Gamezebo Archives - April 2010

Welcome to the Royal Envoy walkthrough on Gamezebo. Royal Envoy is a time management game played on PC created by Playrix. This walkthrough includes tips and tricks, helpful hints, and a strategy guide to how to complete Royal Envoy.

Welcome to the walkthrough for Hamlet on Gamezebo. Hamlet is an adventure game for PC from mif2000 and Alawar Games. This walkthrough includes tips and tricks, helpful hints, and a strategy guide to complete Hamlet.

Welcome to the walkthrough for Mind's Eye: Secrets of the Forgotten on Gamezebo. Mind's Eye: Secrets of the Forgotten is a hidden object game for PC. This walkthrough includes tips and tricks, helpful hints, and a strategy guide to complete Mind's Eye: Secrets of the Forgotten.

Fans of Britain’s long-running sci-fi adventure Doctor Who have gone far too long without a decent video game to call their own. With the exception of a few flash games on the BBC website and the abysmal 1997 PC game Destiny of the Doctors, there has been little effort to try and bring one of Britain’s most popular franchises to the world of video games – but all of that is about to change. The BBC has just announced that a series of episodic Doctor Who adventure games will be made available as free downloads on the BBC website starting this June.

Whether you’re playing it on your desktop, iPhone or iPad, we live in a world where just about everybody has played Plants vs. Zombies. But what if the zombies weren’t zombies at all? What if they were aliens?

Back in December the popular Facebook developer Zynga went on something of a trademarking spree, registering more than 20 trademarks before the close of the month. Amongst those newly trademarked names were things like Hotel World, Poker Blitz, and TreasureVille. Some of these, like Poker Blitz and TreasureVille (eventually released as Treasure Isle) have already come to pass. The majority of these titles? They’re still in hiding. At least they were. It looks as though Zynga’s next Facebook game has started to surface, and it’s going to take place in the old west.

Playing Mind's Eye: Secrets of the Forgotten is a bizarre experience. I wanted to like it, I really did, and for the first hour I thought I would. It starts strong, with a grisly murder and the promise of a story that's actually going places, but after awhile it starts to spin out of control and eventually stops making any sort of sense whatsoever. In the end, all that early potential goes nowhere at all and the game, while decent, never manages to be noteworthy for anything except what might have been.

As fans of the previous paint-by-numbers platformers to bear the De Blob name, the last thing we expected from the series was a brain-tingling puzzle game – but that’s exactly what De Blob Revolution is. You’ll need to think spatially and think quickly if you want to free the trapped graydians and bring color back to the world in this line-drawing, fast-thinking puzzler.

I must admit that I didn’t expect much when I started playing the Hottie Hookups iPhone game. I thought the name was a little off-putting. My daughter asked to play a game on my iPhone, and she saw the “Hottie Hookups” icon with the word “hottie” written over a big heart. She wondered if it was some sort of dating service (which is something weird for your married mother to be into). I assured her that it was a really fun new game, and now she wants my iPhone all the time so she can play it.

I’m a huge puzzle game fan. I’m the guy that’s convinced that I can pack a suitcase or a car better than other people because of the amount of Tetris I’ve played in my lifetime (I swear, it’s true). But for whatever reason hex-based puzzle games are my Achilles heel, I just can’t wrap my head around them. So it was with great trepidation that I waded into HexaRot’s waters and I gotta tell ya... the water’s fine.

Tiger Eye: Curse of the Riddle Box has an official release date! The romance-themed hidden object game based on Marjorie M. Liu's novel "Tiger Eye" will be coming out on April 28 with the Mac version launching soon after in May, developer PassionFruit Games confirmed in the company's latest newsletter.

Sandlot Games' free game of the week is Cake Mania 2. Four role-playing games are on sale this weekend at GOG.com: Pick up Sacred Gold, Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator, Spellforce Platinum, and Stonekeep for 50% off.

After working on the violent and mature themed Hitman game, two members of the development team switched gears and embarked on a journey into the casual gaming world by forming The Game Equation. Following a similar theme of change, the studio’s 2008 debut Deep Blue Sea blended match-three style gameplay with a tale about an advertizing executive named Jessica who ditches her day job to become a deep sea treasure hunter. Two years of polish and hard work have made their follow-up aquatic puzzle adventure all the more impressive.

Imagine an alternate reality Earth, one where our technology has become much more advanced, yet all of our time is spent serving the gods through back breaking labor. This is the setting of Atlantis Evolution. Unfortunately, while the setting is unique and refreshing, the actual game is so repetitive and filled with so many frustrating moments that it's hard to actually enjoy exploring the mythical lost city of Atlantis.

Gogii Games' fascination with museums continues with The Forgotten Pharaoh, the company's latest hidden object adventure. Many details about the title are still under wraps (Gogii promises that more will be revealed, including a very unique twist that we've never seen before in casual games, next week), but in the meantime we have some screenshots and story info to share with you.

The creation of a system-wide social gaming network for iDevices is a great idea, but Apple’s announcement of Game Center is a little late in coming. Over the past year a number of services have come to the forefront to fill the social networking void on the iPhone, including AGON, Geocade, Scoreloop and ngmoco’s Plus+. Currently supporting more than 1500 games and reaching 19 million players, OpenFeint is the biggest player in the field and seemingly has the most to lose from Apple’s recent announcement – so why does their CEO seem so chipper and optimistic?

Some say mental arithmetic is a dying art, and they may have a point. Take a trip to any major store when the tills are down, for instance, and you'll see just how incompetent the average human being is without a computer doing the leg work for them. Numbl, however, just might be the ticket to get our brains back in gear, its simple number-based play helping to get the blood flowing up top.

Innovation isn’t a word that’s used too often when describing match-3 games. Sure Bejeweled Blitz offered a neat re-tooling of the genre, but new experiences like that are few and far between. Babo Crash is one of those rare new experiences, and it’s one that works incredibly well. Crazy power-ups, challenging obstacles, and unique objectives turn the well-worn match-3 formula on its head -- and we couldn’t be happier.

The creators of Jumping Dog want you, and all of your Facebook friends, to be aware that there is a jumping dog. This dog is wearing goggles and running in circles in his yard because there are balloons floating in the sky. This is how he will finally achieve his dream of bounding to the stratosphere. Unfortunately, he is bound to make a huge ruckus in doing so.

After scoring a pair of hits with 2008's hidden object adventure Magic Encyclopedia: First Story and its follow-up, Magic Encyclopedia: Moon Light, Alawar isn't resting on its laurels with the third game in the series. Magic Encyclopedia 3: Illusions introduces a fresh new graphical makeover and a unique approach to seek-and-find that has you switching between two different layers (one real and one an illusion) to uncover all of the secrets a scene has to offer.