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Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst sends you back to creepy, puzzling Ravenhearst Manor. It seems that freeing Emma’s soul from the cursed place was only the beginning, for the dreary cluttered house is still haunted. Not only are there ghosts about, but brand new puzzle locks have been installed all over the grounds and rooms of the mansion. The Queen of England, seriously worried that things are getting out of hand, calls you back to investigate. Soon after arriving, you’re met by Emma’s ghost - and some other spirits - and warned that additional souls are trapped in the house. As Master Detective, the job is up to you. Who else is going to do it? The neighbors? I don’t think so! Those clowns couldn’t find a hidden object if it jumped out of a dark closet at night screaming “here I am!” with exploding fireworks.

Return to Ravenhearst is a hidden object game. Unless you’ve been living in a hut in the mountains like this guy I saw in an action movie last night, that means gameplay primarily involves hunting for specific items in a scene full of them. Some objects on your list may be easy to find, others may be partially obscured by other objects, slightly faded into the background, or lined up just right with the surrounding scenery to make them difficult to distinguish. For each item on your list, click on it and it flies out of the scene and into your Max Headroom styled crime computer.

Regular readers know that OMG I’m such a huge fan of random clicking heart heart unicorn. In fact I started a random clicking fan club about three months ago. Return to Ravenhearst follows in the footsteps of Madame Fate and doesn’t punish you for clicking randomly… almost. Too many bad clicks and your mouse pointer will do a little spiral dance. No time is subtracted from your countdown timer because, unlike previous games, there is no timer. You can spend as long as you like in each scene - another design decision I applaud. As president of the random clicking fan club I give this game an A- in the subject of random clicking. That’s a pretty good score.

Instead of a map or menu to move from location to location, your mouse pointer, placed at the edge of the screen, changes into an arrow to indicate that you can move into another area. Thus you’re able to “walk” around the mansion. This really adds to the adventure game aspect of your investigation and gives the game a nice feeling of immediacy. Your mouse pointer also changes into a magnifying glass to indicate items in the room that you can inspect in closer detail. Sometimes this pops up a window with a closer view of something with objects that can be manipulated. And sometimes you get a tongue-in-cheek text description. Watch for sparkles - they indicate you need to investigate further. And a cloud of sparkles means grab your glasses because another hidden object challenge is afoot.

Following in the trend of most hidden object games, Return to Ravenhearst is packed to overflowing with item manipulation (i.e. “escape the room”) type puzzles. Every time you complete a hidden object scene, one item from those you found will be selected for your inventory. And will be used later in the game to solve a puzzle. You can call up your inventory at any time by moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen. Using them is as simple as dragging them to where you’d like them to be used. For example, dragging a piece of cheese onto a mouse hole. The items you select to keep often seem much, much less useful than others you’ve found (or others that were in the scene, for that matter!) but at least it adds some method to the madness of blindly following your crime computer’s orders and grabbing up snakes, butterflies, eggbeaters, lighthouse statuettes, etc.

What would Ravenhearst Manor be without puzzle locks? It would be a breeze! Get ready to smash your brain against some of the most fiendishly tricky puzzle locks yet on these mansion doors. I spent ten minutes on the moon and sun puzzle lock before I even realized I didn’t have two vital components to complete it. Luckily, you keep a record of all clues in your notebook and these can be reviewed at any time. That’s what separates a Master Detective from a Junior Detective.

The art in Return to Ravenhearst is simply excellent. Look at that screenshot to the left. That’s some sweet sweet spooky house artwork. The odd angles of various screens are delightful. I haven’t seen anything as good since the remake of Resident Evil on the Nintendo Gamecube. Not just the artwork itself, but somehow Big Fish Games Studios has managed to make 800×600 hidden object scenes look really good. I play all hidden object games on a laptop in a shack and I really wish casual game companies would simply switch to 1024×768 for that extra burst of detail. But only few have. Amazingly enough, however, Return to Ravenhearst doesn’t seem to suffer from blurry or fuzzy items on an LCD screen. This is an AAA level title and no one buying it at the retail level is going to feel ripped off.

The musical score, recorded by the Deutsche Film Orchestra, is outstanding, with poignant violins and integritous piano. You can even purchase it in mp3 format from Big Fish Games, if you fall in love with it. You could at least put it in your car. It’s always good to have an iPod or a wide variety of music on hand, because you never know when a friend will say, “C’mon man let’s drive to Florida!” and then you get in the car and realize all you have is The Best of the Village People. That’s a true story.

Here’s some Return to Ravenhearst hints: if you’re stuck at the very beginning and can’t get into the house, smash your way inside! (Didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?) Don’t forget to return to previous scenes and hunt for more hidden objects - each time you do so you get an item that can be used to solve a puzzle and advance further into the house! Having trouble with the skeleton puzzle lock? Look at the second screenshot in this review!

