Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox

Although Mortimer Beckett managed to evict the ghosts from his uncle’s house in Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor, it opened a time portal has allowed various modern-day objects to pass through and show up in random locations throughout history. In the hidden object / adventure follow-up, Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox, Mortimer must travel to different ages in time to put things right.

Like the first Mortimer Beckett game, items in Time Paradox are split into several individual pieces to find. Once all of the pieces of an item are found, the item is added to your inventory and can be used to either solve a puzzle, such as placing a ladder at the side of the building so you can climb up and read the inscription on a banner on the roof, or to help reverse the time paradox by putting the item back where it belongs, such as placing the bunch of eggs into the bird’s nest. Once Mortimer has fixed all of the irregularities in a scene, he’ll receive a piece of Uncle Jerome’s Time Bomb, which is the key to sealing the portals once and for all.

There are eight different ages to explore in Time Paradox, ranging from the purely historical (like the French Revolution and Ancient Egypt) to locations where the lines between history and legend start to become blurred. It’s fun to be able to interact with and help various larger-than-life figures, like bringing King Louis XVI a disguise so he can flee the palace, or returning Hades, God of the Underworld’s lost magical helmet.

Scenes like a rowdy Viking tavern, or two boys playing in front of a Marionette theater in the streets of Paris are wonderful, but even more clever are the unexpected ways that the effects of the time paradox shows up. It’s hard not to do a double-take when you see a London Underground sign resting on a staircase in 1,000 B.C. Greece, or the iconic Big Ben clock sticking out of the middle of the Nile River. Not only are the scenes visually rich and thoughtfully constructed, but the audio accompaniment is nuanced and appropriate to each scene.

The scenes are also ingeniously interconnected by the fact that in Time Paradox, not all of the misplaced items are confined to the same room. Instead, puzzles and objects are spread out across several scenes in the same historical age. Some locations even allow you to travel to sub-locations that branch off from them, like clicking on a boat moored to a dock to row out into the river.

Time Paradox uses an unlimited hints system that recharges gradually over time, and from the world map of a particular age you can look at how many items are still waiting to be found in each specific scene. With these aids, it’s possible to become briefly stumped in the game, but never truly stuck. There are also no time limits, so you can take all the time you need to work out a particularly taxing puzzle.

One of the biggest complaints with these types of games is that they simply aren’t long enough. Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox is definitely longer than the first game was , and not only that, but items will appear in different places when you play through the game a second or third time, which is a pretty good incentive to do so.

The game ends on a pretty big cliff-hanger. Now, normally I’m not a fan of these “To Be Continued” endings because sometimes, for various reasons, the developer never ends up giving us a “Continued” and we’re left hanging forever! However, I think it’s safe to say that given the quality apparent in Mortimer Beckett and the Time Paradox, this is a series that’s going to be around for quite a while.

Review by Erin Bell
Gamezebo, Inc.

Top Chef

Cooking games, pioneered by the likes of Cooking Mama and Hot Dish, are nothing new. But Top Chef, based on the hit reality TV show, dares to do something different by tasking players to actually create dishes instead of simply following recipes. But does it succeed, or is it a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth?

For those unfamiliar with the Top Chef TV show, amateur chefs compete against each other in a variety of cooking challenges including Quickfire (preparing dishes with specific criteria ) and Elimination (cook your heart out, making multiple courses). These dishes are judged and scored, and the chef with the lowest score “packs their knives” and heads home.

In game, you play a young and naive chef named Anna. As you progress, you learn more about Anna and the other contestants – some friendly, some not – through short intro and outro cutscenes. Naturally, you have a rival, who’s named Charles. He is arrogant and condescending, and wouldn’t it feel great to knock him down a peg!

Hosts Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio from the show are here. The graphics are cartoony, and all the characters are distinct and well-drawn. Even the food looks tasty! The music is taken from the TV show, adding to the authenticity.

The “meat” of Top Chef is your time in the kitchen. Anna has to create dishes in two Quickfire Challenges and one Elimination Challenge in each of the 15 episodes. Before each challenge, Padma briefs you on what you’re about to cook and what requirements you have to fulfill. Anna gives you some helpful tips, then it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire.

