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

With autumn fast approaching, people who could not enjoy a well-deserved holiday in the sun are able to make up for it virtually by playing Paradise Beach, the latest creation by developer Astargames. In this building simulation you can get along without sunburn and expensive cocktails, but it certainly has its own catch. In a niche setting represented by popular titles such as Coconut Queen it is hard to stand out, but Paradise Beach does not have to dread any comparison.

As an up-and-coming manager it is your task to create beautiful and entertaining beach resorts on various islands. Supported by Mr. Gates and his granddaughter Emmy, the player will learn what it takes to design sites of relaxation and fun, where people can really experience their dream holiday. While the game omits the usual materials, you will have to keep an eye both on your account balance and how much energy is left for new facilities.

By building and upgrading ice cream stands, showers, cafés, and spas; planting more than a dozen sorts of trees and flowers; or adding sand castles, statues and fountains, you create beach resorts that’s as close to the visitors expectations as possible. Except for natural obstacles, such as rocks and small ponds, you can build anywhere. This trend to not restrict the player with only a small number of building sites is very welcome, because it makes games more complex and interesting, although this more “hardcore” approach might not appeal to every casual player. However, you still have to worry about space in another context.

This mainly derives from the constant and realistic interaction between the player and the resort’s visitors. These highly demanding visitors leave trash on every empty spot if you don’t add enough trash bins to the resort, and sometimes they are drowning and you have to react quickly to save them. On other occasions mischievous vandals will try to damage your facilities, or some guests will desperately beg you to find their phone or their towel which they lost during their visit.

Some of these tasks you can pass on to your staff members as soon as you hire them. The engineer will care about broken or damaged facilities, the custodian will empty full trash bins and remove banana peels or cans, the life guard will save people from drowning, and the security guard will throw out vandals. This is where the matter of space becomes important: every staff member is only responsible for a specific area, so that it is important to arrange facilities close to each other, and to make use of the staff members’ sphere of influence effectively.

The visitors of your beach resorts are extremely picky and sensitive – each visitor is individually responsive to his personal experience that depends on a variety of factors, this being the cleanliness of the island, the vegetation, how long they have to wait at the ice cream stand, the cafe, or various other facilities and whether there are enough showers or lounge chairs. This adds a lot of depth to the game, but unfortunately Paradise Beach lacks specific statistics.

The general mood of a visitor is indicated by a green, yellow, or red emoticon in a thought-bubble above his or her head. By clicking on this thought bubble, every visitor will tell you why he currently likes or dislikes your beach resort, but even with those clues it is hard to tell what the player can change or add to make a positive difference in the visitor’s rating. Constant alerts of annoyed or drowning visitors, vandals, an account balance which is changing faster than the national debt, and securing the provision of enough energy require the player’s attention and a lot of strategic thinking.

Fortunately Paradise Beach game features an untimed campaign. Ambitious players can try to finish any level in expert time, but to proceed you just have to meet all the goals of a level, the time does not matter in this respect.

The graphics are really detailed and all the holiday guests bustling around are a joy to look at, especially when the screen is dominated by green smileys. The individual interaction with the visitors creates a very exceptional experience, which cannot be compared to any other game in the casual market. While other building simulations depend strongly on fast-clicking and construction tasks, Paradise Beach introduces a new and welcome complexity, which involves individual visitors, strategic thinking in various directions and the classic elements of this genre at the same time.

Altogether Paradise Beach is a must-have for building simulation fans who are longing for a real challenge, while it is probably a no-go for people who prefer less complex games where it is not absolutely vague what you have to do to proceed in the game. Besides and certainly of major importance is the fact that the game is not a simple copy of an already existing game, but rather unique enough to provide an alternative and interesting gaming experience.

Review by David Becker

A town with $1 million in debts surely does sound familiar to a lot of people nowadays. Accumulating debt is very easy without a doubt, but what can be done to pay them back? What is still a mysterious question in reality is absolutely no problem in Tourist Trap, the new building simulation by developer Zemnott. But while the idea of building attractions sounds fun, Tourist Trap turns out to be as exciting as looking for a needle in a haystack.

Your main task is to return the town of Kitschville to former glory, supported by a lot of bizarre and over-the-top characters who will provide you with new plans for attractions, amenities, and municipal buildings. You will be notified about new building plans by a light bulb above the city council, where fourteen consultants will present to you new buildings which will please their personal favorite demographic group.

The basic steps of Tourist Trap could not be easier. With the money on your account you can construct all the buildings, each of them attracting a different group of visitors of which there are five, namely families, truckers, college students, senior citizens and business professionals. Here the game’s lack of any complexity clearly shows, because the endless possibilities of customer groups with different interests is barely used at all.

