Insider Tales: The Secret of Casanova (demo)

This too was a demo installed by a game on CD, and also a Dutch translation, although I can't recall any glaring arrors. Of the demos off CD, this was the one I liked best for its graphics and story - of course, that was before I'd found the Oberon game site and the Dream Chronicles games. An Italian... detective? art student? is given a message to come look up the secret of Casanova. Arriving at an office, she manages to find a diary and a heart-shaped locket with bits missing inside. These bits will have to be retrieved from four capital cities renowned for their beautiful architecture: Prague, Venice, Paris and Rome. The one-hour demo time is just enough to finish one of these four expeditions. I remember having to put together a breakfast for a security guard, "repair" a telescope and let the beam of light it focuses fall on the sought-after object, and move a "magnifying glass" over a scene to discover otherwise hidden astrological symbols. And of course there is general object-finding, in a Parisian street, a jeweller's shop and a garden with an adorned statue in it. If the Insider Tales appear as a bundle on the Oberon site, I will definitely buy it.

The Dream Chronicles:
Dream Chronicles
Dream Chronicles 2: The Eternal Maze from Goodie Bag Bundle - 3 in 1
Dream Chronicles 3: The Chosen Child
Dream Chronicles: The Book of Air Standard Edition (makes me wonder what the non-standard edition is)

The Dream Chronicles games have the following formula: a woman wakes in a dream-like state. Someone has cast a sleep spell on the world and the woman has to put things right while walking around in surreal surroundings. There are also dream jewels to complete, by collecting the gemstones that fell out of them; through the succession of games, these become progressively less significant.

My first Dream Chronicles game was Dream Chronicles 2: The Eternal Maze from Acer's Goodie Bag Bundle - 3 in 1, and because I thought the other goodies in the bag weren't all that good, this one was paid for last. When I redeemed the 3-in-1 bundle that contained this second game, I saw that a Dream Chronicles bundle containing the first three games had been released. Argh! Now I have three game icons instead of one, and two extra games that I don't like. It was a search for the other Dream Chronicles, though, that prompted me to become a platinum member of the Oberon Media site, since it had all the games in the series. Not quite a hidden object game, The Eternal Maze struck me as a graphical version of a text adventure, with lots of little puzzles to solve, and, of course, graphics, lovely graphics. Dream-like graphics. A perfect game for anyone who wants to escape from grim reality.

The first game is essential to understanding what's going on in the other games, though not to enjoying them. It is easy, as despite the absence of hints, if there is no mouse activity for a while, the next findable or otherwise clickable object will start to twinkle. The ironically named Faye wakes one day to find her husband gone. She doesn't know that her husband, bearing the manly name of Fidget (his own father is called Tangle) is - that's what makes her name ironic - a fairy. Not only has Fidget disappeared, but their infant daughter Lyra is fast asleep and won't wake up. The cause of this: Lilith, Fairy Queen of Dreams, who has come to collect the man promised to her in marriage, only his parents decided that he should be allowed to choose for himself, and he married a human instead. Fidget, who feared the day would come that Lilith would abduct him, has left Faye a diary of sorts to help her find him. While she finds ways to get into her daughter's room, her inlaws' house, and finally Lilith's domain, she must also collect the pieces that have fallen out of the dream jewels Lilith has stolen. These are not important to the game, but the percentage of completed dream jewels is part of the high score. As each piece is clicked on, a sometimes humorous message appears to say what fairy made this stone. The fairy family is a very extended one, and the departure of Tangle and Aeval - king and queen of the fairy realm, no less - has caused such upheaval in their world that Lilith feels she is only doing the right thing in collecting her husband to restore order. Even allowing for the fact that this is supposed to be a dream, Faye's own human village called Wish looks like something straight out of a fairy tale, making the line between human and fairy very thin indeed. The game ends on a cliffhanger, as Faye arrives at Lilith's mansion only to see a dim outline of her beloved Fidget before he is whisked away again.

The second game starts in the "prison" (limestone pit with greenery) that Lilith has sent Faye to. Aeval, her mother-in-law, speaks to her through the plants, promising to guide her and urging her to hurry before Fidget loses hope and marries Lilith, although the scenery is so pretty and the background music so soothing that I'm tempted to linger. Some puzzles and two dream jewels later, Faye is in the musty maze that the game is named after, to return to the mortal world, find a scientist-turned-plant called Merrow, and go to the Tower of Dreams where her husband is kept, and possibly her child, who, Aeval reports, has been whisked away also. This time I have to pick up not only the precious stones, but also the dream jewels they are set in; there are eight, much less than in the first game, but they do contribute to the score, and each completed dream jewel gives a hint. Some dream jewels vary per game, so in one game I start with a snail, and in another, with a lizard. Completed dream jewels also let me piece together some fairy lore, one of them foreshadowing the next game by telling me that Lyra may be the Chosen Child. After more puzzles, including the gathering of instruments and musical scores for a little concerto, Faye finds Fidget, but Lyra remains missing.

The third game again completely switches scene: Brennan, a dedicated seamstress who keeps a dream journal, lives happily in an absolutely magnificent tree house. Until, one day, the image of Fidget appears to her via a crystal ball. Finally, I get a look at this husband of hers to see if he's worth all that trouble, because, really, I would have difficulty leaving that tree house to go back to my old life. Brennan is guided by notes left in various places to the nexus, a place from where she can teleport to various locations, like the herbalist's house where she can brew a potion to restore her memory. (Warning: collecting items ahead of time here means not being able to find vital items later.) The dream jewels play a part in this: it is by arranging them on the nexus control panel that the player can access new locations. They are also quite prettily designed! Part of the game is finding a way to forge new jewels. Thanks to the nexus, the game goes all over the place and ends in the underwater fairy retreat where a pregnant Lilith is resting, and where I play the organ more than is necessary. Since for once she is not the villain of the story, she gives Brennan/Faye the last bit of information needed to finish the game.

The Book of Air starts with an intro showing images from previous games. It is Lyra's 18th birthday, but just as she is about to receive a present from her grandfather, surrounded by birthday guests, she is transported to a deserted dream version of her village, Wish, and the box granddad had meant to give to her plops down out of thin air. (Anyone who has played the third game knows who's behind this.) It is up to her, like her mother before her, to solve all the puzzles, aided by her grandfather's notes and, this time, an actual hint button. To start with, she must break into the school, do some deciphering, and find a way to the ornate airship (hence the title) that her father made. This airship is shown in the game menu, with sounds of stones grinding together as concentric circles revolve around it. Then, she must find the Keeper of Time, and travel to three areas to find three keys. On her triumphant return, she sees dark clouds gathering over Wish: this is another cliffhanger. The ship is, amusingly, fuelled by a session of SameGame with pebbles, and the dream jewels are mere colourless shards of diamond that will activate a new power if enough of them are collected. Being a newer game, this one sadly has voiceovers, although they are bearable to listen to. I keep the sound on at any rate to I can hear the fairy tune once Lyra has remade the musical scores. As she says: beautiful music. The game can be played in hard and simple mode, but the final brain-breaking puzzle at the end (even if only because I don't know what to do with these heads and chalices) is the same for both. Hint: find the plank combination that goes with each decorative bit of metal, and place on wood accordingly.

Laura Jones and the Legacy of Nikola Tesla (demo)

This is a game I only found at Acer Gamezone, although it may have turned up at Oberon's site since. There are several Laura Jones games, following what looks like a nine-year-old girl and her pet possum on their adventures, but from the irritating voiceover and the equally irritating bag full of junk plus cellphone that I'm supposed to rummage around in, I gather that Laura Jones is a teenage bimbette, to make it worse: from America. Why this is bad is that she has gone to her grandmother in Europe, that faraway fairyland (from the target demographic's point of view) to find out about Nikola Tesla, the famous inventor who was sooooo popular with women. Reality check: Tesla lived in the USA, was an obscure and impoverished inventor who basically had his inventions stolen by the FBI after he died (and by famous "inventor" Edison while he lived), and was unlikely to ever have interested a woman; since he is rumoured to have been a germ-phobe, I doubt he even wanted to. The game puzzles are like kiddy howtos. Add that to the irritating main character and the falsification of history, and I had no problem deleting this game mere moments after installing it.

The Mushroom Age (demo)

I had high hopes for this humorous time-travel game, but it has exactly the same problems as the Laura Jones game: dumb lead, annoying voice-over, irritating puzzles and misinformation. If you've noticed that so many main characters in Oberon games are female: that's not feminism, that's the eye-candy factor. Apart from characters like Faye from the Dream Chronicles games that never come into view, characters are designed to look and act ditzy, and in case players don't realize this is supposed to be attractive, the game itself will remind them. If Laura Jones was a teen with the face of a nine-year-old, this lead character who acts like a teen is supposed to be engaged. She goes to the lab of Dr. Einbock, who is a dead ringer for Einstein, to investigate the disappearance of her fiance (maybe he's on the run from having to marry her?) and the professor instantly faints because this charming young woman reminds him of his deceased wife. Brought round by the scent of lilies, he has her help him activate a cellphone-like time machine that will transport her back and forth through time to find the missing assistant. Whooo, travelling through time is like riding down a Magical Colon, and it's not everyone who gets an audience granted by Nostradamus, but every hidden objects puzzle has objects that need to be moved - I like my scenes static, thank you - and when she cleans a T-rex's teeth and tells it to avoid tooth decay by going vegan, my jaw drops with a clunk. Firstly, carbohydrates are what mouth bacteria feed on, and what foods contain carbohydrates? Exactly: vegetable-derived foods. Animals store their energy as fat, and no matter what the other disadvantages of animal food, it won't make your teeth rot. Secondly, the division into "do eat" and "don't eat" food, a transparent ruse to scare the T-rex out of eating the girl, includes a flying saucer (made of metal) on the "animal" side and a cake (presumably made with eggs and butter) on the "vegan" side. And if cake won't rot your teeth, I don't know what will. Game deleted!

Magic Academy (demo)

This is an older game from Nevosoft Positive Games, the company behind The Mushroom Age. Uh-oh. Still, I got as far as the oracle, within the demo's time limit, without being offended. I can see the game is older because the screen is fuzzy (meant for lower resolutions), and without moving objects or voiceovers. I can also see the gamemakers were still learning the language (a surprising number of game companies working for Oberon are in non-English-speaking countries, possibly to keep costs down) because the English is a bit stilted, and an hourglass is called a "sandglass". The game gets around this by alternating item lists with silhouettes of the hidden objects. The background music is soothingly generic-fantasy.

The story: Annie, the sister of Melamori, who looks like Harry Potter (or Ernie Eaglebeak, for those who remember the Spellcasting 101 text adventures) has disappeared. The search for her starts with helping the local Dumbledore. I like "wizard school" games, so this one is on my "buy" list.