After Anna decides what dish she’ll prepare, like a canapé, grilled meat or sandwich, a recipe appears. But this is where Top Chef becomes wonderfully inventive. Rather than explicitly following a to-do list for a dish, you have to add the ingredients that you think are most appropriate.

Behind Anna is the pantry, which houses the ingredients. There are three types: vegetables, meats and proteins, and flavorings (spices, herbs, fruits, whatever can be part of the dish but not a main component). Each ingredient has a distinct flavor like spicy, sweet, savory or salty. Sometimes you’ll just need to worry about the color of the food, or an ingredient’s nationality. Higher levels have ingredients with more than one characteristic.

For example, to make a vegetable side dish, the game might ask you to use a red vegetable. If they’re available in your pantry, you can choose to use a tomato or a red pepper. Then it will ask for a bitter ingredient. Do you use the olives or the lemon? The choice, refreshingly, is yours.

Initially, you have three workstations where you prepare each step of a recipe, which increase you progress further into the competition. Like a good time management game, it is important to multi-task, grabbing new items from your pantry for when Anna has a free moment. A status meter fills faster when Anna stays on task (just like a real chef). Once all the parts of the dish are complete, you’re presented with a picture of what you made along with its name. You’ll have to complete all your dishes before time runs out.

As a foodie, I was very excited by the possibility of crafting my own dishes. Some of the combinations are very distinct, like pairing orange and fennel (real food tip: add black olives, sliced onion, salt and olive oil for a delicious salad!). To succeed, you really have to know your food. For example, even though the game didn’t tell me explicitly, I knew that when the game was asking for a sweet vegetable for a salad, I could use beets.

The concept behind Top Chef is quite similar to Gamelab’s Jojo’s Fashion Show, where you had to dress models by selecting clothing off the racks to conform to a given style like Modest, Racy, Summer or Winter. The judging, where you’re awarded a five-star rating, and the availability of Shuffle and other power-ups are also familiar. However, the concept that made Jojo’s Fashion Show so fun doesn’t always translate smoothly into the world of food.

Sometimes I wouldn’t have the right ingredient in my pantry, and in spite of using my shuffle power-up, still could not fulfill the recipe’s request. Other times, foods would change categories that were opposites. Tamarind was bitter in one challenge, but sweet in another. Some categories were a little ambiguous, like using “dark” food.

Also confusing were foods my tastebuds identified one way, but the game called it another; basil, to me, hits me as savory, but was called sweet in the game. Flavors that I know work in real life, like basil and garlic, aren’t acknowledged as combinations in the game. Other times, I would stumble upon previously unknown combinations, like fennel and carrots.

Because the game doesn’t separate which part of the dish you’re working on, it’s very hard to keep track of which ingredient you’re preparing for what dish, and consequently, which ingredients should be combined to make a better dish.

There are a few other oddities as well. Animations don’t always line up with what you’re doing – apparently, adding soy sauce means to stand at a station and chop. But weirdest of all is the writing in the game. If you add a particular ingredient twice, it will appear twice in the name of the dish, resulting in things like “Italian Dumplings with Lamb, Lamb and Kale Sauce.”

The judges’ dialog is very obviously plugged in. I was ordered to make a tuna salad, and Tom’s observation was, “I wouldn’t have thought of using tuna, but it really works!”

Top Chef brings a number of great new ideas to the cooking game genre. Perhaps if the developer gave us a cookbook, explicitly letting us know exactly what flavor each ingredient was, and a glossary of combinations, things would be much clearer. As it stands, Top Chef is a smorgasbord of potential, but the finish is a little off.

Review by David Stone
Gamezebo, Inc.

Beebo Deluxe

Bees – they’re really not as organized as you might think. While we can surely classify bees as one of the most hardworking insect species, they still have their own problems when it comes to making their hives as efficient as possible – at least in Beebo Deluxe, where ordinary worker bees are reliant on the services of a “Beeficiency Expert” for hire as he organizes each hive for maximum honey-producing profit.

In this game, you take the name of Mr. Beebo, the best Beeficiency Expert the world has ever known. You are hired by a businessman (or businessbee) named Buzzleworth to manage his entire network of rich honey combs, mainly because of your great reputation of getting the job done perfectly and always on time. And since even the dictionary backs up this claim, your services don’t come cheap either.