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Call of Atlantis is the third game in Playrix’s popular Atlantis match-3 series. Our story starts with Poseidon, god of the sea and god of the earthquake, getting a bit ticked off that the Atlanteans - people living on a continent he created especially for them - have lost their appreciation for his might. (Imagine your cute little floppy-eared dog grew complacent and stopped running up to you when you came home or called it’s name - that’s the way Poseidon felt… except times ten.) Little do the Atlanteans know that Poseidon built a secret altar on the floor of the Sapphire Ocean - what we know today as the Mediterranean Sea - and set within it seven powerful crystals. These crystals keep Atlantis safe. Calling on his fish friends, Aquaman, I mean Poseidon, has the crystals pulled from the altar and arranges for them to be caught, one each, in the fishing nets of the seven surrounding kingdoms.

And thus Atlantis sinks beneath the waves! Several years later, you arrive on the scene. Can you restore the crystals to the altar and save Atlantis? I can answer that question having already played the game, and the answer is yes - if you’re a match-3 game champion.

Gameplay is typical for the match-3 genre. You’re presented with a board full of game pieces, each piece one of four or five varieties. You must swap adjacent pieces to form groups (either rows or columns) of three or more pieces of the same kind. Pieces can only be swapped if they create a match, otherwise they quickly shift back to their original position. Any matches you create are removed from the board, and additional pieces fall in from the top to fill the gap they leave behind. Often, additional groups of three or more will be created as gravity does its work, either by the skill of your carefully planned moves, or more often by sheer dumb luck… and those will be removed as well. Thus you can create chain reactions. As you’d expect that gives you bonus points and leads to a higher score.

What’s the point? Well, as you travel through the seven lands surrounding the Sapphire Sea (Rome, Greece, Troy, Phoenicia, Babylon, Egypt, and Carthage) your goal is to steal back the lost crystals. To do this, you must appease a local god by acquiring broken items native to the region. In each match-3 puzzle, one broken item’s fragments are mixed in with the game pieces on the board. By making matches and removing pieces beneath the fragment, you can drop it to the bottom of the board where it falls free into your greedy hands. Get every piece and you’ve won the level!

Is it really that easy? No, of course not. If it was, Atlantis would have risen long ago. Unfortunately, obstacles are placed on your game boards. Locks and double locks on pieces make them unswappable. Instead, you have to work with the pieces around them to make a match and break the lock. Frozen (and doubly frozen) pieces likewise cannot be swapped, but even worse they don’t drop into spaces below them, potentially stopping your game in its tracks as you struggle to work with just a few movable pieces next to a gaping pit of empty air. And the worst, most evil obstacle of them all: thick mason blocks that keep your precious broken fragments from dropping any further. Fragments just sit on the block, inches from your hands. I hate you, you stupid, stupid blocks! You haven’t seen the last of me. I swear an oath of violence on you and all you hold dear.

To aid you on your quest, you have the magical Amulet of Poseidon. It acts like a battery. Make matches of four or more pieces, either intentionally or by luck, and the amulet will charge. Once fully charged, you can click on it to release multiple streams of energy. These will break random pieces on the board, snap apart locks, and melt ice. They don’t break blocks, however. Grrrrr. You also have four powerups at your disposal. These are present in some boards and are collected just like item fragments - get them to the bottom of the board and they pop out. Bomb powerups destroy all pieces in a tiny radius. Lightning bolts destroy all of one type of piece on the board. Hourglasses give you additional time to finish a level. (Yes, there is a time limit and believe me, you will hit it more than once as you advance through the game!) Finally, the swap powerup allows you to switch around any two game pieces. Used wisely, this can get you out of many tricky situations. There are also hearts on some game boards, which give you an extra life. Powerups remain in your inventory and can be used in later levels if you wish to save them.

Here’s a big Call of Atlantis hint: Save those powerups! Many levels can be won by repeatedly making longer matches to charge the Amulet of Poseidon and then using it to randomly destroy pieces and slowly get stuck item fragments closer and closer to the bottom. The game gets quite challenging as you travel through the later civilizations, and you’ll wish you had the powerups from earlier in the game.

Each of the seven lands has twelve items to assemble. Eight are won by completing match-3 puzzles, but the other four can only be obtained in seven hidden object minigames. You’re shown the four items and then have to find their pieces in a scene. These minigames aren’t going to spin around the pants of a hardcore hidden object game fan, but they do provide a nice break from the match-3 gameplay. Kudos to Playrix Entertainment for allowing random clicking with no penalties - not even a downpitched honking sound effect. Once you assemble the twelve items, you can only continue by placing them in the correct locations in a scene. For example, pruning shears might be used to trim a leafy bush. Or birdseed might be used to feed an unhappy bird. These puzzles are well done and much more interesting than the “click on the Christmas tree ornament” style hidden object puzzles that precede and follow them.

Call of Atlantis is a beautiful game and it’s not hard to imagine that it was a labor of love for somebody. Little details, like grapes swinging in the air from an explosion or mouseover, fish that dart away when you click on them, animated backgrounds in every single scene, excellently narrated introductions to new lands, and more nifty particle effects than some AAA budget games can claim… all make up an impressive presentation. Unfortunately, it’s unimpressively displayed at 800×600 resolution, so if you’re playing on an LCD screen the hidden object scenes will look somewhat fuzzy. But those scenes are just appetizers compared to the match-3 main course, which is as addictive as the best of match-3 games and looks fine at what is, let’s be honest, a low resolution these days. As for sound, I can’t say that I fell in love with Strategic Music’s background themes, but in these kinds of games I typically turn off the music so I can listen to my old The Cars albums at full blast.

