Game Review: Jane's Hotel

Jane's Hotel is another time management game I downloaded from Big Fish Games. You play Jane, a woman with big dreams of owning a five-star hotel. In order to accomplish this, you start out with a two-star hotel and work your way up. Of all of the time management games I have played, this is the worst. Everything is extremely linear and there is no way to change that. You can upgrade your hotel but you are not given any choices about how to do it. Upgrades are unlocked by gaining more experience then you have to earn enough money to purchase it. Luckily, you generally get enough experience and money in each level to buy the next upgrade. While the upgrades tend to change what your customers want/need, that's all they change. You don't get a "Jane moves faster" upgrade or an "Additional Chamber Maid" upgrade. As a result, both your character and the maid character end up running around like lunatics just to make the hotel guests happy. Personally, I think the guests should be able to turn the TV on by themselves. There isn't a need for ME to do it for them.

If you are into time management games, stay away from this one. I recommend you go with Cake Mania 2 or Paradise Pet Salon.

Game Review: Paradise Pet Salon

If you couldn't tell by now, I visit Big Fish Games a lot. This time around I gave Paradise Pet Salon a try. After all, I like pets and I like when pets look pretty! The description for this one reads: This is no day at the spa! It's you versus Pet Corp in this fast paced fur flying good time. Your pet spa is competing against the evil Pet Corp. You'll turn a small corner spa into a huge success with fast and hard work. But it's not all about speed. You've also got to plan ahead. Serve hundreds of great pets and people too so you can earn more money to improve your spa by buying upgrades and special treats for your furry clients too. Fur has never been this fun or addictive.

When you start the game, you have to decorate your pet salon and buy some equipment. There isn't a lot you can afford yet so you're pretty much stuck with the free wall color and floor tile with just a bathtub and cutting station. Oh, and don't forget to buy some chairs for your waiting pet owners. They don't leave the store until you are finished with their pet and they'll get angry if you leave them standing for too long. After a couple of rounds, you'll be able to buy some new equipment. This is where the game starts to get really hard. You can only afford to buy one new station and everyone wants to use it. It gets really difficult to juggle all the pets and their wants while keeping their owners happy. I came very close to losing a couple of customers when I first got a health station.

Paradise Pet Salon is basically another time management game. Instead of waiting tables or baking cakes, you're grooming dogs and cats. It can be a fun game when it's not too difficult. However, when you can't afford to buy additional stations to help with the abundance of pets coming in the door, it can get overwhelming. So while I enjoyed the game, I don't forsee me spending the money to buy the full version of it.

Game Review: Build-a-lot

Last night, I decided to break out of my video game rut. I've been playing way too many time management and hidden object games. So I downloaded Build-a-lot from Big Fish Games. The description reads: Become a real estate mogul and take over the housing market as you construct, upgrade and sell houses for huge profits! You can flip houses for quick cash or sit back and watch the rental income pile up. Travel to scenic towns and perform special tasks for the local mayors. Buy blue prints of new buildings to build bigger and better neighborhoods! Can you build an ice rink for the Olympics? A new cinema for the local movie star? Find out in the new strategy game, Build-a-lot!

I usually suck at strategy games but what the heck. It won't kill me to play an hour demo. The game actually turned out to be quite fun! I played through the first three towns. Well, I shouldn't really count the first town since that is the tutorial. In each town, you are given a list of goals to accomplish. They vary from things like 'Build 3 Colonial Houses' to 'Build A Library' to 'Hire 5 Workers.' While each of these sounds like really easy goals, you quickly find that you have to do some financial juggling in order to accomplish them. You start out with three workers, one housing blueprint and you need to purchase materials. To accomplish the 'Build A Library' goal, you need to juggle your finances enough to buy the library blueprint, hire two more workers and purchase 1500 units of building materials. In order to get the finances going, you need to build enough houses to generate enough rental income to buy everything you need. And, of course, there is a timer. If you accomplish all your goals fast enough, you get a blue ribbon for that section.

I know that I haven't really made the game sound as fun as it is. It plays a lot like a time management game but it's more than that. I found it to be a really enjoyable game and I just might purchase the full version so I can play some more.

Playstation 3 virtual world delayed

Taking place this week is Tokyo Game Show, one of the largest video game conventions in the world. Sony president, Hirai Kazuo, announced on Thursday that they will be delaying the launch of 'Home,' the Playstation 3 virtual world service. While the service was originally intended to be released this year, it is now pushed pack to spring 2008. "Home" is an interactive world where players create an avatar in order to do a variety of things, such as setting up their own rooms, playing games with other users and watching movie trailers. Sony hopes that the service will bring about new forms of advertising as well as electronic shopping.