Haunted Hidden Object Bundle - 2 in 1:
Deadtime Stories
Dr. Lynch - Grave Secrets

My, my, my. The graphics of Deadtime Stories (play on "bedtime stories") are incredible even by Oberon game standards - too bad the game wouldn't let me make screencaps, so the left half of the game launch screen will have to do. Ooh, that colourful clutter in the magical weed patch, the kitchen, the basement. And the creepy background music, hoooo. Tracing the life and death of a voodoo woman in last century New Orleans - a newspaper snippet mentions a Germany on the verge of WWII - it is mostly ghostly chanting around the woman's house and garden shed, the swamp and the house of the evil person who asks for her services, but inside the pharmacy it tails off into a scarily jazzy tune. The little upstart in the top hat is Edward Black, who has personally designed the cemetery he invites the player into, and points out the grave of this installment's main character, whose story will retell itself as the player finds objects and brews potions, through cut scenes with - argh - voiceovers. The voices are bearable and fairly authentic; still, I turn off sound effects (which includes voices) except when solving the piano puzzle. An evil woman, said to murder her servants, wants the local voodoo woman to curse a newcomer for getting invited to "all the best parties". She agrees to pay a princely sum of 150 dollars, but in the end pays only 25. The voodoo woman takes revenge, but her revenge also means her own end. The game is full of ghosts and spirits, and there are grinning voodoo dolls at the bottom of the game screen.

Dr. Lynch, on the other hand, is a sceptic whose reaction to all ghost reports is "bah, humbug". Since his book sales have dropped, he needs a new ghost story to debunk. Coincidentally, a ghost has been seen at an excavation site near a charming Cotswolds village, where the excavators have taken turns watching at night to find out who's behind the constant sabotage attempts. This game's setting is very British, like the Agatha Christie games below, making this a more relaxing game to play, even though this game has a timer and Deadtime Stories doesn't. Also like the Agatha Christie games, it takes the form of an investigation introduced by a drawn comic and divided into stages, each stage followed by an interim puzzle that gives the player an extra hint if completed. Per stage, there are several locations to find objects in, and as the investigation progresses, the player has less time to find everything. Neither the saboteur, nor the ghost, nor even the local vicar are what they seem, and what should be a tense case - there are three murders - is a delightful wandering from prehistoric standing stones to formal garden to tea house to pub to souvenir shop, pictured below. For each completed level, one of the characters offers some comment or insight on the case, and they, like their surroundings, are so stereotypically British that I was surprised by all the Russian names in the credits.

Agatha Christie Bundle - 3 in 1:
Death on the Nile
Peril at End House
Dead Man's Folly

These three games, I assume adaptations of Agatha Christie novels and featuring Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, illustrate the development of hidden object games, though fortunately stopping short of voiceovers. The first game (fuzzy... low resolution...) has slideshow interludes imitating cinema in the silent film days. Suspects can be interrogated between investigations. The investigations have several stages, with timer and several scenes to find "clues" in, time getting shorter for each stage, and games between stages, as in Dr Lynch - Grave Secrets. In the second game, the interludes are crudely drawn comics and the interrogations have been replaced with "clue cards", also as in Dr Lynch - Grave Secrets; the resolution is higher and the graphics are more crisp. Unlike the first game, which had oriental-flutey background music, the second game's background music is also similarly relaxing, even though there is a murder to be solved. The third game is exactly like the second except for two improvements: the interlude comics are more finely drawn, and for those who have finished the game and are wondering just how much hidden objects there are in each screen, there is a "find all" game mode. These four games are the kind of games I play to forget about my money troubles, although, ironically, they all center on problems caused by (lack of) money.

In the first game, Poirot happens to be on the same cruise as the honeymooning Linnet and Simon Doyle. Awkwardly, Simon Doyle's old flame, who introduced him to Linnet, has come along, and it appears that, one evening, in a drunken rage, she shoots Simon and then kills Linnet in her sleep - only at the time of the kill, she was in bed with a dose of tranquillizer. During his investigation, Poirot finds that almost everyone on the trip has a reason to hate, if not Linnet herself, then her unscrupulous-businessman father. And there is a jewel thief involved. Not only does this game convey a holiday spirit spiced up with a little mystery, but its objects are suitably dated: if the object list says "camera" or "radio", I know I should be looking for an old model. Simon's "safari hunter" quarters are only outdone in colonial Britishness by those of Poirot's English colleague.

Staying in the holiday spirit, now in the twenties and thirties, Poirot and his chronicler are staying in a seaside hotel on the coast of Cornwall when a Miss Nick stumbles into view, trying to avoid what she claims is a bee, but what Poirot finds is a bullet. She lists the coincidental near-death encounters she's had, and Poirot suspects they are not coincidence, although Miss Nick's best friend assures him she can be a dreadful liar. She owns End House, a charmingly situated mansion that has sadly fallen into disrepair, and will do anything to get the money for it to be fixed. As well as some dashing friends, she has neighbours who claim to be from Australia. Add a local sanatorium, and there's plenty of beautiful scenes to hide objects in.

As twentieth-century as it gets: Poirot is called by a murder novel writer, who has been hired by a wealthy couple to organize a "murder hunt" at their party. She has a nagging feeling that something awful is going to happen. Poirot agrees to come, and pretends that he will be handing out the prizes. At first sight, nothing seems wrong. The rich owner and his slightly retarded wife, the architect employed to patch up the crumbling folly (a marble mini-gazebo) in the woods, the dopey village girl who agrees to play the victim; none of them seem suspicious. Of course, nothing is as it seems. Scenes for this game: the mansion's bedroom and its front lawn, the refreshments tent, the fortune-teller's tent, the garden of the former owner's house, the boathouse, the yacht of cousin Etienne and, of course, the folly: pure, high-calorie eye-candy. Finding three or four objects in a row quickly gives me an extra hint, so in the "find all" game, I also try to collect as many hints as I can; a hints highscore, as it were.

Amazing Adventures: Special Edition Bundle:
Amazing Adventures: The Lost Tomb
Amazing Adventures: Around the World

This is an older set of object-finding games bundled together, meaning that it was made for a lower screen resolution than mine, and looks a bit fuzzy, and as long as Windows is hogging resources by polling for network connections, its DirectX version may make the computer lock up. Unlike most bundles of older games, though, this is not two games with a launcher app, but a genuine two-in-one game, so that I only have to change the process priority when starting it, and can then switch between games. If I'm quick, I can reprioritize both "AmazingAdventuresBundle.exe" processes in the Task Manager before the monitor goes black and the game screen opens.

The first game is centered on Egypt, although the saloon and the horse-in-stable screens make me think the gamemakers hadn't decided on a locale yet when they started developing. The "story" is a journal that covers 20 missions: for each finished mission, the journal opens on a new page, revealing a tidbit of information on ancient Egyption culture and a piece of the puzzle that will finally lead to the secret tomb that the player has set out to discover. During the mission, the player has to find 10 hidden objects in a scene, solve a jigsaw/swap-tiles/match-tiles/spot-the-differences game , find 10 more hidden objects in the next scene hinted at by the interim game, etc. Each screen or game is considered a level; several levels make up a mission.

The hidden objects screens are amazing. As always with hidden object games, especially the older ones where the objects are shamelessly out of proportion (like a tiny chest dwarfed by a huge matchstick), the objects are shrunk, made half-transparent, recoloured and/or made to seem painted or carved just to escape my notice; and to make it harder, some descriptions are in riddle form or generalized for multiple objects, so that "2 knives" can equal "knife" and "putty knife". Each screen is crammed full of objects, so that the number of objects seems overkill compared to the 10 or so to find, plus the 21 scarabs that must be found to unlock the "secret game", but each location is frequently revisited, so there are many opportunities for finding the scarab it hides.

Hints are given by the hint button, which takes a while to "reload" after each use, but doesn't cost the player anything. However, there is a whopping 15000 point bonus for not using it. This is a points-collecting game: each object found is good for 2000 points, quickly finding one object after another means extra points, and not using hints adds a bonus when the level is finished. When I get enough points, a message appears, sometimes while I'm in the middle of an object search, that I've been promoted to a next rank. Annoyingly, though, when I go to a new location and pore over the screen trying to locate three objects to click in succession, the game decides I'm taking too long and goes into Pause mode to show a reminder about the hint button. It does this, not once for every new game, but in every location. Less annoyingly, it also shows a message when there are only 3 minutes left. The time for each location with 10 objects to find (or more if the direction is "n objects") is about 15 minutes; time doesn't get shorter as the player finishes more missions, nor does the list of things to find get longer, which is just as well, as this game has so many searches that it can't comfortably be finished in one sitting. After the nth visit to the wall painting, submerged temple, airport etc. I was ready to scream.

The interim games can be: jigsaw puzzles of part of a location; swap-tile puzzles of part of a location (often, the same graphic can be used for both); a split-screen where you have to click the differences between the two halves; or a match-tiles game where you have to match two identical images, two similar images, two images of the same colour or two complementary images (like cocktail and shaker), just to keep the player awake. These games garner points, and again there are extra points for speed. The elements of all these games are used in the final game, where (spoiler, as the hint button won't work here) I have to drag stuff, rotate stuff by right-clicking and swap tiles. Failure to understand this means running out of time, and having to start over while feeling a right twit. Unlike the object screens, some interim games do get harder with time: the spot-the-difference games add more and more differences.

After finding 21 scarabs, I can play the "secret game", which means emptying every location of all of its hidden objects as their description appears in the object list. There are over 80 for each location. As before, the descriptions can be riddles or refer to two or more (maximum encountered: six) items, and there are extra points for speed. This game's object screens really are blank slates: finding all the objects clears them out completely, as opposed to the screens in Luxor Adventures, where some "objects" are part of the background to confuse the player.

The second game is much like the first, with the same hint button and point bonuses, even playing the same suspenseful background music with scraping rock sounds, but with even more amazing hidden object screens. As the title implies, this game, while looking for pieces of pottery that will lead to the most expensive diamond in the world, jumps all over the globe, which means more possibilities for locations: a British street scene, a jeep in the savannah, a castle room, the pages of an open book, or a motorboat facing a waterfall. I now have to find 50 gems instead of 21 scarabs (2 per location, as there are 25 locations) to unlock two secret games: the one that clears out all hidden object screens, and the one that lets me play all spot-the-differences games. As in the first game, I can open the journal at its latest page, but can't leaf back to see which places I've visited and, therefore, what screens still hold unfound gems; but the top left screen corner tells me how many gems have been found in a given location. The interim games have been extended with a new spot-the-differences game that shows a split screen plus a row of objects to put back into the screen half where they are missing, a puzzle where all tiles are in the right place but have to be rotated, and a game of finding words in a screen of letters. The jigsaw puzzles now have regular jigsaw pieces, or ones that look like shards of stone. Most interim games still anticipate the next scene, but the "spot the differences" games use the scene just played. An odd new interim game, shown in the last screenshot below, looks like a match-3 playfield, but only one tile has to be clicked away at the time to destroy the squares and fully reveal the scene under them.

I played like mad to find all the gems and check out the hidden games. The number of objects per location is now between 70 and 80, less than in the first game, but still a lot (and there are more locations, see first screenshot below, so the grand total is probably the same) while the differences games have 10 differences per location.

