel free to work random trivia or favorite songs into other questions.

Overall, this is a hilarious social game. Sure, you can race to the center, but the real focus is on laughing with friends.

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JayIsGames’ Best of Casual Gameplay 2009

The awesome JayIsGames site is running a Best of Casual Gameplay 2009 contest.

Adventure is a hard call — since Monkey Island: Screaming Narwhal, Time Gentlemen, Please! and Wonderland Adventures: Mysteries of Fire Island are all in the running. I think Monkey Island wins for me… with TGP in second . I enjoyed Wonderland Adventures, but it just can’t compete with Guybrush Threepwood or foulmouthed Dan and Ben.

Some of my other favorites on this list are A Case Of The Crabs, under Browser Adventure, Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger under Hidden Objects. (I also helped out with NDD: Resorting to Danger so I’m not entirely unbiased) Faerie Solitaire is running for best Time Management… so is Build-a-Lot 4, which means I am officially the only person who hated Build-a-Lot 3. The frustrating Don’t Look Back under Interactive Art, although this game was made for  people with more patience and skill than me, I did like the myth theme.

Vote for your favorites, or just use this as list of games to check out.

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Kill 10 Rats And Bring Me Their Tails!

Guest author Lexton “Lunarhound” Collins discusses the upcoming Guild Wars 2, believable NPC drama, heroic errand-running, and shares his perspective on what makes a good MMO great.

Most gamers, both fans and detractors, would agree that MMO’s need shaking up. It’s happened before, when City of Heroes and, shortly afterward, World of Warcraft made camp grinding a thing of the past and brought quest-based advancement to the mainstream. Suddenly, characters had purpose-driven lives. Other games followed suit, and life was good in cyberland.

Now, several years later, gamers are growing weary of the new grind. It’s tough to ensure that every single one of the hundreds of quests necessary to keep an MMO going are interesting, and players are growing weary of the endless variations on “kill ten rats and bring me their tails”. Mini dramas acted out by NPC’s cease to feel immersive when sticking around for a minute afterward lets you watch the world reset before your eyes so that the next players in line can ride. Collecting exclamation marks and running errands for people too lazy to deliver their own letters or fight their own battles feels less like an adventure and more like checking off a list of chores. Few want to go back to the way things were, but developers, and many players, seem to be finding it difficult to see a way forward.

There have been efforts to do something different but they’ve gone largely unnoticed. Guild Wars came hot on the heels of World of Warcraft, and attempted to remedy many of the ‘theme park’ issues that came with a static world that had to reset each quest for the next player by making heavy use of instancing. Players see each other in towns, but once outside, you and your party had your own private copy of the world. This allowed them to change things permanently based on your actions. Unfortunately, this lead to many players not considering it a real MMO and, despite its commercial success, it didn’t inspire many imitators. Additional problems came from the fact that players could not jump, climb or swim and the world was full of invisible walls that forced strict adherence to the current mission path. Dungeons & Dragons Online came along a few years later with a similar world structure coupled with much better implementation of the mission-based game play and a great new action combat system, but the facts that it couldn’t (at the time) effectively be played solo and it required a monthly fee, it also ended up being relegated to niche status.

Now, Guild Wars has a sequel on the way. ArenaNet was very secretive about it for quite some time after its announcement, and even now information is limited, but what is beginning to emerge paints an interesting picture of a title that is trying to shake up the genre all over again. With the inclusion of open world areas and much greater mobility (players will be able to jump, swim and climb as they can in most other MMO’s), as well as new attitudes toward creative use of instancing, they might actually succeed this time.

In a preview at Eurogamer, back in August, lead designer Eric Flannum states that “I think I can safely say that you won’t see a single exclamation mark floating above a character’s head in Guild Wars 2.” This one little sentence makes for a pretty bold statement considering the direction of MMO’s for the past few years and, luckily, he elaborates:

“We actually don’t have a traditional RPG/MMO quest system… Instead what we’ve got are Events. Think of them as group-orientated activities. This is one of the many things that will encourage the player to explore the world – you can wander through and never quite know what you’re going to see. You might come across a fortress that’s being attacked by centaurs, or it might be that the centaurs attacked half an hour before you got there and they hold it now. You might start walking along a road you’ve walked a hundred times and suddenly there’s a caravan traveling along that road that you may not have seen, and you can go help that caravan out.”

