Hints: Chocolatier 2

Chocolatier 2: Secret Ingredients is essentially the same as the first game, Chocolatier. It’s a trading game, and while the game combines arcade elements to make chocolates, there is no actual time limit. You’re free to explore as long as there is enough $ to travel about. So rule #1: don’t stress.

• Check every building every time you’re in any town when you’re NOT on a mission. If you’re on a mission, they’ll just tell you to come back later (and sometimes they’ll say so even if they have no mission for you when you’re back) so why waste your time?
• Don’t buy stuff you don’t need. Chances are that they’ll just rot.
• Keep a list of ingredients available in each town on a sheet of paper.
• The game does a really good job of keeping track of which factory makes what. When in doubt, just check your recipe book. Before flying off to an unknown factory and start making random chocolates, see if you’ve already got production in place in an existing one. It’s in your recipe book.
• Keep your inventory rotating. That means no stocking up anything other than basic cacao, sugar, and later on truffle powder.
• Don’t let anyone “inspect” or “tour” your factories. Ever.
• When you’re in your lab, trust your lab tech. He’ll give you hints on combining ingredients. There’s no penalty for trying out crazy combinations (it’s not Mastermind) so go right ahead and combine plantains with fire ants in an exotic.
• You don’t have to wait out a specific time period before going back to your lab. Just travel out and travel back to play some more.
• Your chocolates will also deteriorate in storage, not just your ingredients.
• When you’re ever stuck in the game, just revisit every port and talk to everyone.
• Some backwater towns don’t have chocolate shops to sell your wares in, so be careful not to get stuck with no money in a town. This becomes a moot point after you’re able to fly.

If there’s enough request for it, I’ll post an ingredients and shop list, but there’s really no need for one. Keeping track on your own is part of the fun!

Here’s my end save file - a bit messy but it’ll open up free play completely. You want to put it in your:
c:\documents and settings\your_user_name\application data\PlayFirst\
directory. Don’t forget to back up your own first!

 

VMN - not a game, but is it ever cool.

VMN Toolbox is a nice little utility that does all sorts of things.

• Screen capture and email
• Color picker
• Sticky notes
• Virtual Rulers
• Magnifier

All packed into a tiny little light weight utility. It’s easy to use, and great for sending screenshots. Nothing quite like sending me a link to a screenshot to solve all your gaming problems, eh?

I’ve recommended other screencap programs that are free before, but VMN goes beyond the usual screen cap programs by being intuitive and easier to use than any others I’ve seen. I’ve heard from many that they feel “uncomfortable” with the process of screen grabbing, but VMN throws it into a 2-click procedure that you can’t mess up.

As a graphic designer myself (yes, that’s the real job. This is just for fun!) I find the ruler / magnifier / color picker very useful, and the sticky notes is definitely a notch up from the little pieces of paper scattered around my desk. A thumbs up.

Download VMN Toolbox. (It’s freeware)

 

Review: Agatha Christie - Peril At End House

I was quite enamored with the first Flood Light Games’ Agatha Christie game, Death on the Nile. To be frank, enamored wouldn’t be quite the word - I loved it. I’ve also played it too many times to be productive in my other endeavors. It was a seriously groundbreaking hidden object game. It had puzzles, it had adventure elements, it was detailed, well-drawn, and it was everything a hidden object game ought to be. I’ll also never forget that it came first.

Peril At End House is a bit of a mixed disappointment, in that regard. It does a lot of things right - 1024 x 768 resolution that runs smooth as silk, lovely classical style music in the background, unobtrusive sound effects, a puzzle in every room. However, it suffers from a lack of innovation. I guess the problem is mostly me (as will be for other gamers who has played the first game) and I’m expecting too much. Instead of getting something new, I’m getting more of the same. While this isn’t necessarily unwelcome, the time between the last game and this one led me to believe that there would be more.

This second Agatha Christie game from Floodlight games is very much like the first one. You start off with Poirot deciding that he will pursue the case, go through the rooms of each of the suspects, look for objects, find clues, and the mystery is linearly solved for you along the way. What differs the Agatha Christie games from the usual run-of-the-mill hidden object games is the attention to detail. Everything is crisp and clear, scenes are very well composed with most of the objects in plausible places.

