A Zoo Mystery and Ancient Secrets in Kuros

I really liked 3 Days: Zoo Mystery, it was really fun! I did NOT enjoy the Fishing puzzle game though, LOL. The hidden objects were hidden cleverly, and they mostly had to do with the storyline which was good. Lots of good puzzles and hidden object tasks in this game too.

Some puzzles were too hard or I didn't understand them, and I liked that the game had an option where you could complete a hidden object challenge instead of doing the puzzle. I took advantage of that feature a couple of times. The game was a good length too, at least a couple of days of gameplay. Not sure about replayability value, though I suppose you could play it to get a higher score. Oh, and the game also has unlimited hints, basically it's a question mark that has to refill after you use it.

I would definitely recommend this game to people to play, it was pretty good! I used this walkthrough for the hard parts.

I also finished Ancient Secrets: Quest for the Golden Key recently and it was really fun. I used this walkthrough for the hard parts, it was really useful, lol, especially for the harder slider puzzles. My daughter who is six actually played this whole game with me, and she really enjoyed it too! She needed help to read stuff of course, which was fine. The gameplay is basically a mixture of point-and-click adventures, hidden objects and puzzles games.

Like I said before, some of the puzzles were really hard like some of the later slider puzzles. Other puzzles were really easy and my daughter figured them out before me! lol. The game was also a good length, about 3 to 5 hours of gameplay. You get to travel to different locations, search shops, talk to people to get quests and do lots of puzzles. A really good game that I would definitely recommend!

The last game I finished recently was Kuros, a beautiful hidden object and puzzle game. The graphics are stunning! Basically you are in the land of Kuros, and you have to fix these glyph stones that are broken. You talk to people and peform quests for them, and also have to find hidden objects like map pieces (put them together and get a new section of map to explore) and collect items to solve problems (like how to make a bridge across a chasm). I used this walkthrough for the hard parts. Kuros was a pretty good game, but too short! I wished it had been longer. But, another definite recommendation!

Coming soon.....a review of Legend of Crystal Valley.

Women's Murder Club does Everest

Yes, you read that right, I finished two more games today!

First up, Women's Murder Club 2: A Darker Shade of Grey was a very cool puzzle game. Hidden objects were limited to finding things you needed for the game, for example, pieces of a torn up fax and a pink notice pasted to the wall. I used this walkthrough for the difficult portions of the game, and I didn't have to use many hints. By the end of the game I had 44 hints :D (hints follow you through the game).

There's 10 investigations in total, and each investigation is broken into maybe 5 parts or so, I didn't really count. The storyline was pretty interesting, though it would have been nice if the game was longer. Once again, I found the ending abrupt like when I played the first game, Women's Murder Club: Death in Scarlet. One annoying thing is that you can skip cutscenes by clicking the mouse key, but the game gives you no option on speeding through the cutscene. I tell you, I can read faster than the text went by so that part of the game was sorta slow for me. There were also some grammatical and spelling errors but not too much. All in all, a really good game that kept me quite engrossed, and the puzzles were very interesting.

I also finally finished Hidden Expedition: Everest. I had started playing it before my old Windows XP computer crashed, and I didn't look forward to starting it again from the beginning but I finally did. There's a walkthrough and review I found helpful posted at Jay is Games. What's really cool about this game is that it's narrated by Ed Viesturs (yeah, I didn't know who he was either) a real-life mountaineer who has climbed Mount Everest seven times. Along with his voice, he provides a gallery of video footage and photographs of his travels that gets unlocked gradually as you play the game.

Hidden objects were very good, and the various puzzles that finish each level were good and challenging. You could find 5 small gems per location to provide you with one more hint (3 hints at the start of the chapter). I tell you, those hints were dear to me, as I needed them quite a bit! There is also 3 other teams you are racing against to reach the summit in time. Believe me, they got quite close to me at some points. There is one part of the game I didn't finish, and that's these mystery items that are hidden one per scene, and you have to find them without knowing what you're looking for. I only found 9 out of 18 I think. But the walkthrough posted above has more hints to those items locations. That would be the only replayability value I can see in the game, finding those mystery items. But I would definitely recommend, quite fun!

So now I'm playing 3 Days: Zoo Mystery, Treasure Seekers: Visions of Gold (which will probably be followed by Treasure Seekers: The Enchanted Canvases) and Angela Young's Dream Adventure (which I started awhile ago, but should finish). We'll see which of these I will post about next!

Elizabeth Find and Robinson Crusoe!

Yes, I finished two new hidden object games that I can post about, yay!