1001 Nights: The Adventures of Sindbad

When I redeemed this game, the new Casualgames.com site had been up for a few months, and the redeeming screen slipped in a new, pre-ticked option: game backup CD, which would add money to my free order for the handling and shipping of 1 CD, presumably a CD-R. I quickly unticked that option, and will from now on be on my guard; much as I like hardcopy, I'm not too stupid to locate the downloaded game and burn it to CD myself, and if that CD goes rotten, as CD-R media tend to do, I can re-download it - right? Or is the site getting over-full and overstrained and do its owners want to limit downloading, as well as chuck a few oldies? But, back to the game.

This is the first game that I've seen to use drawings - fine pen and ink drawings - instead of rendered 3D. So it uses a technique that I've seen in other drawn games, presumably because drawings are more suitable for it: have the player search, not for whole items, but for fragments until the whole item is assembled. And then, generally, use the item as a tool. In this game, the item has to be stuck in a designated spot, usually a similarly shaped hollow or thin outline. Whole items are also looked for, through a list of objects, or a set of riddles, or a series of silhouettes. Another variation is to take a row of squares out of the scenery, and have the player click on the spot in the scene where they were taken from: great when there's nothing actually hidden, and crystal fragments or runes spring up on every located square. This is also the first game I've seen where the eye-candy main character is male (although, let's not forget the princess) and, like all incarnations of Sindbad the Sailor, more a Hollywood hero than a convincingly real person. In this tale, which starts fairly normally (for a tale from 1001 Nights) but becomes weirder and weirder, his hero status is inflated beyond belief: at one point, he has "saved the world the gods created". Mmyeah. In keeping with this, the background music is the kind of pseudo-oriental music that would do well in a Hollywood film.

The story starts in Basra, Iraq, where the economy has worsened because an evil mage is on the throne. Sindbad, a humble fisherman, falls overboard one day and notices a sunken ship surrounded with treasures. He collects them to sell them and buy Basra's hungry inhabitants some food, even though an amulet warns him not to. Sure enough, word gets around, he is arrested, ordered to show where the treasures came from and thrown overboard on that spot. Underwater, the amulet talks to him again, telling him to assemble three objects. That done, the ship somehow draws him in, and he stands face to face with a wooden figure who is now part of the ship, but who was once princess Chalida, cursed to spend her life as a ship for refusing to hand her crown with seven magical gems to a octopus-like sea demon: the aforementioned evil mage. Only if she gathers all seven gems will the curse be broken. Sindbad (well, the player) has to reconstitute a map that will lead them to seven islands, each island rising out of it when selected as a destination, and then free each gem from its guardian. This means eight times (one extra time for the showdown at the octopus palace) hidden objects searches within two or three screens, followed by a puzzle (slide puzzle, pipe game or other) to finally get the gem; particularly mind-bending is the one-but-last last puzzle whose graphic alternates between this and previously visited islands. Each stage of the game is preceded by a comic panel. The amulet that Chalida supposedly uses to comunicate with Sindbad is also a self-recharging hint button, supposedly powered by insects; Chalida is surrounded with pots and jars containing insect (and spider, scorpion, snail) silhouettes, which have to be filled with the insects found in search screens, about two to a screen. Presumably the hint button recharges faster when more insects have been found. Since insects are found as late into the game as the octopus palace, from which the heroic duo escape to end the game (with the promise of a sequel), I return to the ship with the "Bridge" button whenever I've found a couple.

Replaying the game to try and find all the insects (and almost succeeding, with just one jar left empty) I found that it played exactly the same, although there were extra findable-looking objects that could have been used to randomize the find lists a little. The game allows just one player, so the only choice is "new game" or "resume", and there is no score list of fastest search times. Like just about every hidden objects game, it has at least one mistake in object descriptions, like "polar bear" for a white seal, and this game also has a "switch glitch", where, if I find object A, the description for object B is crossed off, and vice versa. But those are small issues: the game is visually beautiful, and doesn't nag about wrong clicks; rightly so, since objects can be so narrow that it can take a few clicks to grab them. There is no timer, even when Sindbad is supposed to be drowning. Strictly speaking, the hint button isn't even necessary, since, after a while, the hidden object alerts the player with a sparkle; but the hint effect, a circle of purple followed by highlighting the object, is nicely spectacular. There are no voiced parts, bliss. Most gratifyingly, Sindbad's face in the bottom left corner smiles and even grins when the player finds objects fast enough. Between islands, Chalida also grins sometimes, but I've no idea why.

Magic Encyclopedia Bundle: (demo)
Magic Encyclopedia: First Story
Magic Encyclopedia: Illusions

This bundle is easily confused with Magic Academy, as they both centre on a Hogwarts-like educational institution. A major difference is that these games are drawings and not 3D rendered objects, but the drawing is so lifelike that I hardly notice. This time, instead of a Harry Potter lookalike having to find his sister, a girl in purple has to figure out what's going on around a magic encyclopedia. These are older and therefore fuzzy-looking games, the first of which would not let me make screencaps. The story is weird, the background music is oriental-ish, and instead of finding objects, I have to find shards of tools that will create or disvover the objects. There are interim puzzle games, like pipe games, but basically the whole game is one ongoing puzzle.

In the first game, I end up in the garden, and have to lay out the stars in the right constellations, their outlines becoming clearer as more stars are dragged into position. At the start of the second game, the magic academy is trapped in illusions. Moonlight reverts the illusions, so I have to shut out the daylight and shine a moonbeam around like a searchlight. The first screenshot shows the beam of moonlight being pulled around to find hidden stuff. The second screenshot (captured when suddenly the demo had a new 60-minute limit after some uninstallation trouble) shows the constellation-building that happens in both games.

Hidden Object Heroes Bundle:
Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch
Midnight Mysteries: The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy
Luxor Adventures

These three are by Mumbo Jumbo Games, and old enough to have no voiceovers, joy! Two have main characters that are female, but not annoying; if that sounds sexist, I'm referring to two games higher up whose main characters are annoying, because they are gender-stereotypical females. And even so, if the female gets screentime between the hidden object searches, expect at least one doting male. No gender stereotyping in games, pleeeez? Despite their completely different form and content, the first two games share a few characteristics: no timer, invisible items listed in blue lettering that can only be uncovered with tools (the cursor will display revolving gears, while holding the right tool in the right place causes a shower of blue sparks), something that provides an outline of the object sought, extra objects to collect for hints, dramatic animations (a used hint strikes or swoops on the object, found objects slide over the screen in a a circle), exits that glow when the screen is finished, and a story that takes great liberties with the known facts. All three games present their to-find list in pages, not showing the next page until all objects on the first page have been crossed off, sometimes use riddles and/or puzzles in place of object names, and have background music that is too engaging to be really relaxing.

Eye candy noted? Samantha Swift is a fearless archaeologist following in the tracks of her missing father who lays out a trail of stone tables, the "Swift symbols", for her to find. She's also a babe who makes her male assistant blush. This is the third game/bundle I've seen that uses drawing instead of rendering, and while the drawing is not as lifelike as in 1001 Nights: The Adventures of Sindbad and the Magic Encyclopedia games, it gets the job done. Sailing into a temple with a parapente to find artifacts connected with Alexander the Great, she locates a golden scroll, outruns angry cloaked figures and hands the find to Chandrin Geber, an Indian woman with extremely light eyes (hint: she's eeeevil) nicknamed Chess. The angry cloaked figures catch up with her and from assembling an old mosaic, she realizes what she's done: handed Chess the formula for turning anything into gold. To put things right, she will now have to collect a number of things dear to king Midas (yes, he of the golden touch) to create a potion that will revert anything gold-i-fied to its original state. Chess, meanwhile, is at her Evil Scientist Lab to create an improved formula that will make it impossible for golden objects to return to their original form; a decision that will prove fatal to her in the scary finale. The story is both figuratively and literally all over the map, tying together Alexander the Great, king Midas, Solomon and the queen of Sheba, and Jesse James, and transporting our heroine to Turkey, the Middle East, Casablanca in Morocco, the USA, Russia and Ireland before the showdown in the secret lab. Maybe because of this, unlike some hidden object games with a mission, like Midnight Mysteries: The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy, Deadtime Stories and the Dream Chronicles: The Book of Air, which made me go "what, finished already?", this game doesn't seem too short, but leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction at the end. It is far-fetched and not realistic - no, locks do not open when you pour acid on them - and has a match-3 game at the end.

Samantha has a customizable PDA that tells the story, acts as menu and pause screen, and logs all messages, so if you click on something that reacts with "don't use this here" 1000 times, that's how often it goes into her log. To minimize this, don't use tools except where a spray of blue sparks indicate that a particular tool is needed. She has a scanner that will show the outline of whatever object is clicked on in the to-find list, going from white to yellow to red as the cursor gets closer to the object sought. If that doesn't make it easy enough, use the hints, which will illuminate the sought object with a flash of lightning, and collect lightning bolts for more.

The second game is not so much drawn as painted, and, while fuzzy from being intended for a different resolution, is less so than games with pure 3D rendering like Dream Day Wedding. An author suffering from writer's block is visited by the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe to solve the mystery of his death before the stroke of midnight, and set him free. This doesn't mean that the searches are timed; instead, a watch is used as device to transport the player from one scene to another. According to this game, Poe was murdered, by two inlaws, at the instigation of a politician whose corruption Poe was going to uncover, and while the story is clearly fictional as shown by the hidden room in the crypt behind Poe's tomb which also happens to be the wine cellar and crypt from "The Cask of Amontillado", the gamemakers are lucky that the accused persons have no living relatives taking the game company to court for defamation of character. The game posits that Poe's fiction mirrors truth, and uses the well-known stories "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Gold Bug" to arrive at its conclusion, switching between fiction and what it considers reality. This means that I'm whisked to Paris, then New York, then somewhere in the deep South, then back to Poe writing a letter announcing his marriage. The game has an autumnal feeling to it, starting in a cemetery with a skeleton hand for a cursor, ending at the writer's table with a pile of money as reward for uncovering the truth and bringing the villains to justice.

The hint system works with a lamp in whose light I can see the hazy, rippling outline of the chosen object, and a raven who swoops down on the object displayed in the lamp. On average, a fourth of the object descriptions are riddles. I can get more hints by finding the raven in object screens, but if I click on the object screen too often, a one-eyed cat (another literary reference) will chase the raven off the lamp with a blood-curdling miaow, and it will be a moment or so before the raven returns.

Luxor Adventures promises to be three games in one, which would mean that it's a 3-game bundle inside a 3-game bundle. The second two games, however, aren't much: a match-3 game with flat graphics and the ditto Luxor Classic: snaking rows of orbs that have to shot to pieces before they reach a temple (after which it rains gems that I'm supposed to catch for extra points, something which I forgot to do the first time) that are part of the main game, but can be played separately. Finding all the ankhs in the main game also unlocks a bonus "find-em-all" game mode, and one of the interim games is a solitaire game that is also played in Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch. In the introductory comic, the paths of three people cross in a search for Egyptian artifacts started when a dying priest brings the Orb of Osiris to a professor. The Orbs of Osiris are supposedly the oldest relics of Egyptian culture in existence, and Jane and John, a team of intrepid archaeologists, excavate an old tomb in search for others, paid by a Cain Hisster: if that's not a villain name, I don't know what is. He seizes the orbs found and uses them to change the course of time and become the most powerful person in the world. To stop him, the intrepid team will have to find more orbs and travel around the world to set right what he has tampered with.

