Cooking Academy

When the first man dragged himself out of the primordial soup and heard his stomach growl, the age old question was born. “What’s for dinner?” Well, he might have been satisfied with roots and berries, but these days most of us have slightly more refined tastes (and slightly bigger waistlines). And that, my friends, is why a good cook will never go unappreciated!

But, if you’ve signed up at the Cooking Academy, you already know this. As a new student, you must cook your way through a variety of appetizers, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and desserts. If
you can navigate through all of your classes, and pass the exams, you’ll graduate and earn a coveted culinary degree (and a nifty chef’s hat to boot).

The mouse is used for all of your cooking tasks, from cutting to chopping to stirring and frying. If you’re a fan of Cooking Mama on the Wii or DS platforms, some of these tasks will seem very familiar. You’ll be grating cheese, peeling potatoes, slicing bread,
chopping garlic, and sauteeing all manner of ingredients in much the same way as in Cooking Mama. To combine ingredients together, you’ll be shown an obscured version of the next item needed, and must try and select the right ingredient to match.

There’s also the same stove top boiling technique, where you are asked to do certain actions just as the instructions pass the bar at the bottom of the screen. This includes adjusting the cooking
temperature, stirring the pot, and adding ingredients. You’ll also be cracking lots of eggs, and spreading butter in the frying pan, though this is much easier using the precision of the mouse than it ever was with the wii controller.

Despite these similarities, Cooking Academy adds several unique tasks as well. You may be asked to assemble food like
burgers or ice cream cones, which is done by dodging falling rogue items and catching only those that match the picture of your order. Mashing is done by looking for shadows that hover over certain objects, and clicking the right target. There’s delicate precision tasks like separating eggs, and peeling away lettuce leaves, which may require a bit of practice to master. For many recipes, you’ll be asked to knead or mix the dough, which is done by tracing over the lines from rounded edge to arrow tip. There’s a lot of food assembly and folding tasks, like sealing up spring rolls or shaping burritoes or crepes. To complete these, you follow the directions on the screen, which generally means tracing over arrows and clicking certain spots as you go.

The recipes themselves also set the game apart from Cooking Mama. Instead of food arranged by ethnic origin, Cooking Academy breaks up recipes into meal classifications. The recipes include both the mundane (like spaghetti and pancakes) and the exotic (like gyoza and creme brulee), but all are interesting and detailed.

If there is a progression in difficulty level as you advance, it’s hard to notice as you play. The exams generally get harder, but not by much. The recipes might include more steps, but not always, and you use the same skills in the beginning of the game as you do in the end. Variety is provided by the recipes themselves, and the constantly switching between different mini-games.

What’s pretty cool about cooking academy is that you can actually learn a thing or two about real cooking. While the recipes won’t give you exact proportions, they are fairly accurate in terms of ingredients and the general cooking process. Plus, there’s lots of interesting facts thrown in before each recipe.

The mouse proves to be a decent controller, and it’s actually a lot easier to control than the Wii remote in Cooking Mama, making it easier to be precise and get better results. It helps if you have a large mouse pad or open space, since you will need to do a lot of scrolling back and forth.

Some of the tasks seemed overly difficult, because they require you to guess at things you can’t possible know unless you’ve played before. For example, when cutting shapes in the dough, you need to be careful you don’t overlap or cut over the edge, but you’re not shown the size of your cutout before you make your first attempt. Also, when adding ingredients in the mixing mini game, some look overly similar, like baking powder and sugar which are both white powders on a spoon. There’s no practice mode, unfortunately, until you’ve already played through a recipe and been graded.

Despite these occasional frustrations, however, most tasks are fairly easy to complete while retaining a good score. If anything, it could be said that Cooking Academy is an easy game to beat, and most players should have no trouble passing all of the courses and exams. Should you fail, or simply get a lower score than you’d like, you can replay any recipe and increase your grade.

If you’re looking for a cooking game for your PC that is much less difficult than Hot Dish and more exciting than Family Restaurant, Cooking Academy is a good bet. All together, expect between 4-5 hours of solid game play, with decent replay value if you want better grades on your recipes. Who knows – you might even pick up a few ideas for dinner.

Review by Lisa Haasbroek
Gamezebo, Inc.

Fashion Dash

Needless to say, PlayFirst has been milking its “Dash” games more than a freakin’ dairy cow – er, in fact, there’s even a Dairy Dash game to go along with the many Diner, Wedding, Doggie and other “Dash” time management puzzlers. The latest is Fashion Dash, where gamers play as Coco, a woman with dreams of becoming a fashion designer who takes on the challenge of outfitting customers with tailor-made clothes while they wait.

