Gamezebo Archives - August 2011

Welcome to the Sonya walkthrough on Gamezebo. Sonya is a hidden object/adventure game played on the PC created by Specialbit Studios. This walkthrough includes tips and tricks, helpful hints, and a strategy guide to how to complete Sonya.

Master Dealer takes the strategy card game genre and tosses out the seemingly standard fantasy theme in favor of a mob vibe where you’re sending thug, lord, and boss cards against opponents for territory control. Like other CCG games you’ll manage your deck and buy new cards (or packs of cards) similar to something like Magic: The Gathering.

Magic Land is a city building simulation game on Facebook with a magical twist. This guide will help you familiarize yourself with the game and provide you with tips to maximize your time spent in the game.

In this latest edition of Gamezebo Cribs we're heading to Berlin, Germany to take a good look at where the folks at wooga work. In case you didn't know, since being founded just two years ago wooga has managed to become not only the biggest social game developer in Europe with over 35 million monthly active users, but one of the biggest in the world as well. And it's all thanks to games like Diamond Dash and Bubble Island, as well as more recent releases like Magic Land. Soon you'll be seeing wooga games on mobile platforms as well. Let's take a look at where all those games get made.

Social games publisher and developer RockYou has announced a partnership with Peak Games in order to localize its games for new markets across the Middle East.

Mini-game compilations may not be the go-to genre of the hardcore crowd, but when it comes to gaming on the go, quick-fix entertainment is a perfect match. Minigame Paradise offers a clever mash-up of mini-games and pet simulation, but is its adorable premise merely skin deep?

Restaurant City: Gourmet Edition is pretty much exactly what it looks like: a new version of the popular social restaurant management game designed specifically for the iPhone. The fact that it’s not on Facebook means that the game’s social features have necessarily been scaled back, and its smaller stature also means that it’s lighter on content. But otherwise this is a nearly identical experience. And since the original Restaurant City was quite good, this isn’t a bad thing.

Restaurant City: Gourmet Edition is an iPhone game developed by Playfish that lets you manage and customize your own restaurant. Gamezebo’s Restaurant City: Gourmet Edition strategy guide and walkthrough will provide you with a quick start guide, tips and tricks, hints and cheats to help you build the best restaurant on the block.

When it comes to trivial matters, I’m a real forgetful Freddy. Car keys, grocery items, laundry – you name it, I’m going to forget about it. You might think this makes me a bad person, but as it turns out, I’m in good company. You see, Pharaoh Ramses II is forgetful too. He’s forgotten which pyramids he’s hidden which treasures in, and he’s going to need your help to get it all sorted out.

A little over a month ago Playfirst announced that the Facebook version of Diner Dash would be shutting down for good. And now the day is finally here.

Welcome to the very first installment of Gamezebo Cribs! Over the next two weeks we're going to be taking you on a worldwide adventure, giving you a behind the scenes look at where your favorite casual games are made. To kick things off we're headed to Vologda, Russia to see where the good folks at Playrix create hit games like 4 Elements II, Royal Envoy, and of course the Fishdom series. Playrix both develops and publishes games across a variety of platforms, including PC, mobile, and Facebook, and has become one of the top names in casual gaming since it was founded in 2004. So follow us as the good folks at Playrix take us on a photo tour of their offices.

It feels a bit inopportune for Ludia to issue its Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? social game shortly after the cancellation of the original syndicated show. Fans of the game show, which at its peak was enormously popular, may find the social game lets them enjoy the show’s presence a bit longer… or that they’ve found a fairly generic real-time trivia game masquerading beneath a game show license. Ludia’s Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? appears to run on the same basic engine as its prior Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? game and playing it feels much the same.

Welcome to the Age of Enigma: The Secret of the Sixth Ghost walkthrough on Gamezebo. Age of Enigma: The Secret of the Sixth Ghost is a point-and-click adventure game played on PC and Mac created by Casual Box Studio. This walkthrough includes tips and tricks, helpful hints, and a strategy guide to how to complete Age of Enigma: The Secret of the Sixth Ghost.

Age of Enigma: The Secret of the Sixth Ghost puts you in the role of Ashley, a young woman who has been having unsettling dreams about an old house. Then one day, she gets a letter that leads her to the house from her dreams. Here you are greeted by a shadowy figure named Nathan, who tells you that you are a medium and that you must help the six ghosts trapped in the house find peace and redemption.

In the only remaining human city of Bezoar, army veteran Major Fletcher is drawn into a conflict between two of mankind's greatest enemies. He is soon to discoer that nothing is what it seems to be. Learn more about Hard Reset, an indie first-person shooter launching next month on Steam.

Just how often can Rome be in danger? With Roads of Rome 3, the new release by developer Realore, players might start to feel like Sisyphus doing the same work over and over again. In the vein of its predecessors, the game allows players to rebuild various Roman settlements that have been destroyed by barbarians. The result is a game that’s entertaining but that doesn’t break much new ground.

With these puzzle games the interest derived from playing them is not what the game gives you to work with but what it holds back and limits you on. In Tetris the pieces fall randomly; in Bejeweled jewels can only be swapped horizontal or vertically, Mahjong tiles need to be picked up in pairs and be “free," and so on. O-G Sokoban hinges its gameplay on that limiting factor as well, but could have benefitted from a greater sense of challenge.

The fall/winter of 2010 was a pretty great time for mobile games with jaw-dropping visuals. Firemint showed us that photo-realistic racing games weren’t exclusive to home consoles with Real Racing 2. Epic demonstrated how incredible the Unreal engine could be on iOS with Infinity Blade. iD Software brought us RAGE, EA Mobile brought us Dead Space – the list goes on and on... but then suddenly, it stopped.

In my research about Contre Jour, I learned that “contre jour” is actually a french term used to describe a certain type of photograph known for extreme backlighting. It causes the subject in the foreground to appear as an outline of shadow. After reading this, using it as the name of the game suddenly made sense, since Contre Jour uses this throughout to great effect.

Spy Mouse is an action puzzle game from Firemint and Electronic Arts for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You control a secret agent mouse that is destined to eat more cheese and dodge every pesky cat along the way. Finding the best path to each piece of cheese may not always be as easy as it looks but luckily Gamezebo’s quick start guide has all the tips, tricks and solutions you’ll need to play your best.