This game has easily the most horribly cluttered screens I've ever seen, and the "find-em-all" mode shows that much clutter is not findable objects, but part of the background. This is half excused by Hisster having messed with history in his effort to create a stairway to heaven and become one with the gods (an endeavour he will regret at the end of the game), causing items from all ages to be thrown together. In each screen, I have to find two ankhs, whose appearance can differ widely, sometimes being little more than a roughly ankh-shaped shadow, and two Orbs of Osiris. There are no objects that give me extra hints, just one hint button that takes some time to recharge after use, and that will go dead for a while if I click too often without finding something. Once enough orbs have been gathered, I get an interim game of orb-snakes (I can use up one hint to destroy a chain of orbs, but a new one will immediately rush out to replace it) followed by a match-3 or other game to energize a stone tablet. The setup of the game is as messy as the screens: instead of a neat alternation of hidden object screens and interim games, there are "scenes", some of which have to be unlocked by solving a puzzle, and which may be split screens to find differences, containing no orbs but still having ankhs to gather. Most things on the to-find list are object names, some are riddles, and each "normal" hidden object screen has at least one puzzle where one part most be dragged to an object to complete it, using the blue gears and sparks I've seen in the other games. Pressing the hint button lets me choose which item I want a hint for, imposes a see-through circle on the object (or more objects, if it's a puzzle) and solves the riddle, if any. Using no hints wins me only a 5000-point bonus. For replay value, everything translates to points to set a new high score: catching diamonds in Luxor Classic, finding objects in rapid succession, not using hints, finishing the screen before the timer runs out; there is a timer, but it only affects the score. The background music varies per screen, and is the weirdest I've heard so far. In many screens that show Egyptian artifacts and/or abandoned clutter, there are a few notes on pipes and string instruments that keep repeating. In the editing room of a film studio, it's what sounds like a fifties intermission tune complete with crackling.

Magic and Mystery Bundle - 3 in 1:
Kuros
Rasputin's Curse
(Tradewinds Odyssey - see under Other)

To tackle these games in backwards order: the third is a mission-driven sim, the second is a hidden objects game and the first is a puzzle game with hidden objects, like the Dream Chronicles series. They make a rather odd bundle, as Tradewinds Odyssey is funny, Rasputin's Curse is devoid of humour and Kuros takes place on the fictional planet of match-3 games Glyph and Glyph 2. The games have nothing in common, and one of them is even rather unpleasant. So I'll start with that one: Rasputin's Curse.

This wouldn't be the first game made by Russian gamemakers, but this time the subject matter is also Russian. Far from being as apologist as Midnight Mysteries: The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy (Poe wasn't mentally unstable, oh no, it was his enemies conspiring against him!) the game makes the historical figure into a greater monster than he reputedly was. This game is not child-safe: an American woman with Russian roots, urged by her husband to join him on a self-discovery trip to revive their fading marriage, comes home to find him in the shower with a racy blonde. Her young son has a mysterious health problem that the doctor promised to look into, and she has recurrent blackouts where her face creases up alarmingly as a dark figure inside her head calls her name. The infidelity was the last straw, and as she has already left her son with gran and gramps and made all the necessary preparations for a journey to Moscow, she leaves alone. At the hotel, the desk is unmanned and she really needs tea, so she breaks into the tea cabinet. Hidden object games have had me do a lot of picking locks and breaking into places, but this scene made me feel awkward. She keeps running into hints and snippets about Rasputin, so, to keep her mind off her emotional troubles, she researches him, and accidentally slips into the past to meet the man himself. He abuses her fear for her son's health, and... she escapes eventually, but as the only charm of the game is finding out the ending, I won't spoil it.

The story is dark. The background music is depressing (perfect for long winter nights...) and the whiny little boy, who has a diabolical moment at the end of the game, evokes instant antipathy. The hidden object screens are very normal, containing almost no out-of-place objects, which somehow makes objects harder to find, as does the fact that I sometimes need eagle eyes to spot them; I made frequent use of the self-recharging hint button. Somehow, the game seems unbalanced, with objects not equally distributed but sprinkled here and there. Once out of her clinically clean home and in the Russian village that her research leads her to, the likeably tough main character witnesses scenes of rural squalor and meets a cheerless young woman ("First, we make soup") who could have come straight out of a George Orwell novel. To make the game extra jarring, the unpleasant but moving end is followed by the mundane, and incorrect, announcement that this is a demo.

Despite the premise that the planet Kuros is dying, Kuros is, by comparison, a funny and light-hearted game. A woman in black leather (eye-candy!) wakes up, amnesiac, in a wood near an overgrown obelisk. Spacy synthesizer music plays in the background. Unfortunately the game is voiced, but it has subtitles, and can be played with sound turned off. Her first steps lead her into a sandy pit. Deciding that the best course of action is to get out of the pit, she collects a number of items, not from a to-find list, but from a circle of silhouettes (first screencap), and combines them to get at the contents of a bag hanging off a rock. The bag contains map fragments, and each time she's found ten of them, the player has put the pieces together into what looks like a watercolour painting of a new location. She travels between the available locations from a screen looking down on Kuros' land mass, which becomes larger as more maps are assembled, and spends as much time solving (simple, see third screencap) puzzles as finding objects. There is no hint button, but two kinds of object hidden in the scenery are chromatic lenses, to find a hidden object, and scrying mirrors, to solve a puzzle. There are about five of each, so it's just as well that the game is so easy.

Kuros consists of five landmasses, one for each element. Wood, a forest. Fire, a volcanic plain that has a meeting place for guardian beings. Water, a beautifully clear sea with an observatory reachable by cable car. Metal, a plain of metal shapes and a stronghold with a field of silver - literally - lilies. And finally, in the snow-topped mountains, Aether, where an ancient library lies, containing books with... odd... titles (fourth screencap). Directed to the house of the Oracle by a helpful Ent-type creature called Oakbeard, the woman makes mental contact with her teacher, an old wizard, and finds out that her name is Katya and her mission is to restore all parts of Kuros by freeing up the obelisks and completing the glyphs inscribed on them with a wand she found in a barrow (second screencap). After restoring all glyphstones, as the obelisks are called, she is transported to a faraway rock called the Accordant Acropolis (fifth screencap) where she will find the villain who has compromised the safety of not only this planet, but the whole universe. This is the only moment when the voice-over adds something to the game: the villain is Viktor, the wizard's neglected and embittered son. When the wizard asks him why he would do something that could destroy even the universe, Viktor replies: "Let the death of the universe stand as a reminder of how much I hate you, dad." Katya tries to apprehend him; the wizard tells her to forget about him, as it is more important to repair the glyphstones, and the final line Viktor delivers before leaving is: "Of course saving Kuros is more important to you, dad. Have fun." I like this villain.

Hidden Object Mystery Pack 4-in-1:
Ancient Secrets: Mystery of the Vanishing Bride
Paige Harper and the Tome of Mystery
Master Thief - Skyscraper Sting
Born Into Darkness

This pack is where I ran into trouble with Oberon's messy (new?) install method. I'd run into the same trouble with the Women's Murder Club Triple Crime Pack, so I uninstalled it and downloaded the install file from Acer Gamezone, by then called I-Play, not without difficulty as I-Play kept popping up a screen about membership rates, but somehow I managed it. When I tried the same with this bundle later, it seemed I-Play's site had become watertight, because I didn't succeed. These bundles are "exclusive", i.e. only for paid subscribers, which apparently means that non-subscribers are not even allowed to download the demo, and of course my Oberon/Casualgames membership was not valid on the I-Play site. The problem with the messy install is that it puts the game(s) in a directory whose name is a number, under "Oberon Media SIDR", and has its information, including where it's located, written into a "channel", so if I move the game to another drive, it won't start. Unable to figure out this "channel", I took a look at the shortcut, which executed the following line:

"C:\ProgramData\Oberon Media\Channels\110500670\4.0.0.0\Launcher.exe" /Name="Hidden Object Mystery Pack 4-in-1" /sku=510005315 /url=http://userassets.apizone.betaregion.oberon-media.com/Launcher/App/ LauncherPage.aspx /Channel="110500670"

If I located the "bundler.exe" in the game directory and made the shortcut start that, the game would play without the webpage nonsense showing "other games you might want to play" that I normally see, but it was also impossible to enter the key. So, I installed the game again on C:, entered the key, moved the game to another drive and pointed the shortcut to "bundler.exe". Because the Oberon/Casualgames install uses "%Program Files%" to find the game icon, the icon location has to be changed, too. And, clearly, a lot of unnecessary crap collects in "C:\ProgramData", but it doesn't take so much space that it needs to be cleared out just yet.

This appears to be a collection of unusual, rather than vintage, games: they are extremely different, both from each other and from run-of-the-mill hidden object games.

First off: Ancient Secrets: Mystery of the Vanishing Bride cannot be screencapped. So, I can't display how nicely the search screens are painted, how silly the cutscenes are and how nonstandard the screen layout is. So I'll explain: at the bottom is a bar of images of what I have to find, and a "Goal" button that brings up a mobile phone of which the screen tells me what to do next. When I find an object, it is moved into an inventory screen on the right, which is usually hidden except for a small tab that, when clicked on, pulls out the inventory like a drawer. When I've assembled a number of items, I have to drag them from the inventory to a see-through copy of the item on the screen, which makes me think the actual item has already been found, which is a pain in the ass. This whole game is a pain in the ass, sacrificing playing pleasure to narrative: I can't just sit down for a long search session, but have to find a few things, construct something, find a few more things etc. etc. ad nauseam, until I just want to yell GIVE ME THE WHOLE SHOPPING LIST ALREADY!!! And I also have to shift stuff to find other stuff that was hiding behind it. But the game really is very pretty, both visually and musically. And when I finally, after a million little errands, reach the end, I even feel it was too short.

The intro animation shows an archaeologist entering a tomb of treasure only to find it occupied by the ghost of a tribal chief, who sets him an ultimatum: either he finds the chief's long-lost bride, or he will be locked into the tomb forever. Next, Morley, an unsavoury-looking character, phones Kate Miller, the eye-candy tough female lead, to help him find his missing assistant. Even though, as her own associate protests, she has to sort out the exhibits for a museum which is supposed to open tomorrow, she flies to the Kunhu islands and begins a search. In the island village where she moors her plane, wooden statues sit at hut doors as if they were the inhabitants, and the village chief has a head like an Easter Island statue. Of course, Morley is a villain and tries to pass Kate off as the bride so he can grab the tomb treasure, but the tribal chief is a good sort, so she offers to help him find his real love. She is almost killed, but saved just in time by this associate who did some research of his own into Morley's activities, and manages to find, and bring to the tomb, the corpse of the missing bride so that their spirits, at least, may be together.

