As we acknowledge the 100-year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we find game developers walking a fine line between creating a game that's respectful to the real lives lost and also entertaining to play. With Hidden Mysteries: Return to Titanic, the gameplay allows you to explore the Titanic both before and after its demise, but the story is such that the game could have taken place anywhere, making the Titanic setting seem more like an afterthought than a necessity.
Spacetime Studios continues its mobile MMO Legends series with their latest release, swapping space and fluffiness for a rather different, more violent angle. Dark Legends puts you in control of a bloody-thirsty vampire, on a quest to find the culprit responsible for your fangs.
Over the last few years, the name ERS Game Studios has become synonymous with quality hidden object adventures and the company's latest title, Spirits of Mystery: Song of the Phoenix, upholds that hard-earned reputation. This exceptional hidden object game has everything hidden object gamers hold dear—lush graphics, clever puzzles, rich sound and a magic-filled storyline, and this potent mixture confirms once again that ERS is a formidable force when it comes to making crowd-pleasing hidden object adventure games.
Tim Burton is an auteur in the truest sense of the word. Despite what you think of his films, you can't deny that the man has an unmistakable style for everything he does. If you took a cursory glance at Nathan Jurevicius' Scary Girl comic you'd half expect for Burton's name to be attached to it, but alas, it's not. The colorful, gothic world filled with things that go bump in the night might take some inspiration from the cinematic imagination of the same man who brought us Edward Scissorhands, but it is an independently fascinating world all on its own. After starting life as a browswer-based Flash game, Scary Girl made the leap to consoles earlier this year, and has recently landed on PC in all its platforming strangeness.
I have a laundry list of things I plan on doing as soon as my wife and I get out of our condo and into a proper house. Get a dog, think about having a kid, buy a pinball machine, have more parties, etc. In addition to those, one of the things high on my list is the acquisition of a nice Crokinole board. I'd wager most of my friends don't even know what crokinole is, and they run a few hundred bucks, but man do I want one. Until then I have to make do with digital versions, like Clockwork Crokinole.
I'm not a fan of romance novels. There, I said it. For some of you, that might disqualify me right off the bat for reviewing a game based on a romance novel, but I assure you, I went into Tiger Eye: The Sacrifice with a totally open mind. I've been surprised by romantic storylines before, and I was willing to believe that an adventure game based on a book by best-selling romance novelist Marjorie M. Liu could be a winner. Unfortunately, it wasn't.
Over the years, quite a few casual games have been released that focus on the mythology of the lost city of Atlantis. Whether the games detail its destruction or later discovery by scientists, there tends to be a focus on how or why the city was ultimately lost. In Legends of Atlantis: Exodus, we don't have to make guesses or assumptions, as we're transported directly back to the beginning of the island's isolated Armageddon, as earthquakes, tidal waves and more threaten to wipe out the culture's inhabitants, history and even the very land upon which both have been built.
Forget ant farms and sea monkey colonies. It's time for treasure-filled caves populated with dragons, imps, trolls, bandits, and a ton of other fanciful, scaly inhabitants. In Dragon Keeper 2, you'll play parent to a bunch of dragons in order to combat an evil witch. Yeah—a little more exciting than tending to a hermit crab tank.