The objective of the game’s 64 levels is fairly simple: You just have to fill up the honey meters by matching 3 or more same-colored honey drops by placing them adjacent to each other on free honeycombs. Each level interface is divided into 2 parts – the top comb and the bottom comb. Worker bees will be continuously filling up the top comb with honey drops, and your role is to take three of those honey drops to the bottom comb and make same-color matches to win. There is actually no time limit, but when the top comb fills up, this will trigger the time interface to appear and count down until you manage to pick up some of those honey drops.

Basically, you just want to finish each level before having your timer run out. But if you’re aiming for hardcore gaming status, you can also unlock a bonus stage by collecting all six gems within the six levels of each location. You can collect gems by clearing all the colored honey combs in each level. To do this, you have to pop honey drops of the same color as the honey comb, and as an end result, the cleared cells will wax over and cannot be used until you use a power-up to clear them back to being empty.

The “waxing” effect opens up a pretty challenging feature to the game since it will become really easy to fill up the bottom comb with unnecessary honey drops once you have most of your combs wax over. Once your bottom comb is filled up, you have no where to put those honey drops from the upper comb unless you throw them in the blue funnel. But eventually, throwing away honey drops will lower down your honey meter too, and there will be no way out a level unless by letting time run out and start over the same stage.

There are six regular stages for each location as well as an additional mini-game and an unlockable bonus stage, thus bringing up a total of eight stages if you’re good enough a player. Mini-games are presented as a fourth stage for each location and serve as a nice little break from all the frantic honey-dropping gameplay. Mini-games are either a pairing game or a “pipe” game where you have to connect two barrels with pipes in order to build a non-interrupted way for honey to flow between them. It’s really nice to have these mini-games added to the whole Beebo Deluxe experience, but most of them are just too short-lived, very easy to play, and giving the impression of being too lax in comparison to the actual puzzle match-three game.

The game features some nifty power-ups too that are triggered by matching specific objects in groups of three. Examples include the “music box” that slows down the movement of collector bees, the “pink donut” that brings up a “wild card” honey drop capable of matching with any honey color, and my personal favorite – “froggy”, the voracious frog power-up that can eat up a whole row of cells.

Aside from power-ups, Beebo’s insect friends can also come help you out after summoning them by matching jelly donuts. Each insect friend is specific on a certain location and has their own special power very useful for that particular set of stages. For example, Dotty the Ladybug in the Wild Wild West location can change random honey drop colors to red. This is very useful since most of the colored cells in this location are colored red too, definitely helping you out if you’re on a quest to unlock the coveted bonus stage.

After all the work done, Beebo spends time furnishing his own bee hive too. In the “BeeBuy” interface, you get to spend all of your hard-earned money in buying Beebo some appliances, furniture and decorations to prop up his empty crib. Finishing each location also awards you with furniture, and it’s up to you whether you sell the awarded items or keep them as another one of Beebo’s home decor before you move on to the next destination of your journey.

All in all, Beebo Deluxe is really one straightforward game, and although the presentation is nice, the actual gameplay experience can get pretty tiring as it can start to seem like you’re playing through the same interface over and over again. This doesn’t mean that the game lacks challenge though, because in my opinion, challenge is actually Beebo Deluxe’s main feature. Honestly, I just found it too hard to both fill the honey meter and wax over the colored combs all at the same time in each level. And the game can get pretty frustrating too since it’s hard to rebound once you’ve made mistakes in the honey drop placements.

On the positive side, you can always take a break from the story mode anytime and just enjoy Beebo Deluxe’s “Endless Play” feature. Also, the purchase of the game goes towards helping the Pollinator Partnership charity in the research of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a misunderstood phenomenon where bee colonies throughout the world are disappearing.

So, if you’re concerned about the environment or just plain like bees, this game is definitely worth a try because there’s really no other game more “bee” related than what Beebo Deluxe has to offer environmentalists and casual gamers alike.

Review by Ruff Bismonte
Gamezebo, Inc.