You can decide on your own when to build which attraction or amenity, thereby vaguely influencing how many new visitors of a specific group you are going to attract. The attractions are actually fun, the “World’s Biggest Cowboy Boot,” the “Giant Robot,” “Peggy’s Peach Palace” or the “Briefcase Museum,” to name but a few. But apart from look and name, the buildings do not differ greatly. Attractions cannot be upgraded, in contrast to Amenities, whose upgrades simply extend the number of tourists they can accommodate.

Every building has to be connected to the highway by a path, and buildings for business professionals even need a paved road. Sometimes a hammer will appear over certain buildings, which simply means that they need repair quickly. The longer you wait with this, the more damaged they will become, and the more money you will have to pay for the repair. Even worse are fires, because you not only have to send a fire engine, but have to repair the building afterwards, too.

Unfortunately Tourist Trap game feels like an extremely light versions of similar available titles. The option to activate advertisement surely is a good idea, but with only three billboards to boost the popularity of specific attractions with only a very small effect just does not feel like a full and interesting feature. Furthermore you can construct every building where you want to, and add a great variety of rocks, trees and even a pond to change the landscape, which is basically a good thing and sounds engaging. But practically the game fails again to make good use of this potentially promising idea.

While it is vaguely stated that the addition of trees boosts the appeal of any attraction, you don’t actually have to care about that anyway, because even without this bonus appeal the game still is much too easy. In around two or three hours you will have created every possible attraction and collected the required amount of money to repay the debts of Kitschville. And what you are doing in the meantime cannot be called diversified at all – waiting for money, repairing buildings and blowing out fires, and those limited actions in a much slower pace than in similar titles.

Every once in a while you will get special challenges, for example to keep fifty senior citizens for three cycles at Kitschville, or to accumulate a certain amount of money within 30 cycles to extend the land on which you can build. Occasionally you will have to pay for uncommon expenses, or get some bonus money from generous donors, but even those small surprises are few and far between, and definitely not enough to rise the overall appeal of the game itself.

Another significant weakness of Tourist Trap are the graphics, which are as monotonous and sluggish as they can be. The buildings and the landscape are less detailed as those of similar titles, and you spend the whole campaign on the same map, which is not exactly adding any diversity. Of course it is at least something that some of the attractions are animated, but where are the tourists? The game is called Tourist Trap, the attractions display that you definitely have tourists, but Kitschville looks absolutely deserted, there is not a soul to be seen anywhere.

With that said, waiting and collecting money is not exactly what most gamers consider playing. There just is not enough to uphold the player’s interest, and instead of getting challenging in the end, Tourist Trap becomes a virtual version of “Waiting for Godot.” If you are really a deep-rooted fan of building simulations it surely cannot hurt to give the trial a whirl, but don’t expect more than a very short and mildly boring pastime.

Review by David Becker

Avenue Flo is an amazing simulation game with lots of challenging puzzles and quests to solve. Flo is back in this enjoyable sequel to Diner Dash games. So, get ready for a new adventure with lots of exciting surprises.

In Avenue Flo game, you need to help the main heroine save the most awaited wedding of DinerTown! Something strange is going on here and it’s up to you to figure out what. Join Flo as she sets on a quest, help her explore DinerTown, interact with neighbors, find the missing objects, and solve numerous puzzles and quests along the way.

Featuring more than 40 scenes with 20 challenging puzzles, extremely addictive game play, and great voice-overs, Avenue Flo is an intriguing adventure to follow.

• Over 40 scenes to explore
• 20 in-scene puzzles or mini games
• Engaging story with full voice over
• Hear Flo’s voice for the first time

Basic Idea as I See it:
This Cake Mania is a time management game to the fourth power. Jill and have moved back to her home town of Bakersfield to find it mostly shut down due to the opening of a mall close by. So she brings in her friends to open their own shops to help raise money to spruce up the town and attract more people. Of course, Jill opens Evans Bakery, her new husband, Jack, opens up a burger joint, Tiny opens up a sushi restaurant, and Risha opens up a flower shop. All of the shops have 25 of their own levels and a different dynamic of time management play. The goal is to make as much money as possible – half of which goes to the town to buy other tourist attractions and to upgrade the shops as a whole, while the money the shops keep go into upgrading the equipment inside.

Graphics:
Cake Mania Main Street pushes the super bright and colorful envelope. The storyboard part of the game is comic like, which is entertaining. I would suggest taking the time to watch these the first time through, because once skipped, they’re gone for good. The shops themselves, products, and characters are all very distinctive and pleasant. There are even people walking by outside the windows. I also like that there is a proactive environmental aspect to the town view… no cars, only bikes!