I didn’t find much to complain about, and since I’m a game reviewer I looked hard. I thought the game loaded a bit slowly just when it’s first started up. That’s about it.

Did I mention you get Windows screensavers when you complete areas? Because you sure do!

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Two such luckless and freshly unemployed individuals are Becky and Tim. Spooky Spirits, from Legendo Entertainment, is a game about matching colored blocks, catching spookies, and trying to get one’s job back after a careless mistake sends one out on the streets. Becky and Tim are two childlike, ghostbusterlike wardens of the Spirit World, which is like a giant prison for spookies. When you watch an episode of Ghost Hunters and see footage of a dark shadow stepping out from a doorway and suddenly vanishing - that’s a spookie. To keep these troublesome spirits from haunting innocent humans (and not-so-innocent humans of the variety that sell admission to fake haunted bed and breakfasts) all the spookies were rounded up and dropped into the Spirit World.

Then they escaped. Who is at fault for this prison break is a matter of some disagreement. Becky says Tim did it. Tim says Becky did it. I’m sure you know how that goes!

Spooky Spirits is a Tetris-like puzzle game; gameplay primarily involves dropping colored blocks into a container in the attempt to clear away groups of blocks before any reach the top. Run out of room to drop more blocks and it’s “nice try” and back to the unemployment line. You must drop two blocks at a time, and there is no rotating them clockwise or counter-clockwise - they fall side by side, horizontally, and you’d probably have to hack and decompile the game code to change this behavior. You can choose which two blocks at the top of the container you’d like to drop by swapping around any of the six candidates with its neighbors on either side. But you only have about ten seconds to do so, or the two blocks currently selected will drop on their own. Just visible above the six candidate blocks are the bottom halves of six others next in sequence. After each drop, two blocks from this second row will lower into place to fill in the gap.

Longtime readers know that I despise colored blocks! So any game that gives me a chance to seek revenge on red, blue, green, yellow, purple, etc. blocks is a good game in my book.

Once in the container, any block touching a neighboring block of the same color will fuse with it. Besides this fusing property, most blocks are quite ordinary. (They have eyes, and they’re a little spooky, however they’re not actual spookies.) But every now and then a block has a real honest to goodness spookie trapped inside. You can see it banging around in there, trying to escape. One of these spookie blocks will destroy any clump of similarly colored blocks it touches, and is the only way to clear blocks from the container (and catch the spookie). The more blocks you remove at a time, the higher your score.

Valuable bonus points are given out for destroying more than one clump at a time (”double bonus”) or setting up chain reactions (”chain bonus”). At higher levels, chain reactions are essential or the container will quickly overflow.

There are three game modes in Spooky Spirits, divided into five themed levels. “Panic mode” dares you to reach a certain score on each level. The higher the level, the higher the goal. All the captured spookies are dumped (in liquid form) into the Spookie-tank, and by glancing at the tank you can keep track of how many more you need to catch before the next level is unlocked. “Eternity mode” lets you play a single level as long as you like. The longer you last, the faster things get, until finally the blocks are pushing up from the bottom faster than you can use carefully-planned spookie drops to eliminate them. Cursed blocks! The goal is to see how high of a score you can obtain. And finally, my favorite mode is “Puzzle mode.” The boards are prearranged with specific patterns of blocks and/or spookies, and you have a limited number of drops to elimiate all the colors on the board. (Gray blocks act as fillers and don’t count.) This is a slow-paced, thinking player’s challenge. You need to be able to foresee two and three (or more!) moves ahead and take chain reactions into account to be successful.

By the way, I was just kidding about trying to decide what movie to watch on Halloween night. Of course the best horror movie of all time, The Haunting, is the film to watch. (I’d also accept Halloween.)

No doubt about it, Spooky Spirits is one gorgeous game. A high level of polish and pizazz oozes from every nook and cranny. The 3D backgrounds are atmospheric and perfect, with rolling fog and special effects. The game display is widescreen and high resolution, with no loss of detail. Perhaps it’s overkill for such a simple puzzle game, but you won’t get tired of looking at it. For that reason alone Spooky Spirits gets an explosion score of 9.7! The music is equally impressive - each area has its own appropriate theme and each in turn is approriately Halloween-ish.

There’s not a lot to dislike here. My only complaint is that when a tall stack of blocks is threatening the end of the game, and you successfully drop a spookie block into place and destroy that stack, you still sometimes lose the level. I’d prefer that any check for a stack pushing into the top row of droppable blocks be put on hold while blocks are being eliminated from the container.

There are no powerups or special blocks, which makes for a very uncomplicated and simple puzzle game… and it’s up to you to decide if that’s a pro or con.

