I was obsessed with video games in my youth. As such, school oftentimes felt like a cruel way for society to keep me away from them for massive chunks of time. But when we started playing Oregon Trail in one of my classes, that all changed. It wasn't exactly the kind of game I was used to, but I still became addicted. Recognizing a dearth of modern games that have the same feel, developer The Men Who Wear Many Hats has delivered us a modern, zombified version of it with Organ Trail: Director's Cut.
If you think that a weird, three-dimensional puzzle game that will tax both your spatial reckoning and your patience to their absolute max sounds like fun, then boy, have I got just the thing. It's called English Country Tune, and it'll drive you absolutely crazy. In love or out of your mind? That definitely depends.
LogiGun will strike an immediate chord of familiarity with anyone who's played Valve's hit puzzle game Portal. You won't be making any portals, but you will be equipped with guns that allow you to manipulate your environment as you move from one side of bizarrely dangerous rooms to the other, and there's even a passive-aggressive female overseer shadowing your every move and encouraging you to just give up and go home. Fortunately, it shares one other characteristic with the Portal games: it's pretty darn good.
Unmechanical is brilliant. Is that an unreserved recommendation? Alas, it is not. It's a quirky, oddball thing, neither particularly long nor especially challenging. It's a sight-seeing tour with puzzles. I love it. You may not. But you'd be crazy not to at least give it a chance.
Divo Games is obviously committed to its city building franchise, having made three city builders in the last three years: Be Rich, Be Richer and this month's release, Be Richest (Divo's official namer sure isn't working very hard). Most of the time, developers think adding things to a game is the best way to improve it; for some reason, our friends at Divo have gone the opposite route. Many features here are stripped out, and the results not surprisingly, are mixed.
While creepy or scary storylines and settings still reign as king within the hidden object genre, the "sci-fi" hidden object game is picking up speed, with G5's E.P.I.C.: Wishmaster Adventures falling into that new trend. However, where other science fiction/fantasy titles contain ample backstories and attention to detail (Eternal Journey: New Atlantis, for one), E.P.I.C. falls a bit short where it matters most.
Every once in awhile I get an itch to play an old school JRPG. Most recently I picked up Final Fantasy X -- not exactly the most old school game out there, but it had the grind and sweeping story I was looking for. Still though, there was something missing. I never felt that sense of danger that you feel when first wandering outside of town in Phantasy Star, where every random encounter on the world map can be as threatening as a boss battle. I never felt like I was discovering a world -- I felt more like an actor in a film. While Final Fantasy X is very much a JRPG -- and a very good one at that -- it's not the kind of JRPG that stokes the flames of my nostalgia. It's not the kind that throws you into in a hostile world that is yours for the taking. Victim of Xen is.
Wow. It's hard to admit it, but ERS Studios has really dropped the ball on this one. Normally the makers of some of the highest-quality hidden object games around, this month the company brings us Redemption Cemetery: Grave Testimony, a disjointed, simplistic hidden object adventure that plays like a game made for kids under 10. Although here and there hints of inspired creativity come through, in the end they just aren't enough to ensure the game's redemption.