Sounds:
The background music in Cake Mania: Main Street feels a little outdated, but doesn’t get in the way. I can’t really imagine different music while playing and I believe that it changes to create the appropriate environment. The sounds that are part of the game, such as when customers enter the shops, use their talents to affect others, or when items finished cooking/baking/growing are distinctive in the best way. They alert without distracting and add to the overall experience and entertainment of playing.

Controls:
Mouse controlled. The game creates a custom cursor while playing, which is pretty cool. The control concepts, click to move, click to create, etc. are easy to grasp, and thoroughly explained in the tutorial. The one thing I have to say here is that it’s not always effective. Either the clicking has to be precise in location or timing. I found that sometimes, for instance, Jill wouldn’t put the cake down, and since players can click ahead, mistakes happen much easier when one click in the chain is missed, causing slight frustration, but not failure.

Flow:
Players start with Evans Bakery to attract people to the town with Jill’s famous cakes. After playing through a number of levels there, the option to open Jack’s Burger Barn is granted. Once through a few burger-flipping levels, flower arranging becomes an option. And once some bouquets are made, it’s Sumo Sushi time. I appreciate both the ability to jump around to the different shops without having to completely finish one before playing another as well as the ability to get used to one mechanism before taking on a new one. The monologues before each “day” in the shops could be a little disjointed that way, but the flow to the actual game play is pretty seamless no matter what players choose. Hint* if it gets a little too difficult, start the level over and try different equipment upgrades.

Fun Factor:
I had a good time trying out all the different shops, meeting all the different characters, even buying up more tourist attractions for the town. Cake Mania: Main Street offers challenge to keep it exciting, variety to keep it interesting, quirky characters to keep it amusing, and quality game mechanics to keep it fun.

Female Aspect:
This game seems to be pretty geared toward females with the colors and types of shops involved, without being too overtly girly. The cast of characters and customers seem pretty balanced in both gender and personality. I will say that I was looking forward to the “girly”est one – the flower shop – the most. I like that the main character, Jill, is a strong female in that she’s a successful small business owner who is proactive in her community and stands up for what she believes in while still living a full life with a husband and a new house and… other things.

Replay Value:
Although opening different shops bring a nice variety to the time management aspect of the game, one time through might have been good for me, personally. I don’t feel the pull to compete with previous scores since I played to the “Supserstar Goal” the first time through each level (which does make the first playthrough last). It is possible and easily accessible to replay any completed level, though it is tough to remember which level is which just looking at the picture/map of each shop. Maybe with clever titles instead of the day numbers, it would be easier. Replayability might be helped in Cake Mania: Main Street with the addition of new specific time/ score challenges with limitations on equipment or space, the ability to try previous levels with different equipment upgrades, or with completely separate mini games. I think that some of the other tourist attractions might have served well as mini games.

Final Thoughts:
I like this game. I will say that there is a bit of mushy lovey doveyness, but that is balanced out by the edginess of some of the other characters. I like the concept, the story, the ending, and the overall positivity that came from playing it. While I do wish that there were a little more to it – like what do I do with all this money the town has earned when I have bought/opened/upgraded everything? – it will please Jill Evans fans to continue her life’s journey. If time management is your bag, or even if you are new to the genre, this is a good bet because of the variety it affords. It’s a pretty good collection of different time management opportunities all on one sweet street!

Review by Dawn,

Gaming Angels

Nanny 911 is a time management game based on the reality TV show of the same name. You take on the role of one of three professional British nannies called to help parents learn how to discipline their children if the family is to be saved.

With Nanny Claudia your goals will be easy; Nanny Matilda will take you on a tougher challenge. Play on Hard mode and against clock with Nanny Betty.

Meal Time. Barbecue.

First set the table; get the food in the fridge and cook it. Then set mom and dad to the table. Once the meal is done wash the dishes.

It may happen that one parent is blocked and you can guide just one of them. There are Study and Family Time In the game. Playing with kids will down parents’ stress level.

Review from Awem com

Farm Frenzy 3 is the fourth title in the Farm Frenzy series, a time management game where you have to meet different, and sometimes conflicting, goals like owning five goats or baking 10 cakes.

A new central character of the game is Scarlett, a country girl who’s as smart as she is pretty. She receives a letter from her African friend. His farming business has hard times. And the president of the Farmer’s Union Mr. Orson doesn’t want to help poor farmers. Scarlett sets out to win the presidency by helping the farmers get back on their feet the old fashioned way: working hard! So she travels to different continents to manage five farms and try her hand at penguin breeding and jewelry making.

You’ll sling hay in 95 outrageously fun levels, tend to 30 lovely animals (including walruses and llamas) and buy more upgrades than there are ears in a field of corn! What’s more, as you grow crops, feed animals, collect produce and manufacture goods, you’ll be treated to some of the zaniest animation to ever grace a casual game!