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That’s just what happens in Miss Teri Tale: Vote 4 Me, from OUAT Entertainment. In this hidden object game, you play mystery author Teri Tale (whom we first met in Miss Teri Tale: Where’s Jason?), a glamorous thriller author who has given up on New York City to settle in the small village of Peeking Town. (No, not Beijing.) When the local paper (delivered via email) announces the start of a special election to choose the next mayor, you decide to sneak into your neighbor’s houses and look for campaign paraphernalia so you can compile a list of who’s voting for who and thus predict the outcome of the Peeking Town mayoral election! Wait, isn’t that illegal? It sure is!

Let’s skip the breaking and entering… and trespassing… in America the private ballot is a cornerstone of our democracy. That’s why no one sees you vote, because if they did know who you voted for they could try to influence your vote. Why Teri Tale wants to know who will win the election in her town is the biggest mystery in Vote 4 Me. And her snooping just gets her into trouble, for it isn’t long before an inept and deranged blackmailer has tossed Teri’s hat into the ring. (You get to choose which hat she wears, by the way. I chose a slick and hip black baseball cap.) Will Teri end up as mayor? You’ll have to play further in the game than I did to find out!

As this is another hidden object game, you’re no doubt familiar with the basics of the gameplay. You’re shown a cluttered room and given a list of objects to find. Click on them and they’re scratched off your list and removed from the scene. Find enough objects in the scene and it’s on to the next one. You have a limited amount of time to find everything before you’re discovered and hauled off to jail. (Just kidding, all that happens is that you have to repeat the scene.) I’m a big fan of random clicking, and Vote 4 Me allows you to do a fair amount before warning you to stop “making too much noice.”

In each scene are hidden three shamrocks. For each one you find, you get a hint/clue. These really come in handy when you can’t find that fifth and final slug in one of the candidate’s basements. Hints carry over to the following scenes (like rollover minutes), so unless you’re absolutely the worst hidden object game player in the world Miss Teri Tale will probably have enough hints on hand to complete the area. Even if you do run out of shamrocks, you can request a hint, but five minutes will be subtracted from the area time limit.

There are a few basic puzzles involving moving things around - for example, replacing wrenches in the correct spot on a workbench. There are also quite a few minigames. Two that stand out are a surprisingly tricky time management dog grooming game and the most ham-handed tower defense game I’ve ever played. And I’ve played a lot, including most of the bad Flash web ones and one I wrote myself called Robot Mice Invaders (you have to stop the mice from getting to your cheese) that I never released because it somehow corrupted the drive in my old Japanese laptop and now Internet Explorer 7 crashes randomly.

I have to say that Vote 4 Me does a good job with the hidden object scenes. Items are generally well-hidden but not impossible, and the game displays at a refreshingly high resolution wide screen that doesn’t result in a muddy, blurry exercise in frustration. Bizarre but not quite off-putting music snippets in some scenes will keep you on your toes. However the game completely and totally drops the ball when it comes to the poor English translation that its text obviously went through at some point in development. From descriptions of NASA “Cosmonauts” … to misspellings… to lines like “I have found every objects of this room!” … it’s clear that OUAT Entertainment (and Big Fish Games, which at the time of this writing have an exclusive on Vote 4 Me) couldn’t be bothered to spend a measly twenty bucks to pay a native speaker to give the game a once-over. Pretty disappointing and the main reason Vote 4 Me receives such a low score from Casual Explosion.

Now that the U.S. general election is so close, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about the people I hate most in this world. No, not the dreaded mole people. I’m talking about those that try to win an argument (or in this case, an election) by misleading others. My hate for this type of person - who knowingly spreads misinformation - knows no bounds. If you have the misfortune to turn on a TV in a battleground state like Ohio or Florida, you’ll see all kinds of misleading attack ads from both sides. McCain claims Obama will raise taxes on the middle class, Obama claims McCain will cut social security. It’s even worse if you bother to read those ridiculous chain emails or listen to your idiot friends (everyone has at least one idiot friend, so try to make sure yours is a dog because dogs cannot lie). Claims like Obama doesn’t have a real American birth certificate (false: he has been proven to be a real American with a valid Hawaii birth certificate) or McCain crashed five airplanes (wrong: he crashed one plane by accident but was praised by the U.S. Navy for “skillful airmanship”). It’s all baloney. And it’s all designed to trick you!

Don’t trust anyone with an agenda! Get the facts from a site like factcheck.org and not only vote, but make sure your vote is an informed one!

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Welcome to Movieville, USA. Megaplex Madness: Now Playing, from Gold Sun Games, puts you in the enviable position of owner of the failed Bowmont Theater. Left decrepit and abandoned since 1965’s showing of Eleven Days in the Heartland, the theatre is in a bad way. The plaster is cracked in a handful of places, a nasty and dangerous-looking rat hole sits in the middle of the lobby, the foundation is split, spiderwebs criss-cross the balcony, and the red velvet rope and stanchions have been knocked over! No, you didn’t buy it at an auction, but instead it was a late night impulse buy in front of the TV. I honestly tried not to buy it, but the game kept popping up dialogue box after dialogue box and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Luckily, purchase of the Bowmont Theater includes a few old geezers to sell tickets, popcorn, and act as ushers. (The original employess? Bums? It’s unclear.) Never mind the dangerous ankle-snapping rat hole in the lobby floor… open the place to the public and if you can make enough money on ticket sales, you just might be able to restore the Bowmont to its original glory!