Problem is, if you’ve played any of the previous “Dash” games, then you’ve more or less played this one, too. That, and some technical issues, makes this casual game download a difficult one to recommend.

Fashion Dash begins like most of these time management games: a young and talented woman stumbles into a career and with the support and guidance from Flo (of Diner Dash fame) she begins to make a name for herself in the biz by helping unique customers, making money and working her way up from one location to another.

Second verse, same as the first.

The gameplay works as follows: customers stream into a boutique and ask Coco for an available dressing room; bonus points are awarded for matching their shirt color with the same color dressing room and by placing customers near each other to flirt or gossip. Then Coco must hand each of them a booklet that outlines the various clothing designs she has and they’ll ask for a specific piece of clothing and color: a guy may request a blue jacket, while a girl might ask for a pink dress.

Coco then clicks on the customers to take their measurements and brings the info to the seamstress in the back of the store (by clicking the correct color material). When the clothing is ready, Coco must click on the items hanging on a rack and deliver them to the correct customer. At this point they may pay and leave, making room for other customers, or they may request additional items such as jewelry or perfume, before paying. Finally, Coco must pick up the empty hangers and bring them to a rack near the back of the store.

As with other “Dash” games, Coco gets a chaining bonus for performing two of the same tasks together, such as delivering two consecutive pieces of clothing or giving advice to two customers one after another (a question mark appears over their head when they don’t know what to buy). If you make enough money before the end of the day, you can purchase a few upgrades – such as a faster Coco or seamstress, or comfier chairs and a radio to help add patience to waiting customers – before advancing to the next day. If you don’t reach the daily cash minimum, you must play the day over again.

Different kinds of customers with unique traits will visit the five unique stores (beginning in the humble Dinertown and making your way up to Paris, France), including a guitar-playing female who irritates those beside her, an elderly granny who has a lot of patience and a Paris Hilton-esque “heiress” and businessman with no patience. The stores look a bit different, including a different layout, new customer types and items. Along with the main 50-level Story mode is an Endless mode, where players can see how long they can keep a continuous stream of customers happy by dressing them up in a timely manner.

Aside from the fact this game has zero ingenuity, there are technical issues, too, such as mouse clicks that don’t register. For example, you can click around the screen to queue up Coco’s tasks, but inevitably some won’t “stick” – especially when it’s time to give the tailored clothing back to the customers. To make sure I wasn’t wrong about this glaring bug, I had my wife play the game while I studied the screen and indeed when she clicked one or two pieces of clothing on the rack to bring to a customer, a couple of moments later I saw the little checkmarks disappear before my eyes, leaving Coco standing there and customers growing impatient.

Fashion Dash is yet another example of a disappointing – and self-destructive – casual game trend of pumping out similar (or virtually identical) games every other month or so in the hopes customers will continue to cough up the $20 for more of the same. If publishers like PlayFirst spent half as much time dreaming up new ideas as they do shoveling us the same game in a new wrapper, we might just see this industry evolve both creatively and financially.

Review by Marc Saltzman
Gamezebo, Inc.

Cooking Quest

Foodville is holding its annual Restaurant Row Chef’s Challenge and you’ve earned a spot in the prestigious contest. With a limited budget and a ticking clock, Cooking Quest is all about seeing whether you have what it takes to assemble the best ingredients and hustle in the kitchen to prepare five-star dishes that will impress the judges.

In Cooking Quest you’ll be challenged to prepare meals in six different restaurants, each of which offer a different cuisine: Italian, French, Mexican, Asian fusion, seafood and a good old American steakhouse.

Each meal is four courses, starting with the appetizer followed by the entree and dessert – and of course the meal must be paired with the appropriate beverage, whether it’s wine, sake or a pina colada.

For each course you must assemble the appropriate ingredients and tools (such as a corkscrew, knife or ice cream scoop) to cook with. These items are found scattered amongst a room full of clutter, and in typical hidden object fashion you must clear the room by finding all of the items provided on your list.

Some suspension of disbelief is required here: for example, in the wine shop you might find yourself searching for, er… a lizard, two phones, a safe and some tulips. Ok, so these aren’t the exact ingredients for the creme brulee on the menu, but occasionally you do find a special item that does have something to do with the task at hand, like a cleaver, avocados, fish and rice.

Every time you find one of the special items you’ll receive an interesting factoid along with it. Did you know, for example, that blue cheese gets injected with bacteria cultures to create veins of blue mold? Yum.