The game has no timer, no voice-overs (joy! especially as sound tends to hang during the cutscenes) and, by way of hints, five golden coins. For each hint I use - skipping a puzzle, and some of them are real brain-breakers, costs three coins - I may expect a coin lying on a rock or some other conspicuous place in the next room I enter. I can walk between rooms, as objects may not always be hidden in the place where I need to apply them. The cursor helps me by going red for a false click, turning into a hand when hovering over something that can be moved, and - how ambitious! - becoming a hammer and anvil when dragging an object over another object that it needs to be applied to.

Paige Harper and the Tome of Mystery is like Pagemaster, that film with the little boy and the three books, only better. I'm sure her first name is a pun, because this game is all about books. A librarian in a huge, musty building, Paige is requested by phone for a special book. She goes to pull it off a shelf, and a secret room opens. The customer will have to wait a while for that book, because she imprudently walks in, and the door in the wall bricks up behind her. The greenish spirit of the book's last victim, a man in top hat, appears and offers to help her escape by solving the riddles that the mysterious book sets her. And that's where it gets good.

His explanation of how the book works serves as a tutorial to the game, whose layout differs from most hidden object games: the list of objects to find is pictures, not text, and is shown, not at the bottom or side, but at the top of the page. On the right side are buttons to open the inventory and move to another chapter. At the bottom are a number of "view" buttons, a "camera" button, a magnifying glass button and a self-recharging hint button. The scene itself is a book that plops open at a certain page and becomes a pop-up book. Yes, like one of those old-fashioned paper pop-up books for children. In this scene of 2D shapes rendered in 3D, objects can be hidden behind or under other objects, hence the "view" buttons that switch the scene to a certain angle, and the camera that rotates things by hand. The scene is also rather small, hence the magnifying glass. Some chests and cupboards in this virtual pop-up book can open, to which the player is alerted by not only a revolving-gears cursor, but a sound like an angry rattlesnake. The sound effects are very noticeable, but not annoying, and sometimes even funny, as with the musical instruments Cardinal Richelieu wants you to clear away. If it takes too long to find the next item, the hint button will start to whoop-whoop. Despite this, though, the game has no timer. The background music is like the soundtrack of a dramatic film, and the animated scenes tying the search scenes together are, sadly, voiced. The resolution is modern, that is to say, widescreen, and the loading screen when I'm either starting a game or maximizing the screen after having minimized it to make screencaps, displays either a game tip or a factoid about books.

Through these pop-up pages, Paige finds herself involved in several chapters of a popular work of old literature, like Hamlet or Treasure Island. She must make sure nothing goes wrong with the story: for instance, in Hamlet, she has to bribe the guard to open the gate and let Hamlet in, and to find Yorick's skull and put it in the right grave. Sometimes she has to find the object for one chapter in another; a switch of chapters is always accompanied by the alarming (for a bibliophile) graphic of flames eating holes in a page. Between finding objects to satisfy the main book characters' demands, she has to play minigames of different types, like jigsaws and match-3 games, most of which are simple, and all of which are skippable, else I would still be stuck at trying to sail a ship along a dotted line. At the end of the game, the wall opens and releases them both into... Victorian England. This is great for the spirit, who now has his body back, but rotten luck for Paige. Will she return to her world? To be continued...

The idea of using pop-up books as search screens is a novelty, and I hope it stays that way, because even at high graphic settings the shapes still had the jaggies, and this is one game where I unashamedly overused the hint button. The minigames, which can be played separately (by opening a book whose pages list the games) are mostly very simple, and the whole game was played out within hours. Having said that, this is the perfect game for the kind of people that spent recess in the school library as a child.

The chick in black leather in Master Thief - Skyscraper Sting illustrates my theory that main characters in Oberon Media are often female because of the eye-candy factor. This cat-woman clone is Robin Fleet, master thief and former apprentice of crime boss Sam Hawthorne when he was a small name, before he double-crossed her. Hearing on the news that he is in court, but about to walk free for lack of evidence, she decides that it's payback time, and rides to his personal skyscraper on her groovy motorbike to unearth said evidence herself. The music is groovy, too: it's jazzy and fast-paced, like the background music to a cheap police TV series with lots of violence. It's perfect for the game, but I had to turn it off after a while and finish the game in silence. The whorled, futuristic skyscraper has many rooms, three to five of which can be searched at a time for 12 objects, at least one of them a clue to find evidence, and three keys, in different models but always big and clearly superimposed, the total of which will unlock "bonus content": concept art, the two minigames to play independently (3 levels each) and all the intermission comics.

The game goes like this: comic, telling part of the story; search; minigame, either uncovering a stamp or playing a samegame to supposedly crack a safe and get information; next comic; andsoforth until the ending. Which takes a long time to reach. There is no timer, although the music urges you on, and the hint button in the pseudo-mobile phone in the left bottom corner recharges itself really quickly, and the objects are not recoloured or deviously hidden and only hard to find because they are so jumbled together, so that, with some patient searching, the hint button isn't needed at all; but there are SO MANY rooms with so much to do, even when all the spiffy stuff, like Robin mailing Sam a bugged portrait of herself or luring and locking his guards into the safe, is only shown in the comics. In the course of the game, the rooms are often revisited, and get successively more wrecked by Robin's antics. This game is suitable for beginners, as the objects are so relatively easy to find, there are no time constraints and the only effect of too many wrong clicks is a brief siren sound. At the end of the game, the credits say that this game was created with a certain game-making kit, which explains its simplicity.

Born Into Darkness interested me by the turquoise ghosts in the bundler screen. It turns out these play no part in the story. Blood trickles down the opening screen against generic ooh-scary Gregorian choir music. Playeds in a film frame effect, the intro shows a Nathaniel Black phoning a Dr. Amber Blythe, who works at a museum, to ask her to meet him, blackmailing her by saying he knows what she is - if the blood on the opening screen wasn't indication enough. And with her glistening black hair and beautifully pale skin, she certainly looks the part. It also turns out she doesn't act the part, taking not so much as a bite out of Mr. Black, who insists she call him Nathaniel. He speaks with an American accent, she has an affected British accent which at times sounds foreign (Rumanian?). Blergh, voiceovers.

The objective: finding the shroud of Lazarus. The game proper starts with a ham-handed tutorial, a BIG arrow telling me where to move that mouse. As with the first game in the bundle, ease of play is completely sacrificed to narrative: a journal (luckily, non-voiced) tells me to look for certain objects, which I then do in various rooms that I can move between, then these are used for something and I have to find some objects, so now the screens have new objects in them that weren't there before. And in between, there are puzzles. I start in a stuffy museum, full of Judeo-Christian imagery, then go to Bethany, Jerusalem (Ms. Blythe is from a rich enough family that she can simply charter a plane and fly them there), then to Transsylvania, then to, oh, anywhere that's linked with crusaders and/or vampires, with creepy background music going from Gregorian chanting to vaguely Yiddish pipe music to Rumanian folk music... It is a nicely gothic game, I'll allow that. And at the end there are some properly kickass vampires, though they are easily bribed. But the settings are overblown, the story patches all sorts of things together like a Samantha Swift game, and the animation when an object is found or applied to another object - a spreading ring of ankhs or pentagrams - is excessive.

The most fun part of the game is collecting hints. Both Black and Blythe have three hints to their name. In some settings, only one of them can give hints, since he is a Templar and she is a vampire, and their fields of expertise differ. His hint icons are three diamonds, hers are three drops of blood. To refill them, I have to go to a screen where Latin words (Black) or ghosts (Blythe, and these are the ghosts from the bundler graphic) move around in a circle, and click the word or ghost that looks like the example given. I have to find six words or ghosts; three mis-clicks, and I'm back in the regular game screen. I used up hints whenever I could, just so I could play for more!

Women's Murder Club Triple Crime Pack:
Women's Murder Club: Death in Scarlet
Women's Murder Club: A Darker Shade of Grey
Women's Murder Club: Twice in a Blue Moon

Mahjongg Artifacts (demo)

A demo installed by games bought in the supermarket, this is supposed to trace the journey of an archaeologist looking for the fragments of an artifact. Of course, every stage in the journey consists of a game of Mahjongg. A lame game, because it has cheats for shuffling the pieces if you get stuck, a hint button and an undo button. On the other hand, the player is awarded "virtues" for finishing the game without them. It's like the regular game found in the average Linux distribution, but with more eye-candy, and the illusion of travelling around the world. Not a masterpiece in the game world, but fun.

Jewel Quest Solitaire (demo)
Jewel Quest Solitaire 2 (demo)
Jewel Quest Solitaire 3 (demo)

I downloaded all the Jewel Quest games I could find that were about card games, not hidden objects (there are those too, and they look promising) to find the captivating card game that was part of the Acer Gamezone demos: one set in a witch-doctor's nightmare vision of the Amazon jungle where, if the player loses the card game, a chest falls down a chute and a snake rears up... or something. I can't check, because the first Jewel Quest game wouldn't play because "your trial has expired" (yup, the first game downloaded from Oberon balks over a game from Acer Gamezone that was uninstalled years ago) but it's on my "buy" list anyway, so one day I'll see. Here's the official description: "Match card suits to make gold as you unearth buried cards and avoid cursed jewels on your trek through the jungle!" The cards look like African masks, the backgrounds are very organic, much wood and stone, and the card game is not Solitaire as I know it.

The second game switches from the solitary explorer to his wife (see introduction in first screenshot). Her husband missing, she flies to Uganda to find him. Her journey is recorded in her journal, every chapter of it helped along by a game of not-as-I-know-it Solitaire with the cards arranged in various layouts (second screenshot), and even a small match-3 game with a limited number of tile switches in the right-hand corner; the way the cards are played determines the number of tileswaps. I recognize the cards, not only from the first game but also from the hidden objects game Samantha Swift and the Golden Touch: African mask heads in red, purple, grass green and pale glassy blue. There is a voiceover somewhere in the game that I quickly clicked away, but it's mostly African music that goes nicely with the dusty-brownish, again very organic graphics. For players who are not interested in the story, there is also a cardgame-only mode.

The first two games were small downloads (the smallest 20MB), showing their age, but the third is noticeably bigger. Like the second game, it has rousing background music - now in a different style since the locale is an excavation site in Angkor, Cambodia - and a choice between story mode and cardgame mode. Differences from the second game: there is a timer, the game starts with Solitaire as I know it (plus wildcards, or I would have lost the game) and the rules for the little match-3 game are stricter.

Mahjong Memoirs from Romantic Discoveries Bundle - 3 in 1 (demo)

This is a relaxed form of Mahjongg, in the form of lessons given in a Japanese garden complete with tea and cherry trees in blossom, while traditional Japanese music plays in the background. Interlude screens show haikus in Japanese characters, translated to English. The player can choose from a number of tilesets, some of which have to be unlocked by playing out the game. There are two modes, "endless game mode" or "story mode". The latter starts with the main character being taught the principles of the game by an old woman with a past, and throughout the game, that past is revealed through items and letters found. The lessons strikes me as "Mahjongg for suckers", but it does explain the principle of "suits". My only niggle is that the letters are read aloud in English with a Japanese accent (argh, voiceovers). Any other speech is shown in text balloons.