Virtual Farm

Have you ever wanted to run your own farm? Here is your chance in the new game Virtual Farm. Till your fields and plant your crops to see if you can turn a run down farm into a prosperous business in this cute simulation game.

You play as an old farmer who has inherited a farm in dire need of your help. The only successful crop growing on the farm is grass. A green thumb, a healthy dose of patience and a keen eye on the market will help you to turn the grass into profits and thereby expand your crops to include new vegetables, fruits and flowers. As you earn money, you can purchase additional plots for more crops, up to a total of 60 beds.

Although you have to start small and be content growing grass and tomatoes to sell, eventually you’ll earn enough dough to really get things moving! New farm equipment will be available for purchase. Get a new tiller to help fertilize the ground, upgrade your harvester to help you get those crops to market faster, build a larger storage center to keep goods on hand until their demand is high and even trade in your watering can for a far-reaching hose. Who could ask for more?

But there is more! Not only can you grow a wide variety of crops but you can also build support structures to turn your produce into other goods. Take all of that boring grass and feed it to your cows. They’ll produce milk which can be sold for a lot more than the grass. You can even purchase a churn and turn the milk into fresh butter.

Other produce can be used with different buildings as well. Cucumbers can be fed to the sheep that will produce wool. Sell the wool as it is or purchase a spinnery and weave the wool into fine textiles. Have a lot of tomatoes on hand? Great! Build another pen and feed the tomatoes to your pigs. You’ll be able to sell meat at the market for a huge profit. More support buildings will become available as you progress through the game, constantly increasing the potential earnings of the farm.

Locals will contact you and ask for specific harvests. Sign contracts with them and deliver the goods on time for the biggest profits. Fail to deliver in a timely manner will result in the loss of your cash deposit on the contract, which could spell certain doom for your farm.

Another aspect of the game that can make or break your farm is the market demand feature. Every few minutes, the demand for various products will change at the market. If you keep an eye on these demand levels, you can charge exorbitant prices for any of your products when the demand is very high. This can give you a much needed cash boost now and then. Just be sure to reset your prices lower when the demand goes down, or you’ll end up with stockpiles of product that just won’t sell.

I found the game remarkably similar to Alice Greenfingers in many ways, though without the high level of customization for your farm. The overall premise is the same – plant stuff, harvest stuff, sell stuff, make money, buy stuff, wash, rinse, repeat. And, as with Alice Greenfingers, toward the end of the game, the tediousness set in. Endless harvesting of plants as quickly as possible over and over and over again, just to keep up.

One other frustrating aspect of Virtual Farm is that although there are a lot of different production buildings you can purchase, there doesn’t seem to be a way to fit all of them into the lot at one time. I could be missing something, but I wasn’t able to have all of them going at once. This became a big problem as the tasks later on call for a wide variety of products and I had to demolish certain buildings to make room for others and then switch them back later on, at great cost.

All in all, this is a very cute game, with no real ending. You can continue to work your farm indefinitely it seems although once you’ve purchased all of the upgrades, there isn’t much else to do aside from sell the produce. If you enjoy farm and growing sims like Alice Greenfingers, then you’ll probably get a kick out of Virtual Farm. It’s at least worth downloading the demo.

Review by Heather Lane
Gamezebo, Inc.

The Treasures of Mystery Island

With hidden object games more popular than ever, it’s imperative that each new debut bring something different to the table. In the case of The Treasures of Mystery Island, innovation’s offered by way of the need to assemble inventory items and use them to solve puzzles or spark off engaging mini-games. Albeit an occasionally frustrating experience due to well-concealed clues, the odd presentation hiccup and the inherent need to find small, oddly-shaped playing pieces, one needn’t fret, however. Taken together, the whole of the title adds up to a fun, eye-catching experience that’s considerably more than the sum of its individual parts.

As the story (told via attractively-animated action scenes starring characters who nonetheless look distinctly foreign and whose heads don’t naturally fit their bodies) reveals, you’re a courier named Alex. While flying over the ocean, a freak storm forces you to crash land on an uncharted isle, where the local villagers’ chieftain and shaman soon direct you towards adventure and, hopefully, eventual escape. Play mostly boils down to the usual object-hunting fare though, as you scour caves, hospitals, hunting lodges and communications centers for vital quest items. Find enough pieces lying around in a jumble of trunks, mounted heads, bookcases and other assorted everyday clutter to assemble these goods, and you can place them back where they belong. Once done, vital playing pieces and missing clues are provided, mini-games offered to help advance the tale and new locations offered for your continued exploration.

