Gamezebo Archives - April 2010

Fairytales are full of happy endings - of knights in shining armor saving damsels in distress. But sometimes it can be fun to play the bad guy too. In (Don't) Save the Princess from Shen Games you'll use magical arrows to guide an unlucky knight straight into the waiting jaws of a lip-smacking green monster.

Mystic Lands is a new medieval social role playing (RPG) that is currently in open beta by Rae of Light Entertainment.

Mystic Lands lets you to do all the things you’d expect in any RPG, no matter what the platform. You can go out on quests, battle in an area, build up your character to accomplish tasks, and even build out a village.

Since its debut in early March, Pool Pro Online 3 has met with both critical and commercial success. If you’ve read our review, you can probably see why. Thanks to the game’s tremendous performance on the App Store (which we reported on last week) and the success of the UniteSDK engine on which it’s built, Namco is celebrating by offering the game for free tomorrow, Wednesday March 28th. Normally $4.99, that’s a tremendous savings for the App Store!

You can certainly expect to see this in our daily free iPhone games round-up tomorrow – but with a game this big, we thought you might appreciate the heads up.

If My Tribe’s title sounds familiar to you, there’s a very good reason for that. Big Fish initially released My Tribe as a casual PC download a little over two years ago. The Facebook version adds social game mechanics and a cash item shop, but otherwise appears to be largely identical to the earlier version. Readers may recall Gamezebo pointing out that My Tribe was essentially identical to the Virtual Villagers series of games two years ago and that statement is still basically true.

That is, again, more interesting on Facebook than off of it. Cloning is rampant in social gaming, but My Tribe is one of the first attempts at doing something in the Virtual Villagers vein on the platform. The result is something with a lot more depth and variety than most social games, though there’s also a trade-off in terms of complexity.

Crazy, challenging, and addictive, Tilt to Live is easily one of the best iPhone games we’ve seen in 2010 – and thanks to a recent update it just got a whole lot better. The much-anticipated version 1.2 has landed on the App Store, bringing a handful of minor tweaks and introducing two new game modes that offer up a solid blend of the familiar and the new.

2010 marks the 10th anniversary of Bejeweled, and during that first decade millions of people learned to love the original match-3 masterpiece. Now PopCap Games wants to see that love, and they have more than $5000 worth of prizes to award to Bejeweled’s biggest fans.

When we first reviewed the PC version of Pure Hidden, we were absolutely glowing. “A gem of a game,” we called it, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Blending outstanding art with a seemingly endless variety of gameplay, it was easily one of the best hidden object games of 2009. Now OUAT Entertainment has brought that experience to the iPhone.

Floodlight Games is working on a new hidden object game, Special Enquiry Detail.

The game is clearly influenced by the crime drama themes you would find in hit TV shows as CSI and NCIS. You play as Detectives Turino and Lamonte, recently assigned to the NYPD: Special Enquiry Detail unit. Before they even have time to settle in, they are assigned to a case involving the suspicious death of the daughter of wealthy family o benefactors.

As far as popular culture is concerned, The Fast and the Furious movie franchise is synonymous with street racing, so it would only make sense to attach that brand to your street racing game. So it goes with Fast and Furious: Adrenaline, a game all about tearing up the city looking to gain respect by racing hopped up cars. Personally, I wish they just left this one in the garage.

Free games are all around us, but they may not be as easy to find as you’d think. We help you sort through the App Store to find the latest price drops and limited time offers so that you won’t have to spend a penny. Today’s free games include a GPS treasure hunt, a doodle approach to Battleship, a rocket-powered pig and more!

Playdom, a leading developer of social games has announced that they acquired Merscom. Merscom is a leading developer of casual games and is a pioneer in developing games based on popular third-party licenses, such as Sea World, National Geographic, and NBC Universal.

What’s fascinating about the press release is that Merscom is described as a social games company. Mind you, Merscom has been developing Facebook games for over a year but many readers of this web site are more familiar with Merscom as a developer of download games, especially hidden object games. If this is not a sign of the times for download and Facebook games, I am not sure what is.

Welcome to the Mystery Cruise walkthrough on Gamezebo. Mystery Cruise is a hidden object game played on PC created by Alawar Games. This walkthrough includes tips and tricks, helpful hints, and a strategy guide to how to complete Mystery Cruise.

Alex Ahlund, the CEO of AppVee, has given a lot of thought to what the mobile market can bear. He’s also given a lot of thought to the iPad, and how the one gaming market it will have a major impact on in the long run is the iPhone. In a recent editorial on TechCrunch, Ahlund discusses how the 99 cent iPhone gaming model came about, why it’s bad for business, and how the iPad might eventually change it.

Kate Hancock over at Frisky Mongoose got very philosophical this weekend. On Saturday, she pondered, “Why we play social games?” Answers, we like to brag, to pretend, to escape, and to win gold stars.

On Sunday, she asks “Why we pay?” The truth is, most people don’t pay a cent to play Facebook games (though enough to make this a billion dollar and growing industry). This article has more questions and less answers. As I was saying, she must have been very philosophical this weekend…

Keeping a hidden object game fresh and free of repetition is difficult, but North Carolina-based Merscom proves they’re up to the challenge with their new Masquerade Mysteries: The Case of the Copycat Curator, a game with a swiftly moving narrative and a wide variety of challenges and mini-games.

Best known for his editorial work covering Nintendo for IGN, Matt Casamassina has just revealed in a blog post that he has left the popular games site to set up shop as Apple’s new Global Editorial Games Manager for the App Store.

While it might look like your typical adorable pet-raising sim, Conduit Labs' Music Pets is actually only superficially similar to the likes of Pet Society and PetVille. Instead, think of Music Pets as a music game that doesn't require fast reflexes or plastic instruments to play because it emphasizes discovering and collecting songs and sharing them with friends on Facebook.

Earlier this month, BBC Online announced that it would be bringing 4 completely free Doctor Who adventure games to both the PC and Mac. Set to debut in June, the developers were tight-lipped about what players could expect in terms of story from each of these digital episodes. But as any avid viewer of Doctor Who this season can tell you, “silence will fall.” As such, details about the first episode game have now surfaced.

Free games are all around us, but they may not be as easy to find as you’d think. We help you sort through the App Store to find the latest price drops and limited time offers so that you won’t have to spend a penny. Today’s free games include falling ends, pesky flies, an adventurous little ball, and more!

While I'm a firm believer in The Beatles mantra that “All You Need is Love,” if you want to be successful in the new puzzle game Love Love, you also need to be able to get four like-colored blocks together. Percy Bysshe Shelly once said that "all love is sweet, given or returned" but while Love Love is certainly sweet no one is giving you anything. You gotta earn every little bit of love you can.