Having bought and played out the whole game in story mode, unlocking every room in the building down to the koi pond, I'm undecided whether to be sad at the tragic end to a love affair, or irritated at this dotty old bird who leaves her love letters around for strangers to find. This game bends the rules as badly as Mahjongg Artifacts, and for each subsequent game the tiles are piled higher and higher, until cheating is inevitable. Two tunes play in the background, a suitably melancholy one and a happier one; more tunes, as well as the extra tilesets, can be unlocked by playing fast enough (and cheating hard enough) in endless game mode. Maybe one day, when I'm bored enough.

Ocean Express (demo)

An Acer gamezone demo. Heck, all but the last of the games in this category were Acer Gamezone demos, meaning that I played them for kicks until the demo time ran out, and felt no urge to buy them. Which is why this category is so small. This game is very much like Tetris in that there are irregularly shaped pieces that have to be fitted together, but instead of dropping down, they're on a conveyor belt, and they don't disappear when you've made a whole row, and you're allowed to leave spaces, although that means less points, and therefore money, earned. Once the boat, a flat graphic seen from above, is packed as full as it can be, it leaves with a hoot of the horn, and the point total is calculated. As the game description says it: "Perfectly pack puzzle pieces, then cruise the coast with your colorful cargo. Strategically upgrade your fleet as you earn more cash!" More cash can be earned by especially packing the pieces that represent a kind of cargo much in demand, but of course their shape is extra-irregular. That's a cute touch, and the harbour pics are nice, but the game doesn't have anything to offer to those who become impatient at the thought of fitting little puzzle pieces together all the time.

Puzzle Express (demo)

Everything said about the previous game also applies to this game. Again, the official description: "Grab colorful puzzle pieces that reveal a picture as you travel from city to city on the Puzzle Express railway." In this game, I have to pack, not one boat, but two trains side by side, and rows do disappear as I make them, and the picture they reveal is the only graphical appeal of the game. I can see these two being bundled under "Vintage games" someday...

Green Valley (demo)

This demo was installed not once, but twice: as part of the Acer Gamezone demos, and as a demo from one of the supermarket CDs. The second time I thought: hey, let's grab a screenshot before scrubbing it. Because this is a frustrating game, and not one I want to spend any time on, ever.

This is a samegame. Not the kind where you click one in a row of similar tiles and they all go poof, but one where you have to trace a path over the similar tiles yourself, so if you missed one or have to leave one out because you'd have to cross your path to get to it: tough cheese. In this case, the playfield is a honeycomb of fruits and vegetables. Draw a path over them, and they fall out (and new tiles drop down). What do they fall into? The empty crates that a little insectoid game character is constantly putting under the honeycomb while removing the full ones. What if there aren't enough crates? The veg smashes to pieces on the ground. OUCH. That is NOT how you treat eggplant. Or pumpkin. Or anything with food value.

I also hate the 3D character design. Because a 3D look in Oberon Media games seems to mean that the characters must look naff. These characters are insects - bees, if I recall correctly - happily selling off the produce of their vegetable garden. They look too dumb to tie their own shoelaces, or, to stick to the insect theme, clean their own feelers. Not funny. Just dumb. No wonder they waste so much food.

Age of Emerald

Hello, not a demo! But a game on CD bought cheap at the supermarket along with golden finds like Mystery of Unicorn Castle (hidden object) and Atlantica (match-3). Out of all the CDROM sleeves with elves and fairies on the cover, I picked what may have been the worst. Like Green Valley, this is a samegame where you have to trace your own path. Fortunately, nothing falls to waste, but there is the irritation of having missed a tile. Also, tiles don't drop but follow the path of the tiles I just cleared, so that shapes I'd hoped to tackle in the next move are ripped apart. Fortunately, there are special powers like "hammer" and "dynamite" to break up the playfield when it becomes too fragmented.

The backstory is that elves need a village built for them. There is a graphic of someone (the head elf?) that looks horribly like a cartoon of Benjamin Franklin. There is a green forest clearing scene that, in the course of the game, becomes increasingly cluttered. And there is a playfield of tiles, a different shape for each level, with three types of tiles and a timer that runs out far too quickly. The tile types are Money, Food, Magic, and come in gradations. Say, a coin tile is good for 1 Money, and a Diamond for 2 Money. Apples are 3 Food, but Fish are 4 food. This is supposed to make me think ahead: do I ruin a clump of fish tiles just to score me some apples, or do I ignore the apples and go for the highest prize? But it just irritates me, as there is no time to think. Clearing a path on stone or metal squares doubles the tile value and destroys the squares, making a funny sound effect that is the only enjoyable part of the game. After every level: do I have enough Money, Food, and Magic to buy the next structure? If so, buy structure, play next level. Else, play next level. Wow!

I used to play this game brainlessly when in need of relaxation, but it is slightly too hard for brainless play, doesn't relax me, and the background music, which may be supposed to sound elfin, reminds me of a cold draughty house. It gives me a headache.

Cradle of Persia from The Cradle Bundle (demo)

I thought that this was a bundle of two match-3 games. Imagine my horror when I found that the first game in the bundle was another samegame. It seems easier than Age of Emerald (because there are less tiles?) and there are more challenges: tiles that are locked down, or on wood, or blocked by squares of iron. There is a "wildcard" tile, that, unlike the "plus" tile in Age of Emerald, will not combine two different tiles, and although I'm still supposed to destroy all stone tiles, this time it's mandatory, and as soon as they are all destroyed, THE LEVEL ENDS, so tough luck if I still had time to collect more points. The timer is a tube of water that empties with a slush when it runs out, or when all stone squares are gone. I have three lives, so presumably I lose a life if the timer runs out before the stones are gone.

In a vaguely educational way, the history of Persia under its different rulers is now a collection of levels, presented as a progression rather than a change of regime. For each level, I get a new background image. The number of points gathered allows me to buy buildings to clutter up the scene, but also advances me as a player. The player screen initially shows a question mark, but will later display a graphic representing the player's rising status. I made it to "nomad", a naff, slightly bug-eyed bedouin caricature. The game is, at least, better to look at and listen to than Age of Emerald; the "modern" BGM playing when I open the bundle changes to oriental music when I choose Persia, and the backgrounds are nice enough that I'm annoyed when the game changes them. Like the Amazing Adventures bundle, this is a real two-in-one executable: CradleBundle.exe, which makes it easier to reprioritize, as the game was horribly slow until I found out that constant polling for a network connection was what slows the computer. Playing it while connected to the internet, I saw what I had first seen when playing Glyph 2 while online: an advert and a "thank you for supporting our sponsors", from Oberon itself this time. Apparently all Oberon games do this. I'm glad that I now play with network disabled.

Rainbow Web 2 (demo)

An Acer Gamezone demo. The back story is something about having to save the elves. Coloured beads in a spider web must be moved around so that three line up, more beads will slide down out of nowhere. An inventive twist on the match-3 principle, but not visually appealing to me.

Hidden Wonders Of The Depths or Atlantica, 1 and 2

These are my favourite match-3 games. I bought part 1 in the supermarket under its Dutch name, Atlantica; Hidden Wonders of the Depths is the original English title. Because of the title change, I had some problems finding its sequel on the Oberon site, confusing it with the Atlantis game pack. The original is not just match-3; I have to line up the tiles to free the way for a little crab to follow a set course over the board. The crab is adorable and makes little "babababap" sounds. Match-3 games are alternated with memory games and samegames (screenshots 1 and 2) using the same tiles. In both match-3 and samegame, I have to "destroy" certain squares (by lining tiles up over them so that they disappear) and this frees up fragments and puzzle pieces; the fragments are added to whatever object the levels are trying to complete as part of making a new house and inventory for a mermaid, and the house itself - that golden mansion in the middle of screenshot 5 - has some parts added to it.

When enough puzzle pieces have been gathered, the game offers me a "magic card" to fix by switching tiles (screenshot 3), which then gives me a certain power: smash one tile, destroy a line of tiles, add time to clock etc. It also frees up "underwater inhabitants" (ie. fish) who really get in the way by swimming all over the place in the four hidden object games (screenshot 4) that make up the game's bonus levels, and where I have to click away shells, stars, coins, vases, crabs and turtles as fast as I spot them - if I wait for a bit, unfound items will waggle to draw my attention. Still, this is where I lost a lot of lives. That's another thing freed up by destroying squares: new lives. I start out with three and, if I'm careful, can amass something like twenty. If I lose all lives halfway through the game, I can restart the game from that point with three new lives, but the score is reset to zero. Once the player gets enough feel for the game to finish even the most awkward levels (squares with double chains on them, arranged in such a way that lining up tiles is very hard) with lives to spare, there is still the challenge of getting the highest score, with bonuses for the largest number of tiles you can line up or the most consecutive tile matches you can make in the memory game.

The second game, bought in English (not that it makes much of a difference as there's not much text in it) is fluffier and more "aero" in appearance, with rounded edges to everything including the magic cards. I don't like it as much as the older game, but maybe that's just nostalgia. The hidden object games have less objects to find, but they're hidden slightly better, and the points you score are now collected gold, and have a function: to buy stuff. Having made the mermaid a home in the last game, the little crab now has a different mission: to buy fish and a boat for a world trip. Still making bapping sounds, it now also blows raspberries and does rockstar impressions, while its friend, a crab with a moustache and goatee (French?) periodically giggles, a very unsettling sound effect. Yes, there are now two crabs, having to follow two routes on the board of tiles. On the upside, the game has a "relaxed" mode, without timer. Since the game is supposed to take me on a trip around the world, the hidden object game shows a different screen for every location, and some are quite visually dramatic. Along with match-3, samegame and the tile-flipping memory game, a fourth game has been added where I have to move tiles to put three or more together while the playfield fills up with more tiles. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but now it's my favourite game.

Zenerchi from Goodie Bag Bundle - 3 in 1

Supposed to be a relaxing new take on the match-3 concept, like Rainbow Web 2, and have relaxing background music, this game was a disappointment, as neither graphics nor music appealed to me. I couldn't even screencap it, so the graphic on the launching screen wil have to do. The playfield is round, like a car's driving wheel, and circles have to be pulled around to line up "tiles" in spokes of the same colour. Per level, the game sets me two to four colours that I'm supposed to collect points for, the big tiles on the outside of the circle being worth more than the little ones near the centre. Lining up five tiles gets me a bonus tile that lets me destroy or recolour surrounding tiles. Obstacles are introduced as the player progresses: locked tiles, tiles that cling together and a mechanism that makes two circles revolve in opposite directions. There is a Zen Mode and a Story Mode, the latter with a timer that usually runs out after I've reached the Expert score, but before I've been able to collect enough points for each colour.

Diamond Drop 2

This game was bought from the bargain bin of a DIY chain and has, hands down, the worst Dutch translation I've ever seen. It's as if the text was run through a translation machine, giving literal translations of expressions like "legal eagle". If I hadn't been able to guess the English behind the Dutch, the gibberish dialogue that tells the game's story wouldn't have made sense to me.