Mind you, getting ahead is easier said than done. Objects are initially broken down into tiny, hard-to-spot shards often cruelly tucked away behind other objects, housed in difficult to see nooks and crannies or made to nigh-perfectly blend in with background environments. The further you progress, lack of a general ticking timer notwithstanding, the harder locating missing bottle caps and pinecone fragments becomes to boot, as even when you think you’ve found one, these items’ miniscule size means clicking on them can be a tricky task. So make sure you go in expecting to do a little hair-pulling, even if an unlimited “tip” function (periodically replenished as the seconds pass) which helps you track down these gewgaws does help offset the aggravation factor. Oh, and a word to the wise as well, since it’s not always apparent. Sometimes, you just have to solve larger puzzles – i.e. placing nozzles back on faucets or grates back on ventilation shafts – using items you’ve collected at other locations before that last missing piece appears, no matter how much time you’ve previously wasted scouring the screen for it.

Still, with its non-linear setup and grab bag of nifty diversions (e.g. memory challenges or scenarios that demand you choose all edible items from a chain of eggplants, baseballs, oranges, dice and such scrolling by), there’s much to enjoy here. For example, a diverse range of areas to visit (jungles, waterfalls, etc.), snappy aesthetic (love those eye-catching backdrops and the map which serves as a main level hub), and nice selection of collectible trophies (awarded for speed, accuracy, ability to go without hints and so on). Certain elements – e.g. occasional sequences where “cards” featuring athletes, mechanics, waiters and little boys require you to find objects related to each, such as a sheriff’s guns and handcuffs – don’t make much sense. But what they do accomplish, though, is the addition of extra replay value, extending the title’s long-term appeal somewhat beyond where that of most competitors lies.

Neither a particular standout nor dismal failure, in the end, this is simply an entertaining, well-made saga that employs a grab bag of colorful activities and distractions to keep you clicking away. That said, regardless, we definitely dig its overt nods towards both traditional point-and-click desktop adventures as well as more contemporary hidden object titles. If you’re looking for the type of title that’s equally suited towards short or extended gaming sessions, and doesn’t mess with the standard category formula so much as slightly remix it, download away. With its one-two punch of snappy activities and sweet audiovisuals, The Treasures of Mystery Island offers a bounty of entertainment value for all.

Review by Scott Steinberg
Gamezebo, Inc.

Operation Mania

One of the first fruits of Electronic Arts’ lauded partnership with toy manufacturer Hasbro, Operation Mania attempts to upgrade the classic board game for today’s keyboard jock. Its strategic approach: to weave nearly two dozen “micro-games” (bite-sized diversions that can be played in roughly 10-15 second increments) into the standard time management equation.

Happily, the setup works surprisingly well, staying true to the spirit of the original tabletop diversion. Nonetheless, extreme repetition – the bane of many a similarly-styled competitor – again rears its head, ultimately reducing the experience to a fun, but fleeting novelty best enjoyed in brief installments.

As the story (if you can call the occasional hand-drawn comic that) goes, you play zany surgeon Dr. Humerus, on a quest for fame and fortune. To make a name for yourself, you’ll need to make pit stops at five individually-themed hospitals (Muscle Beach, Waistland, Frostbite Heights, etc.) and 35 individual levels.

Laid out on a single-screen 2D backdrop, each stage plays identically to the sort most commonly indigenous to the category, i.e. involving you attempting to please as many testy patients as possible. The faster you attend to each of the randomly arriving medical attention seekers’ needs, of course, the more money you’ll earn towards achieving a minimum daily goal before the ever-ticking clock runs out.

While play starts out simple – click that clown-nosed customer, drag him to admissions, process paperwork, dump dude on the operating table, start surgery, collect some cash – things quickly get more complex the further you proceed. In the beginning, clicking on OR patients proves mostly optional, letting you jump into a brief arcade-style challenge, such as “Wrenched Back” (find the hidden wrench) or “Water on the Knee” (use a bucket to catch falling drops) on-demand.

