Hotel Dash: Suite Success

In the new installment of PlayFirst’s dash series, Hotel Dash: Suite Success, Quinn decides to expand her wedding business by offering honeymoons. But the hotel business can be more complicated than one thinks, with rundown estates, sabotages, ghosts, and guests who do not get along with each other. Why you have to enjoy this new game with a pinch of salt will be explained in this review.

Hotel Dash: Suite Success features two different modes: story and endless. Story consists of five different hotels with ten levels each, in which you always have to earn a specific amount of money to proceed, and an even higher amount to reach the expert goal. The point of the endless mode is to survive as long as possible. In each of those five hotels you can choose between three levels of difficulty and can afford to lose five guests until the game ends. More experienced players will be very glad about the endless mode, because the story mode lacks any challenge known from previous similar titles.

The click management gameplay resembles former dash games (such as Diner Dash or Wedding Dash), but features some interesting new twists. Guests will wait near the entrance for you to drop them onto one of the free rooms of your hotel. If you match the color of a guest’s clothes and the color of the room, you will earn bonus money that can be used to buy upgrades along with your other earnings.

On top of the money you can also earn stars by upgrading rooms. Let’s say you upgrade one room with one star – in this case you will earn one star each time when a guest checks out of this room. These stars can be used to upgrade one VIP-room in every hotel, but unfortunately those upgraded VIP-rooms have no influence on the actual gameplay.

Elevators connecting different floors are the main new feature of Hotel Dash: Suite Success, which Flo, Quinn and the other guests have to use to move inside the hotels. Different services, items, and rooms are on different floors, which simply means that the elevators are the key element in every hotel for handling the requests of guests. On top of that Flo is privileged when it comes to using the elevator, so that guests have to wait for it on a regular basis. Fortunately you can also upgrade a cart for Flo which enables her to carry up to six things at the same time to shorten her ways as much as possible.

Flo has to fulfill numerous requests for the guests, such as carrying their suitcases, delivering food, towels, or pillows, checking out, or making wake up calls. Apart from that there are also disasters to avert, which will be familiar from the Wedding Dash series, and those disasters are actually the only situations where Quinn is brought into action. I think it is a pity to include such an important character of DinerTown in a game, and then to barely use her.

The variety of guest types has even increased compared to former dash games, and this feature sets Hotel Dash: Suite Success game apart from other time management games. These guest types differ in their patience, their preferences and their behaviors, and it really takes some time to get used to those differences and to incorporate those in your own strategy. VIP guests won’t let other guests go past their rooms if they stand outside waiting for something, ghosts will spook other guests, don’t use the elevator and don’t eat, while the fashionista brings along three suitcases instead of one.

Particularly because of the large number of features, twists, guest types, and tasks I really don’t know why this game has become the easiest of all dash games. It is possible to breeze through the story mode easily and reaching expert goal at first try in every level, without developing any special strategy. Thus the reward of finally beating a very tricky level is completely lacking, which will be a great disappointment to many players without a doubt. However, the pace of the game is still quite fast, so that you will at least feel entertained despite the easiness.

Apart from this lack of challenge, the game delivers the usual dash experience, without irritating bugs, a charming storyline, and adorable graphics. When it comes to quality time management games with quirky stories and interesting twists, PlayFirst still is the company to look at. Hotel Dash: Suite Success is as polished as it could be and will meet the expectations of most dash fans. The endless mode somewhat compensates for the easy story mode, so that there is also a challenge for the more experienced players.

Review by David Becker

Gamezebo Inc.

Delicious – Emily’s Holiday Season

Delicious – Emily’s Holiday Season is the latest time management game from Game House Studios. Much like the often-forgotten Miss Management, this game plays like a TV sitcom, complete with incidental music and cheesy sense of humor! The variety of gameplay is a welcome addition to the genre, and unlike most games that make the same attempt, it doesn’t come across as forced innovation.

The peaceful town of Snuggford is covered in a blanket of snow, and Emily has decided to stay here for a while with her family. The hotel is a bit on the dusty side, and as Emily fixes a vase her friend Francois knocked over with a sneeze, she finds herself with a new job. Customers come in, order food, and Emily must fetch it, deliver it, and take their cash. Sometimes the postman will arrive with a package which must be signed for, and the occasional hotel patron will appear to turn in or pick up his or her room key. Everything is handled with a simple click and go interface, and you can queue several tasks for Emily’s busy hands to accomplish.

Between the main tasks you’ll also have a few extra chores to do, such as dusting off the cobwebs, picking up a random item or two, or catching spiders. These aren’t necessary to complete the level, but if you’re going for an expert score, you’d better start dusting. After each level you’ll get a chance to spend some cash buying upgrades that make Emily’s job easier, customers happier, and the hotel more profitable.