Gameplay involves dragging helpless customers to and from stations in the theatre lobby. Here’s how it works: A customer walks into the theatre. Floating above their heads, a word balloon containing an icon reveals what they want to do. An icon of a movie ticket means the customer wishes to buy a ticket, for example. Using the mouse, you click on them and drag them to the ticket booth. A movie projector icon means they’re ready to enter the auditorium, and should be dragged to its doors. A popcorn icon means they want to buy some popcorn, a joystick icon means they want to play an arcade game, a restroom icon means they need to use the facilities, etc.

Customers are fairly unremarkable Poser people, however their bodies amusingly act like ragdolls when you swing them around with the mouse. I tried to jam one of them down into the rat hole (I thought maybe I’d get a bonus or a free token), but unfortunately nothing happened.

When a customer arrives at a station, such as the ticket booth, their word balloon changes to an animated radial dial indicating how long before their action - in this case purchasing a movie ticket - is complete. The game quickly becomes an exercise in moving the correct customer to the correct spot in the theatre lobby and planning in advance to eliminate bottlenecks. Remember, these movie patrons are completely helpless and if one of them just bought some popcorn and is waiting to move to the auditorium entrance, she’ll remain there blocking the popcorn concession stand for other customers until you move her to where she wants to go. It’s not possible to force her to be polite and step aside so that other patrons can get their popcorn!

As in most time management games, customers get exasperated if kept waiting for too long, and eventually leave. You can gauge their level of satisfaction by looking at the number of tiny hearts above their heads. When all their hearts are gone, they turn and try to leave the theatre. Grab them! It’s your last chance to convince them to stay and watch a movie and earn you that little bit extra toward reparing the movie theatre. Sometimes customers want something you don’t serve in your theatre (maybe they want to buy pizza, but you don’t sell pizza). Grab them! Shake them until they come to their senses.

(What’s a heart worth these days? Exactly $1. Each time you drag a customer to a new place in the lobby, you’ll get $1 for each heart floating above their heads.)

Once the movie starts, customers still in the lobby begin getting frantic. No one wants to miss those thirty minutes of trailers and previews and coffee commercials. (Seriously, have you been to a movie recently? It’s crazy.) Customers lose hearts much more quickly when they’re late to a film, but luckily you can click frantically on their word balloon radial dial to speed up their purchase. Or quicken the time it takes the usher to check their ticket. (And I must say, these ushers are the slowest I have seen anywhere, ever.) Or quicken the time it takes a customer to use the bathroom. (Probably not healthy to force yourself to hurry when using the bathroom but I’m not a doctor so don’t quote me on that.)

Every level has a target goal you must reach. Do a little better than the target and you’ll make “expert” status and win a free arcade token. And if you do really well, you’ll receive “master” status and get a repair token that can fix up part of the theatre. The first thing I fixed in the Bowmont Theater was that rat hole. And it doesn’t end with the Bowmont… there are four other theatres to restore, too.

Like Airport Mania, one of the best time management games, you can get bonus points for color-coordinating customers. You see, as in real life, or Dinertown, people in Movieville tend to wear matching outfits of the same color. Each time you serve a successive customer of the same color at a station, you get a plus added to that station’s color bonus modifier that is in turn added to the dollar amount any customer (of that color) landing on that station will spend. Confused? Why do all the customers outfitted in blue like using the same entrance to the auditorium? Who cares? It’s fun trying to match them and get bonus points. Once you reach a modifier of +5, you get an extra arcade token, too.

Arcade tokens are used in the Movieville arcade. There are five unlockable classic arcade minigames. These allow you to earn extra money for theatre upgrades. Like another popcorn station, a gumball machine, or enough cash to convince one of your old geezer employees to bring in one of his old geezer friends to man another empty station.

Here’s a few hints to keep your megaplex from degenerating into madness: Always try for color bonuses whenever possible. However don’t let a customer lose too many hearts waiting for the right colored station. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and send a red-skirted girl into a +5 green pizza concession station, even though that will remove those 5 bonus points. Buy extra stations first, even if you can’t afford an employee to man them yet. They pay for themselves with color bonuses. When you’re dragging a customer with the mouse, they won’t lose hearts, so you should always be holding someone if you’re waiting… and you don’t even have to drag them back to wherever they came from. Just let go of the mouse button wherever you like and they’ll fly back. (Carried by ghosts?) Get in the habit of always letting customers at the arcade game win by manipulating the joystick for them as soon as you drop them in front of the machine. Finally, if customers start asking for something you don’t have, that’s a clue to buy that item as soon as you can afford it. (Use arcade tokens and play minigames for extra cash if necessary.) Because after having their ideas shaken out of them, customers have to think for a while to decide what they want next, and that can waste valuable time and create a traffic jam of unsatisfied movie patrons!