Later, it becomes a necessity, as emergency cases force you to drop everything and bat tennis balls back or remove chickens from ventricles with surgical tongs, and the extra cash these activities bestow turns vital. An increasingly diverse array of patients (e.g. those willing to wait longer, but pay less); props (i.e. ward beds and wheelchairs for recovery or referrals); and surprises (sudden health inspections) that’s drip-fed at a relatively slow pace also adds challenge.

Still, much as we love the comedic visuals, ability to chain actions/colors for extra payouts and sight of noses lighting up when you accidentally vacuum abdomens instead of green gunk, flaws exist. For one, there’s not a vast array of customers, detracting from long-term appeal. Play proves all-too-similar over extended periods to boot. Likewise, although there are quite a few gems amongst the micro-games (see the goo-tracking “Elbow Grease” or blowtorch-wielding “Brain Freeze “vignettes), each grows old after just a few tries.

Purchasing speed upgrades, better gear, more equipment and new stations between levels also turns out to be quite pricey, forcing you to forego helpful upgrades or spend more time experiencing the same amusements over and over in order to afford them. Lastly, queuing actions isn’t always a fine science either, since you can add clickable, but not drag-requiring tasks to the pile, demanding you manually remove patients from surgery tables, for example, before others can be added.

As such, Operation Mania delivers nicely on its underlying potential, but fails to excel in any single given area. More importantly, despite promising oodles of variety at surface value, it’s a mostly textbook take on time management outings, albeit one with more minor distractions than the average contender. Should you not mind the frantic pace, or need to enjoy in coffee break-style sessions to preserve your sanity, both Story and Marathon’s objectives – get paid and keep patients alive, lest they turn into cartoonish angels – will certainly amuse.

Nonetheless, consider it more well-produced genre knock-off than must-play advancement, and one likely to still mostly appeal to the family game night’s existing core fan base at that.

Review by Scott Steinberg
Gamezebo, Inc.

Diner Dash: Hometown Hero

After her cruise ship adventure in Diner Dash: Flo on the Go, entrepreneur extraordinaire Flo comes back to find her hometown looking like a run-down dump. And so, she vows to rejuvenate the town one hotdog or hamburger at a time. There you have the premise for Diner Dash: Hometown Hero, the latest sequel to PlayFirst’s smash hit Diner Dash franchise.

Like any good sequel, Diner Dash: Hometown Hero retains the core format that made it so popular in the first place. In case you need a refresher, gameplay takes place in various restaurants where Flo is responsible for seating customers, taking their orders, serving food, collecting tips and clearing the table for the next round until closing time, where if she’s made enough money she moves on to the next stage.

Of course, it doesn’t stay that simple for long. Soon Flo will also find herself mopping up spills, snapping pictures for tourists, bringing drinks, treats and desserts, pushing tables together for larger groups, setting down flower vases and chatting with customers at the front podium all in an effort to keep their disposition high enough that they won’t storm off in a huff.

And just when she thinks she’s got everything under control, the power will go out (forcing her to use a flashlight), or she’ll hire an assistant – which is not actually as relaxing as it sounds because in Diner Dash: Hometown Hero the assistant doesn’t just help Flo but also serves customers on her own, which adds an element of friendly competition.

Different types of customer each have little quirks to deal with. Teenage boys and girls, for example, love to chat on their cell phones – much to the annoyance of anyone sitting within earshot. Some mothers carry babies on their laps that will cry unhappily until Flo brings them a high chair to sit in. The food critic is picky and impatient, while the hungry men order two rounds of food in one sitting.

As Flo tackles one venue’s restaurant at a time – starting with the zoo and moving on to the ballpark, museum, amusement park and beyond – you’ll actually see the setting start to improve dynamically in response to the positive effect Flo has on it. You’ll get to upgrade the counters, floor, tables, decorations and equipment, and in response more people will start to populate the area. The ballpark’s empty stands will fill with spectators, animals will be added to the zoo, and parents will start bringing their children to the museum again.