Not content to keep things in one location, Emily’s Holiday Season takes place across several areas, including Winter Fair and a farm. The change of scenery does a surprising amount of good for the experience, and the soft, cozy visuals never cease to summon that holiday feeling we love so very much.

Analysis: You might be inclined to write off Delicious – Emily’s Holiday Season game as just another time management game. If you do, you’re missing out on a wonderful gaming experience. Casual to the core, this game is about mood, setting, storytelling, and variety. It doesn’t smack you across the face with a forced collection of different gameplay elements. Instead, you feel like each departure from the norm is a soft, fuzzy gift that you open and gratefully accept. It’s a difficult experience to convey, but if a time management game can make me speechless, you know there’s something special there.

Here’s another genre oddity: storytelling. Not only does Delicious – Emily’s Holiday Season buck tradition with its gameplay, but before and after each level you’ll be treated to a short scene that furthers the plot. Beyond that, you actually find yourself interested in what’s going on, as the characters are likeable, funny, and do some genuinely witty things over the course of the game.

Emily’s Holiday Season isn’t stressful, it isn’t particularly challenging, and the game doesn’t go out of its way to impress you with NEW!!! and FANTASTICAL!!! gimmicks at every turn. Instead, you just have a few bowls of cranberries to deliver, a couple of spiders to catch, and a handful of other miscellaneous tasks to complete. The gameplay and setting are so rich you can’t help but be drawn in, and the variety in both storytelling and locations keep you in for the long haul. Delicious – Emily’s Holiday Season is one of the few time management games you owe it to yourself to play.

Review by JohnB
Casual Gameplay

Gardenscapes

I love it when I feel game makers working hard to engage my interest. That’s exactly the way I felt while playing Gardenscapes, a new hidden object game from Playrix Entertainment that sports top notch presentation, great art, and game design that kept me perpetually wanting to play just one more puzzle.

The game begins with the player inheriting a mansion behind which sits a once resplendent garden. With the help of the butler, Austin, your job is to restore the garden to its former glory by purchasing a wide variety of ready-made elements, ranging from shrubs and gazebos to birdcages and mini-golf holes.

Problem is, you’re broke. To earn the cash necessary to renovate the backyard you decide to rummage through the mansion’s 15 rooms and sell off items in jumble sales. Each sale takes place in a single room and has the player meeting the demands of individual customers. Men and women will be wandering in and requesting things like coats, chess pieces, and kitchen ware, and it’s up to you to find these items as quickly as possible to keep customers from losing patience.

The genius here is that everything we do not only makes sense within the context of the narrative, but also moves us toward a grander goal. The faster we find objects for our customers, the happier they are and the more money they’ll pay. The more money we earn, the quicker we can afford new pieces for our garden, which in turn takes us closer to our ultimate goal of winning the city gardening club’s contest for most beautiful garden. It all fits together and moves things ahead like finely machined gears.

And there are loads of little extra challenges along the way. An actor might send you a letter asking for whatever photos you can find in the house, which will send you to a room loaded with pictures. Or someone might express an interest in buttons, giving you the added goal of looking for brown plastic fasteners in each of the next several rooms in which you hold sales.

With all of the sales plus the added challenges, you’ll end up visiting each of the game’s 15 rooms maybe ten times over the course of the four or five hour story. That does make things start to feel a bit repetitive. Still, it’s difficult to imagine many players growing bored with what they see.

That’s because the artwork is beautiful. Each room is drawn in bold colors, and each of the objects for which we hunt – from the familiar, such as football helmets and lawnmowers, to the exotic, including hookahs and rapa whelk shells – are at once recognizable and interesting. What’s more, the environments and many of the items we seek are highly dynamic: car lights switch on, candles burn, and binoculars and towels dangle. It makes for exciting hunting.

The garden, too, is a small delight. Austin roams around caring for it, and we can send him on little tasks to water the plants, play with the dog, or sit on a bench. He’s also an everlasting fountain of text-based information, some of which is useful (he always lets us know what we need to do to keep the story moving forward), and some of which is just funny (as when he chides us for clicking on him and suggests we simply sit back and enjoy the garden).

And as a little bonus, your custom gardenscape can also function as a screensaver, with birds, butterflies, your butler, and your self-named puppy wandering about in the rain and sun.

