Gamezebo Archives - June 2011

Just how often can the same village face different disasters in a rather short time? In Youda Farmer 3: Seasons you have to help the village and your farm for a third time, after a storm during a winter night destroys most of the houses and buildings. Proving to be as polished and unique as its predecessors, we absolutely recommend this game for people who enjoy wild clicking frenzies.

Here at Gamezebo, we’ve been pretty quick to call the iPad the greatest thing to happen to board games since dice. Just take a look at our reviews of games like Ticket to Ride and Hey, That’s My Fish! to see what I mean. And of all the upcoming iPad board games on the horizon, there’s one that’s remained particularly high on our radar since its announcement last winter: Cargo Runners. Now, after a lengthy silence, developer Trouble Brothers are ready to take the App Store by storm.

Techcrunch is reported a rumor that someone is close to buying PopCap Games for $1 billion. That’s right, I said it - $1 billion … dollars!

Techcrunch speculates on who the buyer may be. Rumors were that Zynga was looking very closely at PopCap but got scared off by the big price tag. There is always Electronic Arts, but with their own valuation of $5 billion, $1 billion sounds awfully high. Other good candidates are companies from Asia, especially since this has been an area of huge investment for PopCap in the past few years.

Ghost Harvest is an iPhone game developed by EA Mobile that lets you build and defend a ghost-filled cemetery. Gamezebo’s Ghost Harvest strategy guide and walkthrough will provide you with a quick start guide, tips and tricks, hints and cheats to help you build the spookiest cemetery around.

With the current state of celebrity gossip, we know way more about actors, musicians, and athletes than we probably should. But Sir Mix-A-Lot doesn't seem to think we know quite enough about him, and so has teamed up with Giant Thinkwell on a new Facebook game called Mix N Match. The premise is simple: guess what Sir Mix-A-Lot is thinking, and earn points if you're right. But is it enough to sustain an entire game?

Over the last few years a combination of the connectivity offered by the Internet, easily available development tools such as Flash or UDK, and a proliferation of new platforms such as iPhone and Android has meant that making and publishing games has never been easier. Stories abound of a handful of people who have made their fortunes from simple yet popular games ideas such as Angry Birds or Minecraft. It has been said that we all have at least one novel inside us – does that translate to games too? I am going to take a look at how we might extract those games ideas from your head into playable experiences you can share or sell.

Another day, another demon bent on turning the world into a churning pit of ash and fury, and luckily for all of us who prefer it the way it is, another hidden object hero(ine) who just happens to be sitting around at home with nothing to do when the call comes in to save the day. That's the setup in Secrets of the Dark: Temple of Night, a new, determinedly-decent game that drops players into the middle of supernatural shenanigans in a small Mexican town.

Lunar Workshop and four other indie developers have teamed up to bring you the Five for Five bundle, a collection of five complete indie games being offered for just $5 USD until July 3. The DRM-free bundle includes the action-strategy dungeon crawler Delve Deeper, the artillery strategy game Digitanks, the co-op shooter Mactabilis, the action puzzle game Spring Up Harmony, and the top-down shooter Steel Storm: Burning Retribution.

Once upon a time, there were a bunch of little paper monsters who sat around a lot. They didn't move, they didn't do anything productive, and they generally just got in the way. And then, one day, the Paper Munchers showed up with their huge mouths and razor teeth.

It’s hard to play Ghost Harvest without thinking of Monsterz Revenge. Both are quirky social iPhone games that put you in control of monsters, and both games even have a bizarre combat mini-game. And while both are charming and fun, Ghost Harvest is a little too by the books to really stand ahead of its closest competitor.

Memoir ‘44 Online is the digital version of the super popular two-player board game from Days of Wonder. Between Ticket to Ride and Small World on the iPad to this latest title, Days of Wonder has made a serious push into the video space and I for one couldn’t be happier. Unlike those other titles, though, Memoir ‘44 Online is a free download and while it won’t play on your iPad it will play on your PC, Mac or Linux machine.

Welcome to the Dracula: Love Kills walkthrough on Gamezebo. Dracula: Love Kills is a Hidden Object game played on the PC and Mac created by Waterlily Games. This walkthrough includes tips and tricks, helpful hints, and a strategy guide on how to complete Dracula: Love Kills.

Ever since Barbie stormed onto the scene many years ago, she epitomized what was wrong with marketing to girls. Sure, she’s gotten way better over the years, and her proportions have started to get a tad more realistic, but she’s still all-plastic, all-American, female fakery. Top Girl has managed to destroy every stride that marketing to girls taken in the last 30 years in one fell swoop. I know I’m not Top Girl’s target market, but I shudder to think how the creators of this game feel about theirs.

Major consumer brands like CMT have rushed to Facebook as the social game industry has exploded, though brands have yet to dominate the industry the way they’ve historically dominated the console game industry. A typical branded console game is usually a well-worn game formula with the license slathered over it, but branded Facebook games are still all over the place. CMT’s Platinum Life: Country is typical of this confusion in brand-focused Facebook games, offering a variety of loosely-integrated gameplay options bundled up with a lot of licensed music and voice clips from major country music stars.

Monster Fusion is the latest in a growing number of games that attempt to bring the obsessive-compulsive appeal of Nintendo’s Pokemon franchise to Facebook. Monster Fusion is much more successful at this goal than most of its competitors, since it had the good sense not to emulate Pokemon too closely. Monster Fusion redesigns the well-worn monster training RPG from the ground up to suit the needs of the Facebook gamer. The result is a game that is fun, completely engaging, and free of many of the annoyances that drag down other Facebook attempts at the genre.

Over the past few days I keep seeing the same message on my phone over and over and over. “Battery Low, Please Connect Charger.” That’s because it seems no matter what I’m doing or how much juice I’ve drained from my phone, I just can’t seem to shut off Grand Prix Story. Given the choice between turning the game off and keeping a charge to last me the rest of the day or burning that battery into the ground has been simple. Keep on playing!

Peggle is now on Facebook, although chances are that you haven't seen it advertised during your daily bouts with Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz. Here, it's known as HotShot to its rapidly growing legions of fans, and it was created by a small studio that has nothing to do with PopCap or its wildly popular Pachinko-inspired masterpiece. As we'll see, that's a bad thing. But while such risky copycatting normally makes for a mediocre gameplay experience, PlayQ has pegged down what makes Peggle fun while smartly adapting the game for a social platform. Now we're just eager to see how PopCap responds.

Hothead Games seem to be on something of a hot streak lately. In only two months, the developer has released three critically acclaimed games to the App Store. Cell Bound, Chromanoids, and Bunny the Zombie Slayer have all managed to earn positive words from our review crew here at Gamezebo. Now they’re looking to add a fourth title into the mix with Kard Combat, a game about battling mages with online play and a freemium twist. We recently spoke with the game’s producer Hamish Millar about this upcoming title.

Every now and then, a game comes along for the iPhone that is simply wonderful. Hothead Games, the folks behind bigger-budget Penny Arcade Adventures and Deathspank games, should be proud of the fact that their new title for the iPhone, Cell Bound, completely fits into this category. This is one of those titles that manages to get just about everything right, and it does so with brilliant simplicity.

The Gourmania series hasn’t been without its faults through its previous two iterations, but Alawar is hoping that the third time’s the charm with Gourmania 3: Zoo Zoom. This installment follows Victoria, the heir to a fortune who is shunned by her father (and cut off from her money) until she can learn the value of a hard day’s work. With her family crest to guide her, she sets off to master the restaurant business in this continuation of the time management / hidden object series.