Game review: Jane's Hotel: Family Hero

Last week, I told you about the announcement of the sequel to Jane's Hotel. Well, the game has finally gone live and I tried out the updated version. In the game, you play Jane, a hotel owner. Your grandmother has lost four of the family's hotels. It is your job to run the hotels successfully enough to pay back the loans on the properties. You only have a couple of weeks to complete your mission. Can you do it?

Admittedly, I didn't like the original game at all. However, the sequel fixes everything that was wrong with the first! You can upgrade you and your workers now so they will move faster or get better appliances for them to work with. Not only that, there are more options for upgrading your hotel. You aren't just stuck with "buy a plant" or "offer dinners to your guests." There are a multitude of options for you and you are only limited by the amount of money you bring in.

There is also a new employee to help offer new things to your customers. The bellboy will fix things when they break (yes, things break now), take pictures of your guests if they request them and carry their luggage. My only problem with this character is that he is not used quite as much as the maid. It would be nice if he could also help water the plants or something instead of leaving all that to the poor maid, who must hate her job.

Overall, this was a much better game. I actually had fun trying to decide what I wanted to upgrade next. Realore Studios has learned their lesson. More options for the player is a good thing.

Jane’s Hotel: Family Hero press release

Game review: Magic Seeds

Magic Seeds is a weird sort of time management game. You are given some seeds and it is your job to grow the plants. While this sounds rather boring, the really interesting part comes from trying to cross-pollinate the plants. You start out with some sunflower seeds. Once the plants are mature, you can cross-breed them. Cross-breeding the two sunflowers will give you tomato seeds. (No, I'm not sure how that works either but it does in the game.) Then, after the tomatoes are mature, you can cross-breed the sunflowers with tomatoes and get corn. So even though the actual growing part isn't particularly fun, trying to figure out what pairs will give you different seeds is.

In very basic terms, this is a time management game. You have to water the plants and hoe the plants and pick the plants and sell the plants, if you so desire. There are even upgrades you can buy to help you with these chores. But I still think that this is not the point of the game. In my opinion, the point of the game is to try to obtain as many different types of seeds as you possibly can. That bumps it to more of a puzzle game than a time management one. No matter how you want to categorize it, it's still a lot of fun.

Game review: Ice Cream Craze

In the restaurant-themed time management game Ice Cream Craze, you play Jan. Her parents own an ice cream shop but they have decided to close the shop and retire. However, Jan had dreamed of taking over the shop. As her parents head off for a two-month vacation, Jan takes over the shop in order to prove that she can handle the business. The gameplay follows a lot of the counter-based restaurant games. Customers come up to the counter, order an item, you make the item, give it to them and take their money. There is a bit of a change here though. Instead of just clicking on a machine that will make your food for you, you need to stack your items in the appropriate order. For example, if a customer wants an ice cream cone with a chocolate scoop on top of a vanilla scoop, you need to pick up a cone, then pick up a vanilla scoop then pick up a chocolate scoop. While this is easy in the beginning, it gets a lot more difficult in the higher levels when they add new flavors and toppings and pies.

I found the game to be extremely entertaining. Besides just having the "satisfy your customers" goal, the challenge of having to juggle the ice cream flavors and everything made it a bit more exciting. Of course, I felt really stupid when I screwed up since all it requires is paying close attention. Luckily, you can just restart a level and fix your mistake. This was probably one of the most fun time management games I've played in awhile.

Game review: Go-Go Gourmet

Go-Go Gourmet is a restaurant-themed time management game. Well, it's sort of restaurant-themed anyway. You play Ginger, a woman trying to obtain master chef status so she can take over her grandfather's restaurant. Unlike normal restaurant-themed time management games, you don't deal with the customers at all. The only "interaction" you have with them is their face appears on their order slip. You start out with a small repertoire of dishes. In order to make the dish, you must find the necessary ingredients in the kitchen and prepare them in proper order. As you get farther in the game, you learn how to make more dishes and the kitchen fills up with various ingredients and cooking utensils.

Basically, this game is mixing a hidden object game with a time management game. You have to kick out the orders quickly and you have to search for the ingredients, which aren't always in the same spot they were before. I really enjoyed playing the game. Even when things started to get crazy, it was still really fun. The only down part of the game is that some of the meat ingredients look alike. It's a little difficult to tell the ground beef from the sausage. Other than that, it's a very fun game.