That’s just one of the notable changes to Diner Dash: Hometown Hero. Another is customization. You could already change how you wanted Flo to look by selecting different clothing and accessories, but Diner Dash: Hometown Hero takes it to the next level. Not only can you create a custom waitress (or waiter), but you can also design your own restaurant, play through it, and then upload it to the brand new Diner Dash website at DinerDash.com so that other people can play it too.

Another cool new feature in Diner Dash: Hometown Hero is an online multiplayer mode where you and a friend can compete head-to-head to see whose waiter can earn the most cash in a single restaurant. If you’re not keen on competition, there’s also a co-operative mode where you work together to serve customers.

Diner Dash: Hometown Hero is also the first time PlayFirst has experimented with micro-transactions in a Diner Dash game. If you’re willing to pay a small fee (we’re talking real-world money here, not the money Flo earns from her customers) you can purchase additional clothes and backgrounds and even entire new restaurants to play in Story mode, Endless and Multiplayer mode. The first to be offered is Waterpark Madness for $4.99.

Still, Diner Dash: Hometown Hero by no means feels like half a game if you choose to ignore the meta-transactions. There’s enough to do in Story and Endless mode, not to mention designing your own diners and challenging people online, that you don’t feel like anything’s missing if you don’t pony up for the extra stuff. They really are just that: extras.

Diner Dash: Hometown Hero is a good mix of the familiar along with several significant new ideas. Gameplay is still as challenging as ever and gets more than a little frantic at times (the bawling babies certainly don’t help), but most importantly, the game still feels fresh – which after this many sequels isn’t an easy feat.

Review by Gamezebo, Inc.

Fitness Dash

Fitness Dash game
After DinerTown loses in a staggering tug-of-war defeat to the Meatropolis Mashers, Jo the Jogger warns her team mates to keep fit. Seems the residents of DinerTown are just a little too devoted to their expertly-served burgers and shakes, though. Encouraged by Flo, Jo opens a series of gyms and vows to get DinerTown into shape for the next competition. You’ll help Jo lead DinerTown to a tug-of-war victory at the Mount Olympus Gym!

Alex Gordon

Treasure hunter Alex Gordon gets more than he can handle when he and his sister, Alice, discover a strange amulet buried in a cave on the island they’re exploring. The amulet shatters into five pieces, which awakens the island’s natives who capture Alice. To get her back, Alex must find the amulet pieces that are now scattered across the island and return them to the head native in this action platforming game.

Alex Gordon is a side-scrolling action game similar to Supercow or Turtle Odyssey. Using either the keyboard or mouse, the goal is to get Alex to the end of the level by jumping on platforms, climbing ladders and ropes, avoiding spikes and other hazards, and either dodging enemies or stomping on their heads a la Super Mario Bros.

There are five stages in the game with a total of 50 levels, along with 15 bonus stages where the goal is typically to collect as much treasure or as many coins as possible within a given time limit.

One of the game’s big plusses is that there are multiple goals for each level. Besides collecting coins and stars and discovering secret areas, the game also keeps track of how many monsters you’ve destroyed and how long it took you to finish the level. You can always replay individual levels to try to beat your time, collect all the stars, or defeat all monsters. Stars can be used to unlock extra levels, and you can spend coins on buying stuff for your retirement island such as a boat, beach house or better landscaping (this feature has nothing to do with the game, really, but it’s a fun diversion).

The level design of Alex Gordon is straightforward in comparison to the classic platformers. From obstacles like falling spikes and crushing ceiling traps to underwater levels, dangerous lava, fireball-spewing plants and Alex’s “wall-climbing” ability, there’s nothing Alex Gordon offers that hasn’t been done before. Levels can eventually start to feel repetitive and stale owing to the fact that there’s not a whole lot of creativity to their design. The story and dialogue also feel trite, and the ending is a bit of a let-down.

That said, Alex Gordon is also significantly less difficult than the vintage platformers, and as a result, is also less frustrating. There are no boss battles, and levels are peppered with arrow signs to point you in the right direction as well as frequent checkpoints so that if Alex loses a life you can start from the most recent checkpoint instead of having to redo the whole level. (You will start from the beginning of a level, however, if you lose all your lives).