Unfortunately, Megaplex Madness is a low resolution game. It’s 800×600, which means a lot of detail is lost and the game definitely doesn’t look as good as recent casual games - especially if you’re using a modern PC. Come on, Gold Sun Games, at least use 1024×768. And the Poser people aren’t as cute as hand drawn characters would be. That said, there are a lot of nice graphical touches, like the ragdoll behavior of customers being dragged back and forth and the animated popcorn in the main menus. The music isn’t bad, but isn’t remarkable either - with the exception of the theme that plays as a movie starts, and the separate fanfairs for winning and losing a level. Besides the low graphical detail, the only complaint I have with the game is that sometimes it’s hard to grab walking customers. I swear a few times I clicked on them but the game didn’t register that I got them.

Despite these minor quibbles, Megaplex Madness is actually quite fun. I’m not saying that the production values are bad, because they’re not, but this game is definitely a good example of fun gameplay mechanics trumping graphics and sound. In that way it brings back fond memories of one of my favorite Jamaican horror movies, Popcorn, starring Tom Villard and Ray Walston.

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Anna’s Ice Cream, from Game On, is a time management game all about serving ice cream. By monkey. Summoned back to Ice Cream Island as a young adult, brown-haired and blue-eyed Anna immediately notices a change in her uncle. He’s less cheerful and more sentimental than usual. (He’s still got the one gold tooth, though.) Wouldn’t you know it, he’s decided to retire and that means giving the island paradise and his ice cream vending business to Anna! That is… if she can prove herself worthy. I don’t need to tell you that the challenge facing poor Anna involves rushing back and forth, clicking the mouse frantically, and juggling handfuls of customers and their orders at a time. (And monkeys!)

If you’re wondering how Anna remains so slim yet spends her summers on Ice Cream Island, I’m wondering the same thing. I love love love <3 <3 <3 Reece's Peanut Butter Cup Blizzards and I can tell you that spending your summers in a town with a Dairy Queen can really do a number on you if you're watching your figure. Anna must be spending nine months on the two sandwich diet just to recover from those summer months.

As for Anna's task, each day her uncle gives her a spot on the island to sell ice cream... and a dollar amount as a goal. She must meet the goal by selling as much ice cream as possible before the day ends, or she fails. Unfortunately there are two obstacles standing in her way. The first is an unconventional conveyor vending system designed by those clowns at Unco Conveyors. The second is monkeys.

Anna stands behind the counter, and when customers materialize (all these time management games can’t afford paying artists to draw images of clients walking) and order by word balloon, Anna must click on the type of cone/dish the customer wants. The cone will drop onto a moving conveyor, at the end of which sits a lazy, good-for-nothing monkey named Mikey. If the order isn’t completed before it reaches Mikey, the dimwitted monkey will toss it into the trash or eat it himself. Stupid monkey! Argggh! He won’t even wait one measly second for Anna to put a cherry on top of the cone. If the customer asked for a cherry-topped cone, and the cone reaches Mikey without a cherry, you can kiss it goodbye. Anna has to start making the it again from the beginning.

The conveyor cannot be stopped! That’s rule number one on Ice Cream Island. You can speed it up, though. As usual in time management games, customers will pay you more (via tips) if their orders are delivered quickly. And they’ll eventually get mad and leave if kept waiting. You can tell a customer is impatient because their word balloon starts fading to dark blue and jumping around like a grasshopper in a box.

As the cone travels slowly along the conveyor, click on a flavor of ice cream and then again on the cone to put a scoop in the cone. If the customer asked for more than one scoop and they happen to be different flavors, you can add them in any order. This never works in real life, your hands just get sticky. Add toppings - if any were ordered - by clicking on them and then on the cone again. Finally it will reach Mikey the monkey and he’ll put it on the tray next to him. (Unless you made a mistake, in which case he’ll hoot and toss it into the trash, or eat it. Argh!) Click on the tray, and Mikey’s girlfriend, Molly the monkey, will come to the counter and pick up the tray. Click on the table that ordered the ice cream, and Molly will deliver the order. After finishing their meal, customers pay and leave. Some will ask for a napkin to wipe their mouths, some will make a second order.

Anna scoops up ice cream from metal trays set into the table behind her. When the trays are empty, she must refill them by hauling them to the ice cream machine at the very right of the counter. This takes a few seconds, so don’t get caught with a conveyor lined with half-completed treats and no ice cream!

Sometimes a solid gold ice cream cone will appear on the conveyor. Grab it because for every five you get, you have the chance to mix a new flavor of ice cream. This plays out like a “guess the number” type of game as you choose amounts of flavorings to add to vanilla ice cream. Coincidentally, “guess the number” was the first computer game I ever programmed. In an alternate universe, could I have written Anna’s Ice Cream? If I had, I would have added a dogcatcher to rush in and scoop up those monkeys!

Anna’s Ice Cream is a bit harder than the normal time management game, at least for me! There’s a lot of things to keep track of as you advance through the island and the combinations of ice cream cones increase. I give the graphics in this game a big thumbs up. I like the character designs. However I give the background music one of those wavering sideways thumbs up/thumbs down combinations. You’ll probably turn it down unless you’re trying to prove some kind of sick and twisted point.