Supposedly, these events will form a complex web within any given public area, spawning new ones and phasing out old ones based on cause and effect. An older example given is that of a dragon attacking a bridge. Players can band together to defeat the dragon, which might open up a new chain of events that can be participated in. Alternately, they might fail, choose not to help, or simply not be there when the dragon attacks, which would result in the bridge being destroyed and a completely different chain of events opening up, revolving around repairing the bridge. The difference between this and something like Warhammer Online’s public quests is that they will not simply reset repeatedly so that players can do them over again. The assertion that there will not be a traditional quest system seems to indicate that public areas will consist of countless such events and, rather than wandering around looking for someone with an exclamation mark to tell them what to do, players will spend their time looking for something actually happening. The potential of such a system to change the way questing is seen in online games is staggering.

That isn’t to say that all adventuring will be completely directionless. Each player will have a personal quest chain to play through that reflects his or her own character. From an interview with MMORPG.com in December:

“When a player creates a character in Guild Wars 2, they will be able to answer many questions about their personal character history. These answers will help determine your personal story in the game. As many fans have theorized, one of the first things you choose is a ’subdivision’ of your race, which provides a more personal feel to your character’s history. For the humans, that means their ancestry–Elonan, Krytan, Ascalonian and Canthan–and also their social status as gentry or commoners of the city of Divinity’s Reach. For charr, it primarily means their legion, whether Blood, Ash, or Iron. The asura choose between the three most respected colleges of learning; Synergetics, Dynamics, and Statics. The sylvari follow the path of their seasonal cycle, or the time of day in which they awakened, being Dawn, Day, Twilight or Night. The norn choose their personal totem, and may choose to walk in the path of bear, snow leopard, raven or wolf. From these and other initial determinations, a wealth of personalized storylines develop, so that each player in the game experiences a story that is individually tailored to their character.”

According to ArenaNet, these choices, though part of character creation, will not affect class or power in any way. Their sole impact is on the player’s own personal narrative. This sounds tantalizingly like the Origins system in Dragon Age: Origins, and is an exciting thought when considered in the context of an MMORPG.

There’s no telling, of course, how much of an impact any of this will have or how well it will be received until the game is available to the public in some form. And if these claims were being made by a smaller developer without the experience or budget to back them up, they might be only a faint cause for hope at best. But ArenaNet has the budget and the talent to back up its big ideas, and it has already proven with one successful series that it knows what it’s doing.

Most seem to believe that the ultimate feat for an MMORPG would be to topple World of Warcraft. I’m not so sure. I think the ultimate measure of success is moving the genre as a whole forward. With a new approach to quest content, a strong focus on providing the player with a personal storyline, and the lack of any sort of monthly fee, Guild Wars 2 stands poised to do exactly that. Will it topple World of Warcraft? I doubt it. But it may force Blizzard to change in order to compete, which would almost certainly lead to other games following suit. Now that would be an accomplishment.

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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.

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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.

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Facebook’s Secret Code

Just in case you don’t have enough time-wasters on Facebook (I’m looking at you, FarmVille players), here’s something new to try:

The Konami code, named after the Japanese company behind classics like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series and the Nintendo Contra classics, is one of video-gaming’s most storied cheats. During development of the 1985 Konami arcade game Gradius, a programmer found the game to be too difficult and programmed in a key sequence — up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A — that, if entered, gave the player a set of the game’s power-ups. As word of the shortcut spread, other programmers aped his cheat, working the same sequence into their own games. The Konami code works in nearly 100 video games now, including Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution.

And now it works for Facebook. Try it for yourself — log in to Facebook and type the code: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, enter. It doesn’t matter where you type it: just have the Facebook page open and active. The result? Lens flares — those groovy circles that appear when pointing a camera into the sun — appear on your page with every click of the mouse. Useful? Not in the slightest. But they’re easy enough to get rid of — logout and they’re gone.

Reading this made me immediately made me tab over to Facebook and type in XYZZY to see what would happen

Via Konami Code: Facebook Uses Video-Game Cheat, Adds Flare – TIME

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Beta Opp: Grand Fantasia

Open Beta has begun!

Grand Fantasia is now open to all, and the Item Mall has been released! Join the dynamic and quickly growing community now and experience the adventure. The Aeria Staff has a lot of thrills planned, and players can look forward to epic contests and events including the chance to win 1 Million AP!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Best Press Release Ever

I don’t often post press releases in their entirety (and I get a bit annoyed with publicists who think I should) but I loved this one and wanted to share. The games aren’t bad, either.