The game also makes an effort to be cute: the Alex character is a brawny cat doing his best Indiana Jones impression, and an eclectic group of enemies includes fat beavers wearing Viking helmets, rock-chucking hippos, kamikaze birds and aggressive little tortoises that resemble the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Checkpoints are represented by Lucky, an excitable fan who wears an “I Love Alex” T-shirt.

So in spite of having a bit of a “been there, done that” feel, Alex Gordon nevertheless offers solid controls and generally well-balanced gameplay, which translate into a decent and playable casual platformer.

Review by Erin Bell
Gamezebo, Inc.

Shopping Blocks

What do you get when you combine the thrill of time management games with decorating choices a la The Sims? The answer is Shopping Blocks, a quirky but challenging game that proves to be a refreshingly different pick for casual gamers.

Throughout the three-stage tutorial we meet Susan, an ambitious store owner who wants to grow her modest boutique into a retail mogul. In order to pull this off you need to help her grow her business by catering to customers’ needs, increasing the value of her stores and of course, pocketing enough money to continue on the quest.

But unlike most other time management games, you don’t directly serve the customers at all. At the start of each mission you’re giving a mission to accomplish, such as build a bicycle stand (which will cost you $900), sell 20 items, increase the value of your shop to $5000 and raise the shop’s “class” to 100 percent.

As customers pour into the store to start browsing and buying, you’ll begin to earn money that can be used to purchase up to 18 unlockable items per three main categories (totaling 54 items in all), which you must place somewhere in the store.

“Goods” are the first category, which include items such as clothing racks, fitting rooms, benches, shoe racks, sunglass racks, and so on. Customers request these items in one of three ways: at the start of each level before you begin (put your mouse of the character’s head for info like “Mike wants to buy shoes,” etc.); as a thought bubble over the shopper’s head; or as a game hint by Susan like “Build a media rack”).

“Patience improvers” make up the second category of 18 items, which, as the name suggests, are designed to make a customer stay in the store longer so they buy something before they leave. This may be TVs, coffee or soda machines, planets and flowers, statues and aquariums, ice cream vendors, stereos, and more.

Third, “Shop class improvers” builds up the value of your store by your decoration choices, such as floor tiles, wallpaper, artwork and lights for the wall, or fancy windows and mirrors. Because of the 18 different items you can use, and you get to pick where they go, no two games should look exactly alike. Plus, with some items like fitting rooms, wallpaper and rugs, players get to select the color they like from a palette of up to two dozen choices (depending on the item).

With a left mouse-click you get to choose where in the store these items will appear, while a right mouse-click lets you rotate the item so that it best faces the store’s traffic.

The game lets you play at three speeds, based on your comfort level. Clicking to restock shelves is easy enough – an icon flashes and a persistent beeping tells you this action is required – but most of your time you’ll be trying to reach your specific goals by serving the customers needs (if you have enough cash to do it).

As you progress through the different stores the tasks get more and more challenging, so you’ll have to restart the same mission if you fail. There’s a second, mission-free “Free Mode” that lets you choose the street for the store you want to run – such as Cherry Street, Williams Lane, Sycamore Road or Dogwood Place – and the game continues as long as you service the customers accordingly.

We really like Shopping Blocks, but it’s not without its problems. The biggest issue is conflicting advice given by Susan. For example, it’s not unusual to be told something like “Build a jukebox,” which you’ll blow your cash on, and then a moment later she tells you that you don’t have enough money to build a sunglasses rack, so sell your jukebox! On a related note, the game’s artificial intelligence might not know there’s only two customers left in the store and you won’t likely meet your minimum cash requirement (if that’s one of your goals) but will tell you to build this and that, even though it doesn’t matter at this point.

Also, while you can right mouse-click to rotate items, it’s not easy to cancel a command, such as decorating a wall with lights, if you need to tend to something more timely, like restocking shelves. You should be able to right-mouse click to cancel a command instead of clicking an icon on the screen (which confusingly is an “arrow,” too, for some reason, instead of an “X”), but you can’t.

All in all, Shopping Blocks is a very good – but not amazing – casual game that is fun, challenging, and has something the overwhelming majority of casual games seem to lack these days: originality.

Review by Marc Saltzman
Gamezebo, Inc.