Announce: Journey to the Center of the Earth on BFG

I picked this one up a long long time ago when it was new. It’s been so long, all I remember was the beautiful scenery, the sheer large amount of puzzles, and a few weird camera issues. I also remember an alternate ending and really good voice acting all around. Most of all, I remember giant mushrooms. Anything with giant mushrooms must be good, in my book.

Here are some links to get you started:

A downloadable trailer

Gamespot Review - 6.7/10

Justadventure Review - B

Mr. Bill’s Adventureland Review - Highly Recommended

Demo (92 mb)

Official Website (not much there)

Gameboomers Walkthrough

JustAdventure Walkthrough

UHS Hints

 

Announce: Circus Empire on the Big Fish!

As far as re-packaged games go, Circus Empire is relatively new. It came out July of 2007, and by October it’s at the BFG site.

Gamezone did a review on this one, and it’s pretty favorable of it being a relatively easy to learn simulation game.

Circus Empire is a basic simulation on the lines of Zoo Tycoon or Rollercoaster Tycoon, but on a much smaller scale. This means there is less to do, but it also means it’s easier to play. For people looking for a few hours of easy entertainment that doesn’t require a lot of thinking, this is a good choice, especially for families with kids.

Sounds good to me.

There are really no demos available for this one. Not even on the Enlight official site. Here’s a link to a help forum in case you get stuck.

 

RAF Global Rescue

A mission-based game to promote the Royal Air Force, Global Rescue’s got it all - obstacles to fly around, hostages to rescue, guns to fire. All of it presented in the usual Kerb quality.

RAF Global Rescue

 

Notessimo

Kongregate is a site like Newgrounds. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, let me explain: they’re both flash game communities where independent Flash game developers post their games and get noticed. There are around 1500 games on there and a lot of them are badly made, but the gems are amazing, with no commercial counterparts that I can think of.

Notessimo is a music maker with an easy to use interface that you can use to create music in minutes. I played with it a bit when it was new, and it has now been updated to feature songs by other Kongregate users. It’s amazing the things it can do - you can create complete MIDI songs on this thing. There are tons of instruments to choose from, and it’s as simple as clicking on a music staff.

Notessimo is definitely worth a bookmark.

 

Announce: Hotel Giant on the Big Fish!

Another one of those non-casual games on the Big Fish. I can’t exactly take the time to review these ones - they take too long, and with a baby in tow, it’s hard to go through these big long games. I can, however, offer a link to a demo. On the BFG site they do not offer a demo to Hotel Giant, but here’s a link to one on FilePlanet.

Hotel Giant Demo on FilePlanet
Hotel Giant Demo on Gamershell

Remember that this is not exactly the one from BFG - theirs is most likely pre-patched.

A few reviews from across the web:

Hotel Giant is all about building hotels. You get to design hotel attractions (bars, restaurants, health spas, and so forth) as well as guest accommodations, and you have to balance quality with profitability when you do so. …
each scenario goes something like this: spend a couple hours designing the hotel, and then spend about five minutes zipping through time until you win (or not). The only things you have to deal with once the game starts are guest complaints and staff hirings and firings, but the complaints are pretty predictable once you’ve played a little, and the hirings and firings usually aren’t necessary.

…The problem is that room design isn’t really fun even when it’s done well, and the more you have to do it the more boring it gets. Since in Hotel Giant you have to design rooms a lot — even despite a friendly copy and paste feature — and since there isn’t anything else to do in the game, obviously Hotel Giant isn’t very much fun to play.

…Overall, Hotel Giant is a nicely made but very boring game.
56%, Game Over Online Magazine

The first is the incredibly thorough but entirely boring tutorial that seems to last forever. It took me longer to get into HG than any other game I’ve played – including Morrowind….HG is one complex game, at least in its execution.

You can’t have exercise equipment in the lobby or a swimming pool in a boardroom – each object has a specific room they’re restricted to (though there are some common object). … (And it doesn’t help that there’s about three clicks for every action and host of drop-down menus to move through.) To help out you don’t have to design every single room. Each layout can be saved as a template then stamped out all over the floor – much like modern hotels. Then every time you change something in one room, it’s changed in all the rooms that use that template.