Source: Mainichi

Game review: Cake Mania 2

In 2006, Sandlot Games came out with a new service-oriented time management game called Cake Mania. You play Jill, a culinary student trying to restore her grandparents' bakery. The game revolves around you baking cakes to the specifications of your patrons. With each new level, you get to purchase upgrades for your shop. This year we are treated to the game's sequel, Cake Mania 2. The customers are different, the locations are really different and there are new cake shapes with new frosting colors available. This time Jill has two friends in desperate need of her help. You choose which friend you wish to help first and off you go into the fabulous world of baking.

As much as I hate cooking in real life, I found myself enjoying Cake Mania so I had high hopes for the sequel. I was not disappointed! With games like this, you usually don't get a lot of new things. However, you not only get the frills of new cake shapes and new frostings and new cake toppers but you also get more difficult customers. Instead of always having a whole line of one-customer patrons, you now get paired patrons. With one customer, you get one type of cake to make them but for the paired-customers, you have to make two separate cakes. It makes the whole experience a little more interesting. Normally I can handle the one-cake-per-customer orders pretty well. I actually got confused once when they tossed in a two cake order and ended up having to throw away a two-tired cake as a result. That just made me more determined to not make any more mistakes.

If you like time management games like Wedding Dash or Snowy Lunch Rush, I think you'll really like Cake Mania 2. There are tons of choices for the player to make so you are never held back by the game's storyline. You get to choose where you go and what upgrades you purchase. I hope that more time management games learn from this upgrade in interactivity.

Game review: Wedding Dash

I'm sure most of you are familiar with Diner Dash, the restaurant game featuring everyone's favorite waitress, Flo. You seat customers (preferably matching the color of their clothes to the color of the seat), take their order, bring them their order then give them their bill and clean up the dirty dishes. There are three separate games in the Diner Dash world, all involving Flo saving restaurants from imminent closure, that feature different types of customers with different types of problems for our heroine to overcome. Wedding Dash is a new service-related game from PlayFirst, the publishers of Diner Dash. We are introduced to our new heroine, Quinn, in the midst of a friend's wedding planning breakdown. Quinn kindly offers to help her friend plan her wedding and off we are to start the game.

This is extremely similar to Diner Dash in that you are seating wedding guests, taking their presents to the happy couple and bringing them food. Luckily there are no dirty dishes to clean up since these tasks will keep you extremely busy, especially later in the game when the guests are requesting who they sit next to. As Quinn, your job is to handle the bigger problems - fighting bridesmaids, bad sound equipment, grill fires, etc. There is an unnamed waitress character that handles all of the guests needs. However, it is very difficult to keep juggling everything with just these two characters in the higher levels. In the second round, there are enough seats to handle about 10 guests but the waitress can only carry two things at once. If you don't figure out how to juggle the presents and food properly, you'll end up with a lot of angry guests. At the same time, Quinn can get overtaxed trying to handle the major problems. There are upgrades to try to offset the difficulty but I found that by Chapter 2, I was having problems keeping up with everything. I did find it to be a very enjoyable game despite getting aggravated that I was having problems by the end of the first chapter. If you liked Diner Dash, give this a try. You'll even get a cameo from the fabulous Flo!

Game review: Little Shop of Treasures

Little Shop of Treasures is a hidden object game from GameHouse. The object of the game is to raise money to open your own shop by helping other business owners with their customers. Each day you will help a different type of business and at the end of the week, you get to upgrade something on your own store. I love this game. The list of objects to be found is at the bottom of the screen next to a picture of the customer wanting to buy said object. There are five objects listed at once until you finish the list. When you find one of the currently listed objects, another customer pops into that space with something else for you to find.

My favorite part of the game is the help function. If you can't find something, the text will turn into a picture when you click on help. This makes it a great game for kids. It will help them learn to recognize words yet it doesn't give them the answer as soon as they get stuck. I found that the pictures were extremely helpful in a tough situation. To renew the number of 'helps' you have, you simply need to find the two question marks within each picture.

The down side of the game is that you don't get to customize your store when it comes time to upgrade. After each level, a specified part of the store is automatically upgraded. You don't get to choose which part or what colors that part will be. It would have been nice to get to have a little more say in what the shop would ultimately look like. Despite that, I think this may be my favorite hidden object game I've played so far.