Santa Claus Presents The Indie Video Games Advent Calendar 2009

Santa’s Office, North Pole (December 3, 2009) – Santa Claus announced today the indie xmas advent calendar is available for every merry indie gamer out there. Santa’s official advent calendar is featuring unique and innovate indie video games at www.indiexmas.com

The Indie games advent calendar features 24 doors, which can be opened one-by-one. Behind each door, gamers find one or more fun indie game to play, and trailers or demos to watch. Naturally, the indie advent calendar is only available in Christmas time.

When Santa was asked about the fun factor of these games, he replied with a warm “Ho ho ho!” laughter and continued eating porridge.

To follow the Santa’s official indie advent calendar, please visit www.indiexmas.com.

About Santa Claus:

Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle or simply “Santa”, is a legendary figure who, in many Western cultures, brings gifts to the homes of the good children during the late evening and overnight hours of Christmas Eve, December 24.

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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: 8% [?]

Beta Opp: Avalon Heroes

From the burda:ic press release:

This is what adventurers have been waiting for: On November 25, 2009, the games publisher burda:ic will start the Closed Beta phase for the eagerly anticipated free-2-play online strategy game highlight Avalon Heroes. Starting immediately, all registered members can sign up for the one-of-a-kind Closed Beta at alaplaya.net/pages/ahcbapplication. With a little luck, this means that they will already get to marvel at the impressive skills and weapons of the game characters before the release date. Moreover, in the official Closed Beta forum at avalon.alaplaya.net/forum, players will be able to find more detailed information and share what they experienced in the game.

Popularity: 8% [?]

BeeAppi’s CyberWord

New iPhone dev studio Bee Appi officially launches their first creation today. CyberWord is a candy-colored Bejeweled-meets-Boggle, built for whiling away time on the train or in the waiting room, but with an addictive blend of  match-3 mechanics and wordplay.

“Most word games simply ask the player to look at the screen,” developer Karen Jirak says, “but CyberWord adds a more interactive dimension by asking players to touch letters, swipe words, and shake the phone.”  CyberWord offers different playmodes, each with a slightly different twist on the swap and swipe mechanic. Challenge mode asks players to create 12 words before time runs out, with increasingly difficult levels. (Try the Easy setting for a particularly niece-friendly game, Jirak used her first-grade niece as a beta tester for the simpler vocab and easier goals.) Infinite mode adds a bomb, a familiar mechanic from match-3, and Puzzle is an untimed mode, requiring players to use up all the letters on the screen without replacement letters. Although you’ll spend most of the game rearranging the bright letter tiles, CyberWord also has adorable anime-eyed creatures cheering your successes and decorating the margins, for a sweet bit of character without falling into the pink trap.

Future updates include tying CyberWord in with Facebook Connect to share scores for a competitive wordsearch element. Don’t worry if you’ve been annoyed by the status-update barrage from friends playing FarmVille or recruiting mobsters, Jirak promises players can choose how frequently to share their scores on Facebook, and sharing on Facebook isn’t a requirement for progressing in CyberWord.

The BeeAppi team is downloading and playing a wide variety of iPhone games as they consider their next project, but we can expect this to be the first of many adorable BeeAppi games.

For more on Karen, BeeAppi and CyberWord, check out my full story in the next issue of Indie Game Mag.

Popularity: 12% [?]

What We’ve Been Talking About On ThumbGods

I recently reviewed My Boyfriend, Women’s Murder Club:  Games of Passion, and Lost in Blue 2 for the Nintendo DS (more on Lost in Blue 2 here), as well as Mystery of Cleopatra, Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, and Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger on the computer (Not to mention hints for Resorting To Danger!). I usually take a lot of time with game reivew, but I managed to review Nancy Drew: The Mystery of the Clue-Bender Society for the DS in under 140 characters.
PS ThumbGods also got onto Facebook, and Twitter.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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: 14% [?]

Muzzled

Telltale Games is following up their Talk Like A Pirate Day free game with a free download of Muzzled for Wallace and Gromit’s 20th anniversary.

Via Telltale Games – Wallace & Gromit 20th Anniversary

Popularity: 13% [?]

The Dark Side of Facebook Games

TechCrunch has a good piece on Facebook spamming hell over at Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell. When I think of the Facebook games spamcycle, I usually think of autoinvites, and invite-500-friends-to-read-your-horoscope apps, but this goes further into the dark side of Facebook games.

Via Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell

Popularity: 12% [?]