While challenging, Farm Frenzy 3 game is more balanced than earlier installments of the series. You can breed poultry instead of buying them, for example, and dress the bears you catch in silly outfits and sell them for more money.

If you’re serious about getting gold on every level, you can still dig down to the heart of the Farm Frenzy series: lots of strategy choices, and easy ways to test them as you work your way towards perfection. But I only felt compelled to keep playing this time because of my experiences with previous Farm Frenzy games. If this had been the first in the series, I don’t think I would have bothered replaying levels multiple times to get the gold.

Review from Squidoo

Escape from Paradise 2: A Kingdom’s Quest is the sequel to Gogii Games Virtual Villagers-style sim game Escape from Paradise. With the help of the royal Perusah and an ever-growing tribe, our Hero must discover many of the islands secrets through strategy, mini-games, and various challenges befitting a legendary Hero and tribal leader.

The game begins with you, the Hero, stranded on a mysterious island. It’s your destiny to aid Perusah, the tribal Prince or Princess, and child of the Island King. You can customize your character to have whatever look and gender you’d like, and the King’s child depends on your own character’s gender. The Hero must complete numerous tasks at the bidding of the various tribal inhabitants of the island in order to restore it to its long former glory and rise to the rank of the new King.

A Kingdom’s Quest takes place on the island. The island is relatively large, and as your progress in the game, new areas will be uncovered. Each area features one or more new tribal inhabitants who will offer you something in return for your services. Challenges include building new huts, wells, food storage, finding various creatures or objects, and completing mini-games.

You’re not alone: you will also have the help of new tribe members whom will show up over the course of the game, with a maximum of 30 members in your tribe. You will have one Golden Tiki, who is maxed out in all stats and abilities, as well as a monkey named Taz, whom you will need to uncover various hidden objects and secrets scattered throughout the island. Taz also gives you the ability to play a variety of mini-games that don’t only earn you needed goal-objects, but also increase your skills and abilities, food, and wood reserves.

You will need to keep your tribesmen (and yourself!) satisfied in hunger, thirst, sleep, and social in order for them to be happiest and therefore work most effectively. Tribesmen can be leveled up a total of three times in three areas: carpentry, woodcutting, and food gathering.

In comparison to its predecessor, Escape from Paradise, A Kingdom’s Quest implements some different features. For example, unlike the first game, this title can be paused at any time. When you shut off your computer or close out your game, the game will save at the exact point you closed out. When you start it up again, it will start from the moment you left off.

Unlike some other games, you don’t have to worry about your tribes people dying. If their stats are low, they will slump when walking and work poorly, but they won’t die. Villagers will also automatically eat, drink, or sleep if you neglect them. Game speed, however, cannot be adjusted, making some activities feel very long and unnecessarily drawn-out.

A longer and much more challenging title than most casual games, A Kingdom’s Quest is a refreshing taste of simulation mixed with mini-games. There is a lot to do on the island, and most tasks do not have a simple, linear style of accomplishment and instead require you to think and strategize. The element of managing the happiness of your inhabitants means that there is always something to do. While your villagers are working on a certain task, you can play mini-games with Taz. They will continue to work and level-up while you play.

Mini-games include Tiki Match Three, Hidden Object levels, and even Sudoku. Tasks aren’t obvious and require you to be more adventurous.

Unfortunately, that very quality makes the game difficult and potentially frustrating. For example, Taz the monkey is the only one who can see secret hidden objects, and only when he’s standing nearby. If you’re not playing as Taz, chances are you’re not going to find what you’re looking for.

Hidden objects are hidden very, very well. Hidden object mini-games, on the other hand, are lacking, and while you may have found the correct object, many times you will have to click on it numerous times in numerous spots before the game will pick it up. Other mini-games, such as the Sudoku title, are quite difficult.

Furthermore, you have the ability to place your various buildings wherever you’d like – a nice quality, right? But oftentimes placing it within a certain vicinity will cause your tribesman to not perform tasks properly or refuse to move to a certain area entirely.

The game features a very op-ended form of gaming. It’s all good and fun until you don’t know what to do next or where to find something, and then there’s no hint system to help you. This can make the game frustrating when you’re not sure what to do next. Lastly, the role of becoming the new King of the Island and taking the hand of the royal child is simply an object of storyline, and does not introduce a new quest or form of gameplay as it might imply to some.

Overall, Escape from Paradise 2: A Kingdom’s Quest is a fun game that promises manyhours of gameplay and a buffet of original mini-games, but some elements could have been implemented more smoothly. A hint system would have done wonders for this game, seeing how creative it is in hiding important objects. Those who like Virtual Villagers-style games and the first Escape from Paradise are sure to love A Kingdom’s Quest, but those new or unfamiliar with challenging adventure games could easily be intimidated and frustrated by this title.

Review by Tawny Ditmer