…Fulfilling the menial requests of characterless guests didn’t do anything to keep me playing. And the inability to take out some of this frustration on your hapless employees just isn’t possible. Beating up on Manuel-type waiters would have been a welcome addition. I guess what I’m trying to say, HG bored me after about 5 hours.

5.0/10, The Armchair Empire

Sounds pretty bleak, but Gamespy says:

Not a bad game by any means. JoWood has produced a quality title that seems to truly simulate the challenge of hotel management. Unfortunately, a cumbersome interface, and overly complex management scheme detract from an otherwise excellent game. Nevertheless, it’s worth a look.

It’s up to you. Links to the Demo is above.

 

Review: Zoo Empire

Zoo Empire is basically a copy of Microsoft’s Zoo Tycoon. Now, Zoo Tycoon wasn’t a casual game, and neither is Zoo Empire. The reasons are very, very simple: there’s way too much to keep track of, too high of a learning curve, and there is no way you can play this for a few minutes and come back later.

For me, Zoo Empire feels like a trip to memory lane. It’s so much like Zoo Tycoon it’s eerie. The only thing that seems to be different is that my polar bears don’t seem to want to have the penguins for lunch when I leave them in the same pen. I don’t think that’s an improvement. Seeing my visitors running away in terror because I delete a part of the fence containing my lions were all part of the fun in Zoo Tycoon.

Zoo Empire is not a new game - it has actually been out since 2004. There has been a number of reviews written about it. So instead of my ranting about how it is not a casual game, I’d like to list a couple of quotations here.

Zoo Empire allowing you to choose from over 40 species and subspecies of animals including both rare and endangered species, over 150 types of visitors and animals objects, over 200 buildings, items and facilities. There are a dozen different terrain types, each with unique dynamic grass effects allows you to experience the subtle landscape changes as you progress in the game. There are also food booths, gift shops, toilets, bins, signs, first aid stations, security and vending machines, etc. As owner of your zoo, you can adopt animals, landscape and build exhibits, hire and manage employees. - GameGuru

The early stages of the game are blessed with a tutorial system to get you acquainted with the interface and controls. This is, of course, frustrating and relatively slow, but is genuinely useful and the game is all the better for it. - BoomTown

The question is, are you willing to play through 2 hours of tutorials? You have to learn how to fence animals in, edit the terrain, hire a myriad of staff, conduct research, build small and large buildings, keep animals in their desired habitats, etc, etc. Despite it being a kids’ game, Zoo Empire has a pretty steep learning curve.

If you’re willing to put in the time, Zoo Empire does turn out to be an addictive Zoo simulation. It is a completely children friendly, non-violent simulation game that contains fun facts on all of the animals that you can have in your zoo. I do recommend picking this one up from the store though - you will want a printed manual on-hand, since the tutorial doesn’t tell you everything you need to know. You can get this off BFG for $6.99, but getting the boxed version shouldn’t cost you anymore - it’s a 3 year old game, and a budget title to begin with.

 

Review: Capitalism 2

Trevor Chan’s Capitalism 2 is hands-down the best simulation game I have ever played. Please notice that there were no categories mentioned in that last sentence: it is the best simulation game I have ever played, out of any category you can think of. It is an accurate free-market economy simulation that allows you to control a company from the agricultural, mining, manufacturing, real estate, trading, wholesale, retail, as well as the stock market sector. It is a complete overview of how capitalism works.

Somehow, through it all, Capitalism 2 makes it easy to pick up, simple to learn, and really, really hard to drop. It manages to have no pretenses about the products that you can choose to sell (by making it funny like some tycoon games try to do) or throw in extra animations and story elements to make it interesting, but comes through as an addictive game by the strength of the gameplay alone. Now, let’s tackle the details: there are many.