Death on the Nile was a great game, and Peril at End House is, at the core, the same game. There aren’t any surprises - the quality is there and the puzzles are there. Instead of the old videos in between scenes, we now get a comic telling the story instead. The “saloon” where you can interview the suspects are now replaced by “CLUE” cards. “Interviews” are one-sided and really just a card in the page.

If you’ve played the first one, you will want to play this one. However, the rooms feel a lot less populated and I cannot help but feel that the game was rushed. Peril At End House should’ve been an “improvement” considering how successful the first game was, but instead of the boost in production values, there has been a cut. It’s still worth getting despite of it all; the scenes are still beautifully composed, and the story is still quality Agatha Christie.

 

Review: Dirty Dancing

I actually looked forward to this game. I anticipated it. I waited for it. If there was a line, I was waiting in line for it. After having all these high expectations (afterall, it’s the first and only game based on one of my favorite movies) I must say that I’m sorely disappointed. It’s like opening a box of really nice looking chocolates only to find that they’re all cherry creams.

Dirty Dancing is very much like a box of assorted chocolates. Technically. In a box of assorted chocolates, you get the caramel crunch and the mint creams; occasionally you’ll run into an undesirable “nougat” or “orange cream.” This is a game of mini-games - 10, to be exact, with one extra one to spend all your points on to decorate. Unfortunately, these mini-games range from “rather interesting” to “dreadfully boring” as well as “almost unplayable.” I’m going to go through each of these in turn.

Breakfast Buffet
Easily the best of the bunch. It’s a drag-3 in a hexagonal format, not unlike Cindy’s Sundaes. Instead of the usual match-3 in a line, Breakfast Buffet allows you to match anything that touches, which makes the game a bit easier. When a match is made, the progress bar on the left increases. When it fills up, you finish the level.

The introduction of flies, desserts and rotting plates makes it a bit more interesting. When you match desserts, you gain “shuffle plates” and you can hold 3 of these at a time. Clicking on them shuffles the entire board. Flies and rotting plates prevent rows from being dragged and seem to work exactly the same way.

Pinhole Mahjong
A semi-interesting solitaire card game that plays like mahjong. You get more cards as levels go on, but it doesn’t really get more challenging.

Bellboy Bedlam
Well, they’ve got the Bedlam part down. You have 4 bellboys, a bunch of customers, and 4 rooms. The bellboys will stay at their post and perform their individual functions. When you drag them to a different location they will perform a different function: greet, check-in, clean, and check out. The only issue is that rooms take too long to clean, and there are too many customers. This is the one mini-game that I didn’t find very playable at all.

Talent Show Search
An object hunting game. With drawn objects that are outline and flat color only. There are drawers that can be opened, and things hiding behind others, but the objects are just too crudely drawn for this to be enjoyable. The objects are also not very responsive; even if you find the right object, it might take a few tries for your mouse to pick it up.

Pinball
It’s pinball. Nothing more, nothing less. There are some good song snippets to be had, that’s all.

Dance Contest
This is the supposed highlight of the game. There are 6 songs in all to unlock, and 3 levels of dancing for each. The premise is pretty simple: circles will appear on the ground with a radial green bar that indicates when you should click. Technically, it does it right on the beat, but the best place to click is 1/4 beat before it hits the end. Now, couple that with a sound effect that comes in just a bit late and you’ve got a rhythmic disaster on your hands. If you turn off the sound effects, this game is VERY playable with decent music. With sound effects on, this game is impossible.

Video Jigsaw
A jigsaw puzzle where the image is a looping video from the movie dirty dancing. I wonder why they didn’t loop an extra few frames in each backwards to make the transitions smoother, but it almost looks like it hiccups. This is a very high scoring game, and if you want to unlock all the other games early, this is the one to play. You can rack up enough points in 6-7 rounds to buy up everything else easily. Each finished puzzle also unlocks a movie clip where the audio is too low compared to the rest of the game, and isn’t viewable again unless you do the puzzle again.

Melon Mayhem
Slider Puzzle. Not much special about it at all. Make a path by moving dancer slider blocks to let a melon through. Very, very low scoring.