Adding another layer of complexity is the fact that you’re also working with a limited budget, and after each hidden object search you have to purchase a key ingredient from your shopping list with whatever money you have. For example, when choosing a wine you can go all out and splurge on the Vintage French Bordeaux for $65, or opt for the more economical California Pinot Noir for $32. If you’re completely broke (or cheap), there’s always the House Merlot, which is free.

You start each restaurant with a budget of $100 and have to spend it wisely, because your money has to last through all four courses so if you splurge too early you might not be able to afford higher quality ingredients in the later stages. You might also run out of hints, because using one to reveal the location of an item costs $20.

Furthermore, clicking on too many wrong items will cost you both time and money. The game is pretty quick to penalize wrong clicks, and the fact that gameplay suffers from the problem of name confusion (i.e. you it won’t let you click on the kayak when it’s asking for a boat; a ship’s steering wheel is confusingly referred to as a “helm,” and so on) makes it all too easy to mistakenly click and watch your precious budget being drained before your eyes.

The good news is that you can earn extra cash through speed bonuses (clicking on more than one item in rapid succession), and time bonuses awarded at the end of the level. If you run out of time, you’ll start the level over again with a new set of objects.

After you’ve assembled all your ingredients, it’s on to the food preparation and serving phase of the game, which is presented like an Azada-style puzzle with a bit of real-time action thrown in. You’re presented with a scene of a table setting along with pots and kitchen appliances for you to do the prep work, and an inventory of the items you’ve collected across the top of the screen. You can click and drag items to use them. For example, you can open the bottle of wine by dragging the corkscrew onto it, then fill the customer’s glass by dragging the opened wine bottle to the glass. You’ll also have to do things like cook a steak on a skillet, watching the temperature gauge to make sure you take it off the heat at just the right time.

After serving the meal you’re awarded a star rating based on the quality of the ingredients you purchased, and how precisely the food was cooked.

Some of the scenes – like a stove top with bubbling pots or the inside of a humming fridge – are pretty dynamic. However, the biggest disappointment with Cooking Quest is that with only six restaurants, it’s over too soon with limited replay value consisting of playing through the scenes with different items and trying to improve your star rating. Experienced players should be able to get five stars or close their first time around and blow through the game in about three hours. Furthermore, items repeat frequently, as do the locations.

There’s no question that the game is fun while it lasts, it’s just a shame that the game ends just when it’s really starting to cook. Still, that’s the beauty of the free trial. Try Cooking Quest by all means, and if you’re having fun but have already reached the fourth or fifth restaurant by the time the trial is over, keep in mind that there’s not going to be much more to unlock.

Review by Erin Bell
Gamezebo, Inc.

Gold Rush: Treasure Hunt

There’s never been a better time to get rid of a certain precious metal, with its value higher than ever. Happily, according to pleasing new action-puzzler Gold Rush – Treasure Hunt, there’s never been a better time to find it as well. Having ventured deep within the title’s computerized caverns, we concur: While not the most frantic or captivating of its breed, the game nonetheless proves fun and challenging, especially when enjoyed in short spurts.

Guided by the ghost of Prospector Jack – doomed to haunt certain shafts due to his greed – you’ll venture deep within caverns filled with fabulous rewards, and equal danger. The goal: Find gold nuggets, which, when returned to the mustachioed specter, cause him to tell more of his tale and further one’s progress.

Storyline largely takes a backseat to actual play though, with the outing a basic mouse-mashing brainteaser at heart, akin to nothing so much as the 16-bit (read: Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis) mindbenders of yore. Still, there’s a cool campaign treasure map to travel along, multiple mines to visit and an overarching coin-collecting goal to keep you engaged throughout.

As for on-screen action, veteran gamers will find that, superficially at least, it resembles nothing so much as Namco’s venerable classic Mr. Driller. Each stage essentially consists of a downward-scrolling cave inhabited by blocks of various color. These squares tumble downwards according to the laws of gravity, falling to close in gaps when lower-situated peers are removed. They’re also automatically drawn together, filling in any intervening spaces, when located adjacent to one another.

Your goal: Keep stacks from reaching the top of the screen. Doing so is as simple as clicking on groups of three or more similarly-colored squares, which – when highlighted – disappear, causing the blocks above to come tumbling down. Keep at it long enough to clear a trio, quartet or more of gold nuggets, which appear after descending long enough, and the stage ends in a brilliant flash of scintillating light.