Some tips and hints to help Anna: bowls/jars of toppings must be picked up and put down each time, so whenever possible, wait to add them to more than one treat on the conveyor at once. Keep customers happy by feeding them cookies, lemonade, or having Molly do circus tricks for them. Always try to serve an entire table at the same time, for lots of extra tip money.

Once you reach the zoo in “story mode,” you unlock “happy hour mode” which I would have called “in your face mode.” One monkey stays at the zoo and customers line up at the counter.

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But enough about Pup-peroni. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the North Pole… Veronica Rivers: Portals to the Unknown, from Dragon Altar Games, is the story of a normal day in the life of supermodel hot North Pole rescue post operative, Veronica Rivers. After receiving a distress call from one of the nearby geologic research stations, Veronica gathers together her camera, an apple, a thermos, kettle of hot water, a flashlight, a lucky teddy bear, and a lot of other things because this is - you guessed it - a hidden object game.

It seems some mysterious creatures and a huge snowstorm attacked the geologists’ camp. Luckily buried in the polar ice the researchers found a stargate, I mean an ancient portal, and managed to escape carrying all their umbrellas and statuettes and hammers and old television sets and pineapples and boots… to the sunny swamps beside the Mekong River in Laos. There they dropped some of their junk and continued their journey through the next portal, to good old Ireland. And so on, and so on. As Veronica Rivers, you must follow their trail of clutter, using your amazing PDA to find hidden objects, take pictures documenting your journey, and most importantly scan for evidence of alien interference on our reality as well as message tablets hidden in the folds of space-time.

Boy can those geologists carry a lot of stuff! We’ve all seen those movies where a group of people have to walk through the hot burning desert, but some idiot among them wants to carry along a huge gold statue or his favorite bowling ball or a box of winter clothing or two grocery bags full of Pup-peroni, etc. And of course he ends up leaving it in the sand. I guess it’s the same with these geologists. Tip: always pack light when you’re on the run!

In every scene you’re given a list of objects to find. Usually they’re listed by name on your PDA, but sometimes only their shapes (in silhouette) are revealed. Sometimes you’re shown a split screen and have to find the differences between two scenes. A few of the hidden objects further the story, but others are just random. That’s what happens when you live your life at the behest of your PDA. Click on an object and it will be removed from the scene and crossed off your list. Longtime readers know that I’m a huge fan of random clicking, and thankfully Portals to the Unknown is agreeably leniant in allowing a burst of fast random clicking now and then. Do too much of it, however, and the screen will turn yellow for a few seconds and you won’t be able to click on anything. There are no time limits, which is nice because usually those limits are ridiculously extravagant.

By default, Veronica offers commentary about every object she finds. Pencil sharpener: “This will come in handy when my pencils become dull.” Statuette: “A sophisticated statuette. It would fit my collection at home.” The letter A: “All knowledge starts with this letter, I would say. And I wouldn’t mind knowing what the hell is going on.” Okay… You can turn this commentary off in the options menu, but leave it on because it’s worth it… unless you’re going back to replay certain scenes and don’t want to see the same messages again and again. Just a few times the commentary breaks down when it attempts to address the plot of an area, because finding objects in a different order than the commentary expects results in Veronica getting ahead of herself in explanations.

If you need hints or tips, the game is very charitable. There’s usually a hint button somewhere and pressing it will find one of the hidden objects. You won’t be able to ask for another hint for twenty seconds, however.

Your PDA will sometimes ask you to take some pictures of the scene, just to prove to everyone back home that you really are having this wonderful adventure traveling around via magic portals. When taking snapshots, your mouse pointer becomes a camera viewfinder and clicking activates the camera. Paradoxically, the pictures you are asked to take by the PDA are shown on the PDA’s display, so they’re already in there. (It’s confusing the first time you’re asked to take pictures. Hint: Find, inside the scene, the same bit of picture shown in black and white in the PDA display, line up the viewfinder mouse pointer with it carefully - the pointer should change slightly to let you know you’ve got it - then click!) So why do you have to take pictures that are already in the PDA? Insert here a funny animated gif of a sheep turning its head back and forth and ???’s flying out.

Your all-knowing PDA also acts as a scanner, scanning for alien symbols that are only revealed when you mouse over their hieroglyphic with the mouse, or secret message tablets that look like keys to some giant extraterrestrial mutant door. There are a variety of minigames that take you beyond merely hunting for hidden items. Activating the stargates, I mean magic portals, themselves via simple logic games, connecting to orbitting GPS satellites by uncrossing links in a chain, drawing symbols to unlock secret messages from aliens, etc.

Where Portals to the Unknown excels is the simple but effective animations between areas. Veronica exploring, solving puzzles, etc. There’s also a lot of nifty video effects on display: from spinning, shimmering portals to background animations inside the disordered scenes themselves. Unlike some other hidden object games that drop cluttered room after cluttered room on the player, there’s a real sense of movement and momentum to Veronica’s explorations. The actual graphics of the items and backgrounds themselves are decent enough… but a bit clip-arty and not as high quality as standouts like Mystery Case Files: Madame Fate.