The most successful enterprises (President’s Choice comes to mind) tackles the entire chain of production to eliminate competition and lower the prices of the raw products. So, let’s say you want to sell cans of soda pop. You can choose to buy soda pop from 1) your competition in town who manufactures it 2) your competition overseas who are shipping it to your local seaport, or 3) buy sugar and aluminum and manufacture it yourself and the cheapest of all 5) farm your own sugar, mine your own aluminum, sell it to your own factories at cost, then manufacture it to sell exclusively to your own stores. Once you have it in store, you can either choose to market it by branding, market it by using the traditional media, or even better, acquire the local traditional media and the money all goes in your pocket.

Oh, the possibilities! That’s what makes capitalism special. You can buy a piece of land in the boonies for the cheap. You can choose to buy land that are closer to the urban center, acquire the houses already on it, and pay more. You can buy your competition out in the stock market. You can dominate real estate and expand the city by creating new residential areas. You can corner the price of gold by acquiring all the gold mines. You can build department stores and discount stores or a whole range specialty stores. You can buy condos, TV stations, Radio stations. You can manufacture and sell everything you have in the manufacturing library, and believe me - it’s huge. You can build farms and produce eggs, meat, leather, and a range of agricultural goods. You can even build a headquarters building, hire a CEO to take care of the centralized details of marketing, branding, R&D, etc etc, while you come up with more ideas on what to acquire.

What makes Capitalism 2 so easy to pick up is the 3 x 3 grid building system. Each building, be it retail, manufacturing, has 9 boxes for you to work with, and each product requires at least 1 purchasing box and 1 sales box in retail, an extra manufacturing step in factories, processing in farming and raw materials and so on. You can layout your stores however you like as long as the links between the boxes “work” so that materials travel smoothly from one point to another. If you’re stuck, there’s even an entire layout library that ranges from typical retail layouts (4 products with advertising in the middle) to complex factory layouts that produces palmtop computers.

There are many, many layers to capitalism 2. Of course, that comes with a price: a somewhat overwhelming interface full of information and a steep learning curve, both of which flat out declared it not a part of the casual games category. It does, however, comes with full built-in documentation as well as a “start up” campaign that details every aspect of the game. If you’re willing to slog through the start-up campaigns, you can easily play this game for hours a day, weeks on end, and it won’t get boring

Another setback is the graphics. Capitalism 2 is around 5 years old, and even then, the graphics can be at best described as “retro.” Some character portraits are downright ugly, the maps are sprite based, SimCity 2000 style, and the music - there’s music? But the sounds of the city, including the sounds of things being manufactured and sold as well as the humming background noise of supermarkets, are right on the money.

Capitalism 2 is well worth $20, it has built in on-line play so you can play against other players, a custom campaign so you can determine all of the win conditions as well as start-up conditions, and a full challenging campaign. This is one game I’ve played on and off over the years and always find myself looking up after an hour or four wondering where the time has gone. Easily the best simulation game I’ve ever played - highly recommended. Don’t let the bars and line graphs scare you - Capitalism 2 is the most accessible yet realistic business simulation you can find.

 

Announce: Return to Mysterious Island available on Big Fish Games!

All the adventure games I’ve seen on BFG before were older ones or simpler ones like the Nancy Drew series; so when I logged on this morning and saw Return to Mysterious Island, I was quite pleasantly surprised.

I picked this one off the shelf when it was new, and it was definitely a pretty good adventure game. It had great puzzles, a unique inventory system (which is used in all the newer games by the same developer), a survival meter which isn’t often seen in adventure games, and a lot of great puzzles. There are multiple ways to solve puzzles, which is definitely a plus.

It’s a bit short, and the story a bit sparse, but definitely a lot here to keep an adventure gamer occupied. If you’re a Gameclub member, this game’s a must buy!

 

City Creator

I don’t know if you can call this a game or not, but for those of you who are into pixelart, this is definitely worth checking out. It’s a city creator - you can drag and drag individual roofs, tiles, buildings and people into your map and eventually save them into an image you can use on your blog / forum / etc.

Play with the City Creator.

 

Hacker Revolution is being given away!

I don’t usually do an announce for GiveAwayOfTheDay, but I just tried the game and $25 is a deal and a half but today it’s FREE!

It’s a great simulation game where you hack into computers, and it’s surprisingly fun and addictive. It’s not quite a casual game, but when the price is $0, who can say no?

It’s free for another 10 hours from when this post is created.