If the setup all sounds a bit too straightforward at first, remember – several details make your repeated trips deep into the earth more appealing. Think playfields which scroll faster the further you get; obstacles like rock formations, breakable granite blocks, rising gas bubbles and side-mounted shelves; bonus multipliers and row-smashing or time-adding power-ups; and treasure chests that can be reunited with keys for cool bonuses, just for starters.

A pleasing 100 individual challenges – which demand you clear X many blocks, reach a certain depth or accuracy rating, or remove all squares from the screen to open containers hiding Jack’s precious loot – also entertain. Still, much as all the basic “simple to learn, hard to master” elements are in place, the tale never grips you quite the way the best coin-operated classics do.

Nevertheless, when experienced in brief, bite-sized sessions, the epic proves a great way to relax and unwind. While it’s tiresome watching canned animations play every time you select a pickaxe and drill or open a new chest and waiting for boards to advance (right-click to access new rows of blocks faster), there’s definitely a simple, addictive quality to the outing that’ll keep you coming back. Little touches like a fast-paced, swashbuckler movie-style soundtrack and stones which tumble one by one down sloped embankments help add charm. Even if, that is, this isn’t the sort of all-consuming diversion, a la Tetris, that’ll have you dreaming up new gameplay strategies in your sleep.

As finger-tapping desktop mindbenders go, you could certainly do better, or worse. Sitting slightly ahead of the curve though due to excellent polish and balancing (not to mention novel concept), however, Gold Rush – Treasure Hunt proves well worth its weight in, well, you know…

Review by Scott Steinberg
Gamezebo, Inc.

Cake Mania 3

Help Jill work her cake-making magic to get back in time for her wedding!
Cake Mania 3
In this third part of the Cake Mania series, Jill confronts her greatest challenge yet — planning her dream wedding! Disaster strikes when a mysterious time bender crashes to the ground and shatters into pieces. As Jill’s family and friends rush to pick up the scattered shards, they are suddenly sent hurtling through time. Now, to ensure her wedding goes off without a hitch, Jill herself must travel to through time — from Ancient Egypt to an unknown future — and work her cake-making magic in order to get herself and her guests back before the ceremony begins!

Beach Party Craze

Beach Party Craze
Hit the beach in a contest to earn the most money! The sand and surf are your domain as you work against the clock to serve food and drinks, purchase souvenir shops and keep your stores stocked with the best goods. Keeping guests happy is hard work, but the sun-kissed colors and superb animation that leap off your screen will make it worth your time. With a humorous storyline, dozens of upgrades to buy and addictive point-and-click game play, Beach Party Craze is sure to make a splash with the entire family!

Parking Dash

Get behind the wheel and shift into high gear with the all-new Parking Dash!

Introducing Karma, Flo’s hip, new friend, whose life takes a dramatic turn when she has contacted in her Donutville apartment about inherited property in DinerTown! Flo intercedes before Karma can sell the tiny blacktop lot behind Flo’s Diner to Mr. Big, and encourages Karma to start her own valet parking business. You’ll have to be quick to click as you rack, track, and even stack automotive gems from every corner of DinerTown. Help Karma clean up the streets. Parking Dash is thoroughly entertaining mix of the familiar and the unique. Hop in now!

Mah Jong Quest III: Balance of Life

Mah Jong Quest III Balance of Life
Starting from a mysterious birth at a mountaintop monastery and ending as a wizened old man, use your grandfather’s ancient Mah Jong set to solve an ever-challenging series of puzzles. As you play, make life choices that take you though battles against dragons, unreturned love, utter devastation, spiritual awakening, and ultimately a blossoming family. The story unfolds based on the decisions you make, so choose wisely!

Tropix 2

Take your funniest vacation! Play Tropix favorites like Coco Bowl, Cascade, and Puffer Popper, or try new games like Ice Cream Parlor, Stone Stacker, Fish Swap and more! Earn sand dollars to decorate islands along the way and unlock an original storyline featuring everyone’s favorite monkey, mermaids, pirates, and a few new friends. Whether you like puzzles, word games, action, sports, or even hidden object games, there’s something for everyone! Escape to a paradise of Tropix 2 games right now!

Secret of the Fairy Queen: an Enchanted Seek and Find

Enchanted Fairy Friends
Welcome to the Enchanted Fairy Circle! The mysterious Fairy Queen has made an appearance and promises to reveal a wonderful secret on one condition – you must guess her name. Search for 8 other fairies from the Rose Queen’s court to piece together the secret. Grab your fairy dust and get ready for a woodland quest!