Video game review: Snowy Lunch Rush

I know I stated earlier that hidden object games are my big weakness. I also have a fondness for time simulation games like Diner Dash. This time around I tried Snowy Lunch Rush. The Big Fish Games description of the game reads: "Do you have an appetite for fun? Then join Snowy the Bear as he sets out to run the best restaurant in town! Using nothing but your drive to be rich and famous, send Snowy scampering all over his shabby restaurant to seat customers, take orders, serve food, collect money and clear tables. Combos and other special feats can help you earn enough cash to keep the restaurant open, make repairs and upgrade to swankier locations."

This is such a weird game. It has all the typical Diner Dash-type pieces. Customers come into your restaurant, you seat them (preferably according to their color) then you wait on them. To try to keep it interesting, there are a few additions. Now there is a drive-through for you to keep an eye on and important people can make phone reservations for a table. However, it's rather difficult to get over the fact that it is a couple of bears running the restaurant. Snowy is a white bear that handles all of the customer interaction while Browny does the cooking. If the customers were also animals, it might not be so difficult but they are a variety of humans. Still, the game is enjoyable. I would like it better if you had some choice in the upgrades for the restaurant but it doesn't really detract from the game too much.

Video game review: Concentration

Back in the day, there used to be a game show on television called Concentration. It ran for 14 years from 1958 until 1973. Since then, there have been a couple of other versions of the show aired. The one I am most familiar with was called Classic Concentration. It was hosted by Alex Trebek and ran from 1987 until 1991 with reruns airing until 1993. Concentration was a great show because it was easy yet hard at the same time. The two players would start out with a game of Memory. Each of the 30 tiles held prizes for the players to match. Underneath those tiles was a rebus puzzle, a word or phrase that had to be figured out using pictures, letters and numbers held together with either a plus or minus sign. While the matching part of the game was fairly easy since there were only 15 objects to match, the rebus was usually rather difficult as the pictures could represent a number of answers. In the final round, the winning player would match cars from the tiles in front of them. The player would win the last car matched.

I have played many variations of the Concentration video game. There was a DOS version for the Commodore 64 that I played as well as a NES version. Last night, I played a new version for the PC from All Games Free. This downloadable game stays true to the television show. Unfortunately, that makes this all too easy for a video game. I played the one player version of the game on the medium setting. My competitor was rather slow, meaning I won just about every round on every game I played. He won two rounds of the 6 that I played. (I completed 3 games and there are two rounds to each game where you play against a competitor. He won one round in two different games.) When I got to the bonus round to play for the car, I easily matched all of the cars well within the time limit. The rebus part of the game was a bit more difficult but still fairly easy to guess without removing too many of the tiles first. Of the 6 rounds I played, my competitor correctly guessed two of the rebus puzzles while I solved the rest.

The matching part of this game may be good for small children or someone interested in working on their memory skills. However, the rebus part will be too difficult for children. I am hesitant to recommend an adult/child pairing for this game because the matching part of the game requires at least a little bit of reading skills. All in all, this game is only good for sentimental values. If you really enjoyed the Concentration shows, you will probably enjoy this game for awhile. Though I doubt you will want to play beyond the 30 minute trial.

Game review: Mystery P.I. - The Lottery Ticket

Mystery P.I. - The Lottery Ticket is a downloadable hidden object game from PopCap Games. The description from their website reads: Help Grandma Rose retrieve her winning $488 million lottery ticket in this richly entertaining mystery! Retrace Grandma's steps and uncover clues by finding hidden objects and solving tricky puzzles. Earn big points for accuracy and climb up the P.I. ranks. Do you have what it takes to solve the case? I found this to be a rather interesting hidden object game. You start out with a couple of areas on your map to search. Not all of them are buildings and some of them are rather unusual. Once you have gathered the alloted number of objects needed, you are taken to a memory game. With each level you have more areas on your map to search and you have a different memory game to play. You start off with a typical 'match the cards' game but then you evolve to 'match objects with the same color' and 'find objects that go together.' This is really an amazing way to make this game different from other hidden object games while engaging the player as well. Since each level is so different, you have to pay attention to the rules every time.

In my opinion, this would be a great game for an adult to play with a child. The hidden object sections are hard enough to keep the adult interested while the child will do better on the memory side of things. I know my daughter beats me every time we play Memory. Even if you don't have any children to play with, this is still a captivating game.