Log Balance
Move your mouse from left to right to keep yourself balanced on the log. Jump over knots, and slap fishes. (No joke.) It’s a bit of a non-game. You can ignore the fish if you like.

Trivia
A simple trivia game for the movie Dirty Dancing.

Cabin
This is where you can place furniture in your cabin and buy additional things for the pool and patio. There are 2 rooms and two outdoor locations where you can arrange furniture and generally play house. You can use the money you’ve accumulated during your mini-games to buy stuff. There are lots of stuff to buy, but to what end?

Dirty Dancing tries to be many things, but the lackluster presentation as well as the horrid sound effects (low quality), on top of the already generic mini-games made it one of the worst games I’ve played this year. This will only appeal to fans of the movie, and even at that, it didn’t appeal to me and I sat through Havana Nights.

 

Walkthrough: Agatha Christie - Peril At End House

Last time I made a walkthrough for the Agatha Christie game, I split it up in pieces, but this time I did thumbnails instead to make things a little easier. If I’m missing anything, just leave a comment and I’ll add it - this was done via one play through. If you have requests for MULTIPLE objects in a given scene, contact me.

P.S. I’ve also made a trainer for this game to stop the timer. (I don’t know how else I could’ve got through some of these levels) I’ll still need to test it some more, then I’ll release it.

Hotel Lobby - 5 keys in their boxes

Round 1 solution

Seaview Promenade - 5 Stones in Sand

Gate to End House - Spell END HOUSE

Gate to End House - 12 Pieces of Newspaper

Round 2 Solution

Parlor - 6 Papers in a Drawer

Seacliff Steps - 2 Stones in a Row

Round 3 Solution
( CORNWALLCOAST)

Freddie’s Room - 5 Tulips in a Vase

Foyer - 5 Pigs in a Row

Round 5 Solution

Round 6 Solution

Dining Room - 3 Teapots in order

Dining Room - Dismantled Radio

Round 7 Solution

Lounge - 6 Eggs on a Plate

Police Station - 3 helmets on a rack

Round 9 Solution

Beach - 6 Toys in a basket

Community Dock - 3 fishes on their hooks

Round 10 Solution

Ballroom - 5 Olives in Glass

Round 11 Solution (green, red, orange, yellow)
<!– –>

Cliff Edge of Lawn - 6 Croquet Balls

Dining Room - 3 Monks in Row

 

  

 

Free: Crayon Physics

Kloonigames is a company that releases experimental freeware games every month - usually these are completely off the wall and features gameplay mechanics that’s never been used before (no dash games or hidden object games for you) and naturally, I check every once in a while to see what’s new. There’s one game already posted here quite like Crayon Physics, but that’s a flash game. This is a downloadable freeware game from Kloonigames.

Basically, in Crayon Physics you’re given a piece of paper to draw stuff on, and the aim is to get the ball to the star. That’s it. You can make rocks, draw ladders, what have you, as long as the result is a 2D platform area where you can get the ball to the star. And yes, it’s much more complicated and requires more strategy than you might think. It’s even alt-tab friendly and plays in fullscreen.

Play Crayon Physics here.

Once that’s got you hooked, the developer is working on a full version of the game that involves much more complicated physics - axle and rotation and wheels and all that, and all it requires is your imagination. You can check out a Youtube video here:

And sign up for their newsletters hoping to be the first to know when it does come out.

 

Review: Lucky Clover

One major complaint about most object hunting games from casual gamers is the lack of replayability. Granted, they have a point. Once you’ve seen a scene 5 or 6 times, you’ve basically memorized where most everything is. Lucky Clover got around this by having a lot of locations for a given object, and then randomizing. Lucky Clover boasts 270 locations and 75 levels - much, much more than your usual object hunting game. Then again, it isn’t your usual object hunting game. It is much, much less.

The core game of Lucky Clover involves finding multiple lucky charms in each location. Each level might be just one location or a few, and you’re looking for charms. These charms are shapes that are hidden in the photographic locations, and depending on your chosen difficulty level, can be either obviously visible or very faint outlined shapes. I played this on medium, and it can sometimes be pretty hard to find the charms. Each time you find a charm, points will be added to your pot of gold. Using hints cost you gold, and gold ticks down (time is money) as you play the level. This is a pretty novel idea and I rather like it. Problem is, that’s all about all there is to this game.