Aside from the relatively small number of rooms to search, the only other criticism to be leveled at Gardenscapes game is a lack of originality in terms of searching aids. As in some other HOGs, players can earn hints by finding question marks, click on concealed cameras to briefly reveal the locations of items currently sought, and find thermometers that offer hot/cold cues as you mouse around the screen. But at least they’ve been expertly implemented, helping players who are stuck without simply giving away the location of the objects they need to find.

I’ve been working through many hidden object games lately so I have plenty of recent titles with which to compare this one, and Gardenscapes is easily one of my current favorites. I just wish it lasted a little longer.

Review by Chad Sapieha

Gamezebo, Inc.

Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal

Up until the 1920’s, more Americans were living in rural areas than in cities – however near the end of the Jazz Age, between the Great War and World War II, all that changed. People flocked to cities and urbanization hit the United States like a steam-powered locomotive clobbering a cabbage truck.

In Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal, developed by GameBrains, you play the titular Valerie Porter, a slightly naïve but intelligent young woman searching for her big break in late 1920’s New York City. Though kleptomania won’t be a diagnosed illness for decades, your penchant for stealing bells has resulted in your relocation to the city, in hopes of becoming a star reporter for the Daily Informer. Your big break surfaces when you’re hired to replace Sharon T——-, former reporter at the Informer. The paper’s top reporter, Terry Morgan, takes you under her wing and offers some protection from your sexist editor-in-chief. However all is not as it seems, and your first exposé about the corrupt mayor seems to have resulted in the murder of an ex-cabaret dancer turned movie star named Scarlet Velour! Use the powers of journalism to get to the bottom of this tragedy.

Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal is a hidden object adventure game, and quite an active one at that. Like most hidden object games, gameplay primarily involves searching a scene strewn with all manner of knickknacks and junk. You have a list of specific objects to find; clicking on one of these items removes it from the scene and your list. After finding all the objects, you move to the next scene. And so on. Hidden object games are the most popular casual games.

When you’re stumped and can’t find an object, a hint is available in the form of a lightbulb. When charged, click on it for an inspiring clue to the location of one object on your list. Your eureka bulb recharges over time, but every scene contains two batteries that you can collect to recharge it instantly if needed.

Like many hidden object games, Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal often asks you to find multiples of the same kind of item. For example: seven trophies, five timepieces, ten hotdogs, etc. In a new mechanic, the game allows you to chain together these objects to collect more than one at a time, by holding down the mouse button and “connecting the dots” from one item to the next. This chain lightning effect charges your lightbulb. The longer the chain, the more powerful the charge.

The game is untimed, however once per chapter you must ride the subway to or from a location. This ride lasts a maximum of one minute, and offers a chance to recharge your lightbulb – if you can find a certain number of grouped objects in sixty seconds or less.

Every scene also contains five bells. Can Valerie pocket all one hundred bells across the twelve chapters that make up the game? Finding them awards you medals, so if you like in-game achievements, keep your eyes peeled.

Though technically Valerie Porter is a hidden object adventure game, it’s a limited one with an inventory/puzzle system confined to individual scenes. Among your list of items to find you’ll see tasks or items written in red script. These require some sort of interaction between an item in your inventory and a portion of the scene. Using a key to unlock a filing cabinet in order to deposit a file, for example.

At the end of each chapter your story hits the presses, the edition hits the streets, and the game gives you a numerical score based on the time it took you to complete the chapter, the longest chain of similar objects found, the batteries you didn’t use, and the minigames you didn’t skip.

The Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal game was most impressive with these rather clever minigames. As a journalist, you get to interview witnesses, write stories, and even compose headlines. All are portrayed in minigames. I liked that some sort of memory of objects found when snooping around various locations was required later to organize your thoughts (in the form of a word search puzzle). Perhaps the most fun minigame involved writing an article, madlib style. (Check out the screenshot to the left for an amusing example of one of my stories in progress.) None of the minigames felt superfluous or tacked on just to pad the game. I have to commend GameBrains for impressing a sense of fourth estate activity, albeit simplified, upon the player.

Equally impressive are the character voice overs; almost every line is spoken, which helps animate the slightly predictable plot. You know how there’s always that one voice actor whose lines makes you roll your eyes so hard that your eyeballs make a small sound and your cat (or dog) turns its head and looks at you? Well, thankfully they didn’t hire that actor for this game.

However, I can’t give out all gold stars… the game is displayed in the inexcusably low resolution of 800×600 pixels! Though there are few tiny objects to get muddled at that resolution, now and then I had to waste a hint on an object (some rosary beads resting on a plate of food) that I probably would have been able to spot at 1024×768 or higher. Probably. Maybe. It’s 2009, friends! We’ve all got newer computers that blur images when they’re upsampled to our monitors’ native screen depths!

Review by Uesugi