What is the story: in a village of anthropomorphic animals, a near-sighted mole mines diamonds and makes them into jewellery for the local ladies (and occasionally gentlemen). His mining rights are running out, and to renew them he will have to compete with a new arrival, a smooth customer who threatens to not only take over the mine but also steal away the second new arrival, a pretty mole-girl. The mole miner does what he can to win her heart, failing all the way - if the translated text wasn't so horrid, this would make a funny read - until it turns out that all the smooth customer came to steal is the possessions of everyone in the village. The mole miner apprehends him, becomes the village hero, has his mining rights renewed and, of course, gets the girl. None of this action is visible, the player just has to knock diamonds from the ceiling and assume this achieves what the game dialogue says it does.

The first screenshot shows how the game works: you have to grab one or more of the precious stones descending from the ceiling and throw them up again at stones of the same colour; if three or more stones of the same colour are clustered together, they disappear. As such, this is somewhere between a match-3 game and a samegame. For every disappearing stone, some weight is added to the scales until they are full, and a piece of jewellery is considered finished and flies to the customer in the top right corner, who may be pleased, neutral or downright grouchy depending on how long the wait was; customer patience can be extended by feeding them coffee, cake and sweets, and the jewellery-making options can be upgraded to increase value, making this game a hybrid of match-3, samegame and time management. Interspersed with the precious stones are bonuses, "frozen" stones that need two hits to free them, coins that have to be caught when they drop and rocks that hit the character on the head, wiping whatever the character was holding and making him dizzy for a few seconds. When a piece of jewellery is sold - and the longer it takes to finish, the more its value drops - the money is added to the safe on the right, and when the safe is full, the day ends, either in fireworks if the day's target is met, or in depression and a replay of the level (but the player keeps the money) if it isn't, and the target is higher every day. Screenshot 2 shows the mission levels as gems in a mine shaft, and the awards that the character receives every four or so levels, up to the big trophy at the end.

Okay. The game demands faster reaction speeds than mine, but is otherwise quite original. However, the mole miner is a selfish bastard with a derpy-derp face (no, 3D character design is not always cute and funny). The customers are unreasonably impatient, the village as a whole so mean-spirited that I'm practically cheering on the cardboard villain, and the awful translation just clinches it. If it wasn't for Nautica that comes bundled with it, I would have considered the game a waste of even the two euros it cost me.

Nautica or Golden Submarine

Once a separate game but now bundled with Diamond Drop 2 is the delightfully simple game Nautica, where a submarine must shoot shells and other sea-themed items upwards into an overhead frame to bring down the coins. Each shot costs oxygen, but each caught coin adds some (coins picked up off the floor add some too, but less) and in all the submarine must get the coins before running out of air, which will make it spin round and fizzle out, after which the level has to be replayed. (After three times, your "lives" are up and you can still go on playing where you left off, but with your score reset to zero.) Each level is tiny, but there are very many of them, and both bonuses (like shotgun bullets) and obstacles ("frozen" tiles, weights that drop on the submarine and knock it out for a moment) are introduced as the player progresses. So, the game plays a lot like Diamond Drop 2, except there's nothing irritating about it, and no back story. The game executable is very small, suggesting that the game is an old one; I suspect this was a pioneer in its genre.

Island Adventure Duo:
Galapago (demo)
Paradise Quest (demo)

I know one of these two, or a game very much like it, was preinstalled on the laptop as an Acer Gamezone demo. These two looked close enough, so I downloaded them (from the Acer Gamezone site, I couldn't find them on the Oberon site) to check them out. Despite being the second on the launcher screen (used here as graphic, because I couldn't get a screenshot of the game itself) I'm describing Galapago first, because it is the most fun to play and comes closest to the demo I remember. Under a tree that has funny (shrunk?) heads hanging from it, tiled playfields, representing sections of beach, must be cleared of stone squares before "the volcano erupts" (the timer runs out). When that happens, the primitively drawn marine animals on the tiles grow wings - yes, even the hermit crabs - and the player must click on as many of them as possible to gather points before they've all flown away. The points go into making gilded statues of those animals in the "My Collection" screen. The playfields get harder as you move further inland. The heads watch the tile-switching and for every really good move - one that wipes a double set of three, or five or six in a row, with more rows forming and being wiped as the tiles slide down - they will let out highly amusing sounds of admiration. It's for these sounds alone that I play the game.

Paradise Quest, though also connected with a tropical paradise island, is nothing like that, and despite having far prettier graphics and an actual backstory, is much less fun. Here, you can't simply pick a stretch of beach and start clicking. You are an archaeologist come to the island of Isabela and must repair its ecosystem by playing match-3 (because that is how ecosystems recover, yes, really) while also hunting for artifact stones which then become scenery puzzle pieces. The playfield is bigger than the screen and - argh - scrolls around; the only way to move it is to make matching rows in the direction you want to go. It's another one of those games that give me a headache. As said, the graphics are nice, though, as is the jungly background music. And it's educational, revealing snippets of information on wildlife of the kind seen by people who travel to real tropical islands, rather than playing match-3 games in a very odd attempt to save them.

Heroes of Kalevala (demo)

The Kalevala is a Finnish epic. I don't know anything about it except that the Finnish composer Sibelius composed something based on it. I don't know if it has heroes. Or if, like the game, it is about settlers looking for a new place to live. I do suspect, seeing pictures of these settlers and their wagons, that the game was originally meant to be about pioneers travelling west in the USA. Maybe that idea was scrapped because part of the game is chasing out the people who already live there, which would bring up the massacres of native Americans, and that would be just too painful. The single person about to be displaced by the influx of settlers, announced by the stupidly pompous voiceover at the game's intro, is a witch. She doesn't appear, she just sends her crow to scare off the newcomers, and act as timer for every match-3 game level. It's a pretty standard game, following match-3 conventions: line up three or more tiles with themed pictures (in this case, pinecones, crowberries, the things found along Scandinavian coastlines), collect points to buy stuff for the settlers, get an obstacle here, a bonus there, and collect bits of magic cards which give you super powers, such as, in the second screenshot, the hero Ahti, who raises a flood that will take many tiles with it. Not knowing the Kalevala, I can't comment on the authenticity of these heroes. I can comment on the authenticity of the background music: kantele (Finnish harp) or something that sounds like it.

Despite the background music, and the fact that this (as visible from the screenshots) is one of the rare games to fit comfortably in a wide laptop screen, I scrubbed it. Sorry, my sympathy lies with the witch. Who invited these settlers, anyway? Why couldn't they stay where they were, and if they had to leave because they squandered their previous habitat's resources, what's to say they'll do better here? Off with them.

Dr Despicable's Dastardly Deeds (demo)

What's a poor brilliant inventor (with an accent like Sophie Lipkin from The Powers That Be) to do when her attempts to automate any menial job she manages to find, get her fired even from burger-flipping? When (in a dream?) a Dr. Despicable approaches her, wanting to make use of her special talents, she's in no position to refuse. His line of work is pesky terrorism: things like shrinking all the jeans in every clothes shop. The brilliant inventor helps create the machines necessary to carry out his evil schemes on a global scale... through... match-3 sessions. The points gathered in these sessions (with or without timer) pay for different kinds of machinery. The game is funny, and satirizes, among other things, telemarketing centres, and it feels great to be the villain - but this is another game that stretches my credibility too far. Sorry, there are things that cannot be accomplished simply by switching tiles, and the tile-switching offers no rewards (kooky sound effects, particularly) by itself. Scrubbed.

Glyph 2 (demo)

The hidden object game Kuros is a spinoff from the match-3 Glyph games. It is connected through the planet it takes place on - Kuros - and the glyphs, special characters with special effects. Having played Kuros and loved its graphics, I wanted to try the Glyph games, but finding them was not so easy. Glyph 2 can only be found on the Acer Gamezone site, while the first game, Glyph, is hidden away on Oberon's own site under "Vintage games". Being so old, the second Glyph game is installed in a different way from most games, and harder to transplant from C: to another drive, which bodes ill for the first game. What also bodes ill for the first game is that in the second game, I can't inscribe glyphs. An example appears onscreen, which I am supposed to trace with the mouse cursor. I do. It doesn't work. This is a problem, since the tile-busting powers that normally come from magic cards are here evoked through glyphs. And if the game won't interpret mouse movement correctly, who knows what else won't work. As a sour cherry on the cake, if I play while connected to the internet, I'm shown commercials and a plaintive message to "please support our sponsors". This game will be scrubbed, and I hope Oberon releases it (and the first game, too, that would be nice) in a modern bundle that can be moved to another drive without problems, and doesn't have hardware issues.

Anyway, the summary, which is the same for both games, is that the planet Kuros is dying, and can only be restored by unleashing the power of the five, yes, five elements: wood, fire, metal, earth and aether. The graphics seem pretty, although, due to the technical problems, I've not seen a lot of them.

Cradle of Rome from The Cradle Bundle (demo)

Unlike Cradle of Persia from the same bundle, this is a match-3 game. Its levels follow the history of Rome, starting with the myth of Remus and Romulus being raised by a wolf. Like its companion game, it has a water-themed timer, in this case an urn. The goal is the same: collect points to buy buildings and create a town, by destroying tiles, especially those on a blue square, and obstacles like a "chained" tile, the destruction of which, in the third screencap, leads to a dramatic pouring of tiles into the lower playfield. The score for each tile is displayed above it as it disappears; some tiles contribute to a "power", like a hammer to break up a clogged playfield, and some have no value. Its backgrounds are greener than the Persian dusty desert backdrops, but while every successfully completed stage is celebrated with fireworks and a change of scene in both games, the background in Cradle of Rome seems to change for every building I add; the button to the right with the eye on it makes the game bars disappear, for an unobstructed view of my achievements. The music and sound effects are charming: harp in the background, a funny sound when I do something wrong and a trumpet when the level is finished. There are game bonuses like "farmer" for matching 5 tiles in a row, and "miner" for scoring a certain amount of points. Again, the player has three lives and a status that is raised with the number of points scored; the first step on the ladder is "peasant".

Wedding Dash (demo)

An Acer Gamezone demo played just after Dream Day Honeymoon and a disappointment, because it does have to do with the mechanics of planning a wedding, rather than finding objects. Guests have to be seated as they arrive, refreshments have to be brought to the tables, and small disasters must be resolved (by lots of clicking), before they all hop off to the dance floor to boogy down. The introduction comic tells how the main character accidentally volunteers to be someone's wedding planner, then stresses out in the same yoga class as Flo (of Diner Dash fame) and gets a pep talk that prepares her for her task. The game graphics are "Flo" quality, ie. simple and ugly.

Diner Dash (demo)

Another Acer Gamezone demo. This is Flo's big break: her grandmother has to take some time off and leaves the diner to Flo, an ugly flash animation of a character. Fortunately, the diner with its cooking equipment and food is somehow less ugly. This game is like a template for all time management games: customers arrive. Take customers' orders. Prepare food. Serve food to customers, before they lose patience and stamp off. (This means sometimes taking less orders so that less customers are waiting so that they will be individually served faster. Time management!) Take money and tip (commensurate to speed and quality of delivery). Optional: clear rubbish off table. Got the basics? Introduce complexities. More items to order, items that need more steps to prepare, guests that have to be seated in a certain pattern. Continue until player exits game and tosses laptop out of window while yelling unprintable words. But, okay, it's addictive.