There is a pretense of a mini-game, and it’s rather like finding bunnies in magicians’ hats. You get to pick a prize semi-randomly at the end of each level, and the prizes are collected and displayed on your prize screen. It’s not much of a mini-game; it requires one click. Then you’re off to look for charms again.

Lucky Clover boasts 270 locations. This is technically true. There are 270 locations. However, these locations are photographic, and they consist mostly of ruined castles (stone), a lot of fields (green), and a big patch of sky. Pretty much every one of them looks like that. They’ll also have cartoon mythical characters drawn on top of them, and while they fit the theme of the game, each one of them stands out like a sore thumb compared to the photographic backgrounds. So while there are 270 locations, it feels more like 10. Hey look, here’s another view of a ruined castle!

While some object hunting fans may enjoy the challenge of being able to hunt for semi-transparent shapes amongst yet another green hedge, I found this one addictive for an hour and then got extremely boring. It’s the monotony of it all - look for more shapes in more brown/orange stone and grass. Rinse and repeat. Our Leprechaun relieves the boredom by spouting a joke every time you start a map, and the music is fitting to the whole Irish theme, but it’s not much more than a twitch game of hide and seek.

Lucky Clover saves mid-level, and is technically a Minute Game. It loads and closes on a dime, and is also alt-tab friendly. It takes 3 clicks to exit the game - 2 more than necessary. Once you start, you can’t stop … but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the impending monotony.

 

Free: Excit

Excit is a ball bouncer much like the ones found in old adventure games. The premise of the old game is simple - push a ball in any direction and it’ll keep rolling unless stopped by a wall; bring the ball to the exit without it running off the edge of the board.

Replace ball with Spreadsheet cursor and walls with solid blocks, add some colored portal blocks for teleportation, and you have Excit. Addictive little thing. It has 30 levels, and each has a password. There’s even a ranking system. Collect the MIS icons to score a higher ranking.

Play Excit.

 

Video: Earth Eternal

EE is a high-quality, free, 3d MMORPG*. It takes place in an epic fantasy world full of fantastical monsters…

…and will also play right from your browser and will be completely free. (Well, you know what they mean. Free like MapleStory free. Option to purchase extra things, furniture for your dwelling likely, but the core game will be free.) Frankly, it looks stunning for something that plays in your browser.

Why is this under “original” you may ask? No elves, no dwarves, no been there done that fantasy races. It’s definitely different.

Read their FAQ.

*Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game

 

Trainer: Agatha Christie - Death on the Nile

You might wonder why it took me so long - I’ve written trainers for various games for kicks, and here’s my favorite hidden object game that doesn’t have a relax mode. This one’s always giving me heart palpitations. I just never thought of it before. Actually, it wasn’t my idea. It’s a commenter’s. So I loaded up the game again and wrote one…it only took 10 minutes, and another 20 minutes letting the time run down to test it. Here it is:

Agatha Christie - Death on the Nile Time Stopper.

I’ve tested it on both (oh it makes me giddy to type that) of my computers running the same version of the game. It’s the one from Reflexive, and it should work on the same game you download from other portals. All you have to do is load up the game, load up the file, unzip it, run it, and click on “stop time.” It doesn’t matter if the game is full-screen or windowed, it should work. After getting emails all the time about my trainers, here’s a run down.

What the trainer will do:

• It will stop the timer in Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile.

What the trainer will not do:

• It will not let you play the game for free by stopping the evaluation timer. That’s NOT what a game trainer is for.
• It will not stop the game from penalizing you if you make random clicks - that would be too easy now, wouldn’t it?
• It is not a Trojan. I just tested it with Avast! and it cleared, but AVG might give a false positive because it does go into memory, fetches a value from the game, and changes it.
• It is also not a Trojan because I’m a bit of a hack when it comes to these things and the only thing I know how to do are change $ values in games and stopping timers.

I’ve also only tested it on one version of the game, and since casual games rarely display their version numbers on startup screens, I have no idea which one it is. I have re-downloaded it from Reflexive to make sure I have the latest version, so any version you download as of now should work.