Game review: Dress Shop Hop

Another game from the creators of Diner Dash and Wedding Dash, Dress Shop Hop is a fashion-based time management game. Flo (from Diner Dash) and Quinn (from Wedding Dash) tell Bobbi (Dress Shop Hop) to open her own clothes shop. Of course, the heroine of this games listens to her predecessors. They have rather successful businesses themselves after all. Ohhhh....I really wanted to like this game and I did in the beginning but then it goes to hell. Much like other time management games, you move the customer to their "table." In this cast, the "table" is a machine that helps the customer decide what clothes they want. Then you have to go to the fabric machine to get their color fabric and take that to the sewing machine that makes the clothes. The problem with all of this? The machines take forever to do anything and the customers get impatient quickly. So by the time you reach the second chapter of the story, it's difficult to complete each level. If the machines moved a little faster or if the customers were a little more patient, the game would have been a lot better. As it is, it's frustrating to have to play the same level multiple times and still not be able to complete it.

Game review: Golden Hearts Juice Bar

Yet another restaurant themed time management game, Golden Hearts Juice Bar tries to change things up a bit by making the "restaurant" into a trendy drink bar. Unfortunately, the changes that make the juice bar possible makes the game annoyingly difficult right from the beginning. Of course, it doesn't get any easier as the levels go on. You play Kelly, a college student who is trying to each some money to continue her studies. So she takes a job at the local juice bar making milkshakes and strawberry smoothies. While this sounds like a great job, the game makes it extremely difficult by taking it out of a bar-typed setting and using a restaurant setting instead. As such, Kelly has to crank out as many drinks as she can while waiting on tables. Add in the fact that each drink takes a couple of seconds in the blender, it's not too difficult to end up with some cranky customers. You can make them happier with the house band but they seem to take an awful lot of breaks.

Also, the game setting teases you. There are things available that you can use but the customers don't want. So if you accidentally click on them, you are screwed. This includes things like lemon wedges for the drinks and slices of cake. They don't come into play until the middle of the second restaurant level.

I'm rather disappointed in the game. I wanted it to be really good. It's a great theme but it's just not used very well. If the designers had used the bar instead of seating the customers at tables, the game would be a lot easier and a lot more fun to play. I hope that they'll make a sequel to the game with a couple of minor changes. It'll be cool to have a bar-themed time management game. I think it'll bring back memories of the old Tapper games.

Game review: Babysitting Mania

When I first saw Babysitting Mania, I figured that it would be a time management game where you take care of babies or children. Feed them, change them...that sort of thing. It's nothing like that. You spend the entire game trying to clean up after a couple of hellion children while feeding/changing the baby. The goal is to get the entire house clean and the kids in bed before the parents come home. Sadly, that is really difficult because the children keep making more messes. You can put the kids in "time out" but that only lasts a little while. I was really disappointed that this game is more about being a maid and less about actual babysitting. In real life, I don't think anyone would be expecting their babysitter to do a lot of the things she does in the game. For example, one of your in-game chores is doing the family's laundry. I know that I wouldn't expect my babysitter to do the laundry while I was out.

In the end, it was a frustrating game that had nothing to do with the title. The only time you care for the children is when the baby needs to be fed or changed. The older kids are permitted to run around destroying things without any sort of punishment. (They go back to destroying the house after their "time out" so I don't consider that much of a punishment. It's intended to give you some time to catch up on your chores, that's it.) Definitely a game I will not be picking up.

Game review: Dirty Dancing

When I first saw the Dirty Dancing game on Big Fish Games, I shuddered. What sort of game could they make based on an 80s movie? Would it be any good? Despite my worries, I downloaded the trial to see for myself. The game is basically a bunch of mini-games thrown together in the Kellerman's setting. You go between the various cabins playing all sorts of games. There's a hidden object game where you have to not only find the objects on the list but also find keys for drawers because some of the objects are hidden are even more hidden. Another of the mini-games is a sort of matching card game. Instead of being a typical memory game, you have to figure out the pattern for matching the cards or you'll still have cards left in your hand. There's also a difficult time management game. You are given four employees that have to help the customers in all aspects of checking into the hotel. Everything from walking them into the hotel, checking them in, showing them their room, cleaning the room afterwards and showing the customer to their car. It's really difficult to keep everything going with just four employees and the flood of customers that walk in. If you don't get to the customer IMMEDIATELY, they get pretty ticked.

I think there are 10 mini-games total. While I played most of them, the games just aren't very interesting. You have to play each of the games over and over in order to "win" that particular cabin so you can move onto the dance lessons with Johnny. Unfortunately, the game just isn't as much fun as it should be. There's nothing dirty or dancing about it. They could have named it Camp Kellerman and the vibe of the game wouldn't change any.