Dragon Altar Games, you almost convinced me that you were native English speakers… until you started using “evidences” as a plural for evidence. That’s like saying “Look, I’m wearing five jewelries!” or “Wow, the street is full of traffics!”

It’s crazy talk!

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Crumb, from Piddle Pup Games, is a friendly Sokoban variant for the casual game market. The mysterious Forest Mother has vanished and as her only apprentice it’s your job to find her. Luckily she left a few clues. You’ll have to search through 50 levels of forest glade goodness for bits of magical essence - crumbs - that she’s dropped along the way. For each level you complete, your collected crumbs reveal another page in the Forest Mother’s diary, which reads like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, except without as many violent deaths or donkeys. Why did the Forest Mother take such a meandering path through her woods? Will she punish you for collecting all her magic crumbs thereby making it difficult to find the way home? There’s only one way to find out!

Gameplay involves moving your apprentice (I chose a giant purple mail carrier monster as mine) through a tile-based level looking for crumbs. There are fire essence crumbs, water essence crumbs, smokey essence crumbs, and more. The Forest Mother is smart enough to know that bread crumbs are quickly scarfed down by birds. Let’s see a bird scarf down a pile of fire essence crumbs! Ha ha ha. Sometimes giant boulders get in your way. Luckily you can push them around, as long as they have some free space on the opposite side. As in Sokoban, figuring out how and where to push the right boulder to open up the right path makes up the majority of Crumb’s puzzles.

Player beware: Sokoban games require a level of patience and an ability to strategize beyond that of most puzzle games. Some might get frustrated. But patient puzzle lovers like me will be delighted. Starting at about level 29, “Another Water Hazard,” the trickiness of Crumb begins to mount. Hint: use the “Show Map” option to see everthing at once and plan your moves ahead.

Boulders can be used to ford streams. Simply push one into the water and it will sink and allow you to stand on that square. Boulders can also be used to put out forest fires, of which there are an alarming amount. And they’re all fat and spikier than puffer fish, so you know they’re dangerous. (Here’s a link to a picture of a baby puffer fish puffing up just as hard as it can.) But roll a boulder onto a fire square and the fire will be extinguished and you can pass. You can also push boulders to block or even destroy monsters.

Yes, there are monsters! Giant drops of water, giant bees, giant walking daisies, and more. If a monster grabs you, you’ll lose the last crumb you collected, but the monster will be destroyed. What’s that you say? You didn’t collect any crumbs yet? Well, in that case the monster devours you and you have to begin the level again.

Everyone’s afraid of monsters. Don’t start making excuses like “oh no, monsters… I have to wash my hair” because there are also magic potions strewn about the forest glades to help you on your quest. Yellow potions allow you to stun any monster you come into contact with. Red potions allow you to walk through forest fires. And blue potions allow you to enter Ghost Quadrant where everything is backwards! Just kidding, blue ones let you walk on water. You can also find brightly-colored keys, which allow you to unlock gates locked with the same color lock.

Collect the required amount of crumbs for the level, and the door to the Enchanted Forest roaming cottage (similar to a Tardis) will open and allow you access to the next level. You’ll also get to read another page in the Forest Mother’s secret diary. It would be more impressive if the diary pages followed along somehow with the levels in the game, but one can’t have everything. The less moves you make - and yes your apprentice is wearing a pedometer - the higher your score for the level. If you complete a level in a sufficiently low number of moves, you’ll receive a yellow flower on the forest map.

I really like the graphics in this game. If you enjoy old-fashioned pixel art and don’t really care for all this modern plasma this and particle that, be sure and check out the excellent tile work in Crumb. (Except for those fires. Yuck.) The main game screen trappings with curled vines and potion and key inventory slots are particularly nice. The music, however is kind of dull and you’ll either turn it way down/off or replace the .ogg files with renamed Three Stooges sound clips. (I’m just kidding for the love of god don’t do that I am serious don’t do it.)

Long before I found the Forest Mother, I found a few annoyances. For example, the game crashed on me once (but only once) in the level “Toram Islands.” Not sure why. Reloading was easy, though. Another time, on “Free For All” I somehow lost a smokey crumb and couldn’t complete a level. I swear I checked everywhere and it wasn’t there. (I think a monster stole it.) It’s also easy to randomly teleport onto a monster if you choose a bad time/direction to step onto a teleportation pad. That seems kind of unfair to me. And the mouse control arrow should not be shown if I’m using the keyboard to move my apprentice through the forest! Using a mouse to play Sokoban is like using a pair of pants to drive a car. Finally, the characters all walk left and right along the exact bottom of the tile instead of the center. Visually, very odd.

Overall, Crumb is a peaceful oldschool puzzle game masquerading as a casual game, and you owe it to yourself to check it out. Unless you’re really into zen and incense and Sokoban, you’ll likely get frustrated on some puzzles. But I’ll bet you’ll return every now and then… to try to finish another level. In just a few days I played it so much that its cute red-headed girl icon popped up on my Windows “Start” button list of frequently-used programs.

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