Farm Dash (demo)

Yet another Acer Gamezone demo. Acer sure filled up that laptop with timewasters. With finer graphics, in the same style as Cake Mania 2 below, it sends a family off to a farm. Animals have to be fed and their produce collected and selectively (depending on demand) brought to market. While I liked the game's graphics, I didn't like the animals stamping when I didn't deliver their hay to them at the drop of a hat. Stupid cows, can't they see I'm busy?

Cake Mania 2 (demo)

A final Acer Gamezone demo, in the time management category, and a familiar title: the Cake Mania series. The Cake Mania games are popular, both, I daresay, for their choice of subject (cakes, yum yum) and their better quality graphics. Though still simple, these are actually nice to look at. There are three or four (possibly more) Cake Mania titles out, showing just how much game pleasure can be wrung out of baking, icing and delivering different shapes of cakes. A possible candidate for the "buy" list.

Mystic Emporium

The second time management game that I really, really liked. Apart from "Cake Mania" quality graphics, the premise, for once, has nothing to do with food. This was one of the demos installed by the games bought at the supermarket, so it's the Dutch version, and I paid much more for the unlocking code than if I'd simply bought the English version off Oberon's site; but at the time I didn't know how addicted I would become to these games. A young witch, with cute skull jewellery and a cat that somehow obscures the top of her pointy hat when lying on it, fulfils her dream of starting her own potion shop. She starts with just two potions. The number of potions increases to six, the equipment can be upgraded over time, and shelves can be bought for surplus potions. Each day has a minimum and expert financial target; attain the first, and the game moves to the next level; achieve the second, and the day in the progress screen (third screenshot) is shown as a double star. To keep the player in a good mood despite all the stress, the background music plays a merry little tune. There are awards for things like not losing any customers for 10 days running, and boy, do some of those customers have short tempers. Every few days, you can play for one of three amulets - one that increases tips, makes a plant grow its seeds faster, or causes the firebird to grow feathers more quickly - in a samegame. One would think that a game offering only 24 levels or "days" would be finished pretty soon, but since I'm a slowpoke, I'm usually stuck at day 23. (A day after writing this, I managed to reach the target for day 24 and get the end screen, where the shop is declared best magic shop in town and the customers congratulate its owner. But I still can't reach the "expert" target for the last three days.)

Turbo Fiesta (demo)

A demo installed by Fabulous Finds; upside: the game is in English, downside: it's another "dashing waitress" game. There is a game called Pizza Fiesta, so I suppose this sequel could be called "Pizza Fiesta in Space". A fast-food joint in a space station has to turn a profit despite sabotage attempts, which means the game has more backstory and continuing narrative than the other time management games I've seen. The game's title probably comes from the "turbo mode" the customers go into when they're happy enough, when the game plays a festive tune and all the customers achieve the zen of infinite patience, which means maximum tips and no more stamping out; sadly, this state doesn't last long. The graphics are gaudy, but better than "Flo" quality; perfect for a greasy fast-food joint in any location.

Go-Go Gourmet: Chef of the Year (demo)

Do not play this game if you are on a diet. Another demo that came with Fabulous Finds, it is also probably a sequel, and its main character, already established as a master cook, now has to win a title as international master cook. How? By being the fastest short-order cook around. This is no "slow food"; she is shown a recipe and instruction and then has to grab ingredients from all over the counter, put them in the right containers for processing and serve up the result to the judges, who rate her only by how fast she delivers. Her competitors are a bunch of ethnic stereotypes from other countries. Each day, the slowest chef loses and is kicked out of the competition, but has a plausible excuse why, insinuating foul play. It is easy to stay at the top, at least for the first few days covered by the demo, and for every success our heroine wins another outfit that you can change her into in the dressup screen; not a frivolous activity, as what she wears can affect how the judges rate her. What she also wins: recipes! After I'd finished playing the demo, shut down the laptop, done a million other things, and attached the printer to the laptop an unspecified number of days later to print out some document, the first thing to roll out of the printer was a two-page apple pie recipe that the game still owed me. I don't remember anything about the background music's quality (let's face it, in the rush, it's the first thing you stop noticing) but the graphics are nice and glossy. Even the food looks good to eat.

Diner Dash: Hometown Hero from Goodie Bag Bundle - 3 in 1

Flo and her grandma, returning to their old stomping ground to hear that the zoo is closing, decide to save it by starting a restaurant there. Flo serves the guests at tables outside. What happens: she assigns them tables, takes their orders, passes them to gran, delivers the food etc. but since the game doesn't limit the number of guests, a huge line of increasingly cross waiting customers inevitably develops. This game sucks! I wouldn't expect it from a game set in a zoo, but these are the ugliest graphics I've ever seen!! The colours are plain and washed-out. It has an "eternal serving mode", but the main game already feels like that. The usual applies: it's possible to upgrade equipment. It's also possible to change Flo's outfit and the colour of the clothes she's wearing. Which just doesn't make the game any less ugly.

Chinese Temple

This game from City Interactive, predecessor of titles like Zuma, is so old it needs the CD in the drive. As this is bad for both CD and drive, I'm still busy on a workaround with an ISO image, and played the game just long enough to get screen captures. As can be expected, the game is addictive. A "dragon" of coloured balls runs down a track towards a temple mouth: it is up to the player to keep the dragon out of the temple by shooting more balls at it, since balls of the same colour will destroy each other. As such, this is a very fanciful arcade version of a match-3 game. The tracks that the dragon follows become more convoluted with each level, making it harder to hit. If the player hasn't eliminated the dragon within a certain amount of time, the difficulty doubles as a second dragen starts to snake out. The levels are represented by towers in the Great Wall of China, and there is a trophy room for well-played levels.

Supercow (demo)

A demo installed by a supermarket CD, this is one of the rare side-scroller games. I don't like sidescrollers because all that shifting from one screen to another makes me woozy, and my reaction speed sucks. A fan of the genre would love it. Our bovine superheroine receives a distress call from a sheep: an evil professor has abducted the farm animals by drugging them with sugary treats. Very witty, which is why I used up the 60-minutes demo time before thinking of grabbing a screencap. Sadly, it was the Dutch translation, so the written text was stilted and not as funny as the original, but the English voiceovers had been left intact. Collecting medical kits and milk cartons was fun, and defeating guard dogs by jumping on them, very satisfying.

Fairy Godmother Tycoon (demo)

A gutbustingly funny parody of all fairytale classics and at least one set of cartoon characters (check out the first two screen caps) wherein it is revealed that the fairy godmother isn't a kind person at all: she's a ruthless businesswoman, and those little favours are only to improve her public image! This is what's called "strategy" or "simulation", but since these games are not complex enough for actual simulations, I'd call it a time management game with less rush and more focus on results. The idea is to get rich in the potion business, both by selling potions and by catching the occasional randomly thrown bag of money (vaguely visible right-of-centre in the third screenshot, with the rays emanating from it), first in a quiet easy village, then in bigger locales where you might have to eliminate the competition with mafia-esque tactics. This one is on my "buy" list for its comedy value alone.

Eye for Design

As told in a comic drawn in the style of a flash animation, a white-haired interior design student with huge glasses gets the highest marks of her class, only to find herself without work when she graduates. It is up to the player to land her assignments and carry them out so that her reputation will increase and more and higher paid assignments will come rolling in. It's like the room decorating games in Fabulous Finds, only uglier and totally counter-intuitive. I simply couldn't understand what the game wanted from me. So, I scrubbed it.

Artist Colony from Romantic Discoveries Bundle - 3 in 1

Like Fairy Godmother Tycoon, this is a "simulation", ie. less stressed-out version of a time management game. I'm glad I bought the bundle, as it laid to rest a false impression I got from the demo: that the game is into racial stereotyping. Well, it is - it's into stereotyping, period - but not as nastily as I thought. The backstory: two artists, one high on discipline, the other high on talent, set up a colony especially for artists. The disciplined artist has a wife, called Mimi, and a baby son. The talented artist manages to seduce her with his animal attraction and, pregnant with his child, she runs away, no longer able to face either of them. They quarrel and leave; the colony falls into disrepair. Fast-forward a generation: Mimi's two children are now adults. The older brother Ben (painter) and his friend Dylan (musician, black, I had the impression that this was his half-brother from the "bad" father) have returned to the colony and want to restore it to its former glory. They are joined after a few days by the real half-brother, a boozy type who unintentionally steals Ben's love interest, and the drama is about to repeat itself, but unlike his father, Ben can count on a friend to pull him through.

The game is several screens of pretty scenery just waiting to be cleaned up, something that will have to be done continually as flowerbeds keep going to ruin, weeds spring up and dirt collects. As the colony becomes more attractive, more artists will enter it to make use of its facilities. The money their creations make is then used for more building improvements. At the same time, the artists need maintenance too: they must be provided with food, places to sleep and inspiring visuals. Their needs are also not as complex as the demo made me think, the main thing is to keep them happy and inspired, assign them maintenance tasks to keep the colony clean and fresh-looking, train them in their artistic specializations (they can't produce the next work of art until they've gained a skill point, although once they've reached their maximum, they can pump out the art non-stop, inspiration and energy levels permitting) and even raise other artists' inspiration levels by giving public performances. If their happiness/inspiration drops too low, artists leave the colony, only to come back as new arrivals with their skill points reset to zero. As the colony's gallery fills up with art, buyers will come in, offering amounts sometimes way above, sometimes way below the real price. I learned the hard way: always sell, no matter what the offer, to free up space so the artists can keep producing. Although Ben and Dylan are paired up with the first two artists that join them at the colony, they and all the other artists can spontaneously crush on a random other artist, which means they should be dragged to that artist to check how reciprocal the feelings are and will then make an artwork based on either the wings of love or the pain of a broken heart, which will automatically sell for more, after which the crush, having served its purpose, expires. The simulation is quasi-open-ended: it has a storyline with quests to fulfill, after which I can keep playing and earning the colony more money, but with nothing to spend it on, there's no real point, beyond the amusement of maintaining a human ant farm of "arteeste" types in a pretty setting with - a nice touch - changing seasons. Leading to the situation of artists still using their outside picnic places for a nap on a thick blanket of snow.

Tradewinds Odyssey from Magic and Mystery Bundle - 3 in 1

Along the same lines as Fairy Godmother Tycoon and just as gutbustingly funny, this one sporks the living daylights out of Greek mythology. The player picks one of several characters - the misunderstood Minotaur, the sister of Helen of Troy, an athlete falsely accused of substance abuse, and others - and sails from ancient city to ancient city with an upgradable fleet, trading ingredients (buy at low price, sell at high price), buying protective enchantments, and carrying out whatever requests and missions come up on the way. On the journey, there are pirates and mythological monsters to defeat. The interlude screen when the next screen loads looks like a fresco. Although this was rather a mismatched game bundle and one of the games in it was downright iffy, I can recommend both the bundle and this game individually. The only possibly objectionable aspect of the game is the sometimes wailing background music, which may grate on the nerves after a while.