I haven't been playing a lot lately, due to the fact that I have a new boyfriend. :) and before that I was playing a lot of The Sims, so I didn't really have anything new to post about.

But on to Elizabeth Find MD: Mystery Diagnosis. Here is the walkthrough I used for the game. It was a pretty good game, it has 3 chapters that you can play, basically 3 patients that you have to diagnose. You get to visit different locales, like the hospital of course, with various offices and lab rooms and the patient room, and you also visit an ambulance and a school and the patients' homes.

I played in relaxed mode, so I didn't have a timer. The hidden objects were pretty easy, I think I only had to use 6 hints in total throughout the game. I like the fact that some hidden objects were various doctor related stuff like drawing blood and finding the heartbeat, and to do those ones you had to click on an instrument in your medical bag. The puzzles were pretty good as well, though I found the Radiology-MRI game really annoying. I skipped that a couple of times. Characters were not that good.....I found some of them annoying, I think they were trying to be like a House clone or something. But this game was good, it gave me 3 days of gameplay (one case per evening) so yeah, I would recommend it.

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was another hidden object game, I found this one rather more entertaining. I used this walkthrough to help me through various parts. This one was also more longer which was great. It had six chapters and each chapter had 6 parts. I played in Survivor Mode, which was timed, and I think I only got close to the clock a couple of times.

But yeah, puzzles were very entertaining, there was spot the differences, find x number of items, and putting together puzzles, along with a whole bunch of others. Oh, and you got five hints at the start of each chapter, and you could earn more hints in various ways. At the end of each chapter you got to build a little more of a boat so that Robinson Crusoe could escape from the island. The hidden object portion of the game was challenging, items were hidden quite well. Had a good storyline as well, the game goes from when the ship is caught in the storm and he's shipwrecked to him building a cabin, then meeting Friday (a native that helps him), and escaping from a tribe of cannibals, to going to Friday's tribe, to of course escaping from the island. Not sure about the replay value, but it was a very good game, and I would definitely recommend it!

Anyways, now I'm playing Women's Murder Club 2: A Darker Shade of Grey, Hidden Expedition: Everest and Detective Stories: Hollywood. Will post once I finish another game, but funnily enough, it probably won't be one of the ones I've just listed....I play what I feel like playing, and sometimes it's something I haven't played yet.

Oh, and I have some cool news! As you know, my favorite game company in the world is Spiderweb Software. I've been a member of their message boards for a little more than a year now, and in April a senior moderator asked me if I wanted to join the moderator team! Of course I said yes. :) They wanted to have a newer member as a moderator instead of someone who'd been there for years and years, lol. So I haven't done much besides edit posts to contain pictures, and edit someone who had something spammy in his signature. But anyways, it is awesome that I am a moderator on my favorite game designer's forum. :)

So that's it for now, see you next time!

The Sims!

I've been playing a lot of the Sims lately....the first game, not the second one. It's not that I don't like the second game, it has a lot of cool features like a child growing into adulthood and being able to get married and then getting old and also moving out to University. So I'm sure I'll get into it eventually. I want to buy the complete set of the Sims 2 once the Sims 3 comes out. That's what I did with the Sims. I bought The Sims Complete Collection (the game plus the 7 expansion packs) for $60 bucks at Best Buy but I don't think they sell it there anymore.

One of my favorite things to do in the Sims is download objects that some very talented and creative people make and offer to others for free! I've found so many cool furniture sets, wallpapers, floors, heads and clothing sets in my searches.

Here are some of my favorite sites to download from:

• NightTime Sims
• SIMcredible! Designs - Some sets available only for donators
• beewitched - Sims 1 Downloads by Fairywitch
• Around the Sims - Some sets have special objects (gifts) only for donators
• Moppet Sims
• Parsimonious
• TSR - The Sims Resource - All Sims 1 downloads are free, as is registration for the site.
• The Sims Zone
• 7 Deadly Sims
• Dincer Hepguler Website - Click on The Sims box to get gorgeous furniture and build sets!
• Atelier Quebec
• The Secret Society of Woobsha - Tons of free, hacked object for the Sims.
  
• Sims Interior Design - Some objects are for donators only, but lots of free stuff.
• COMHAIR Sims Stuff
• Marina's Sims - Great Sims 1 downloads, especially build items! Not updated anymore though.
• C&C Enterprises - Free site that specializes in hacked objects.
• Gnohmon's Sims1 Goodies - More great, free hacked objects, including a staircase that allows more than one sim to use it at a time.
• The Well Dressed Sim - Some items of all the sets are free. That makes most unusable but you may find some good items that can go with your existing objects.
• SimFreaks - Some freebies, but most are for subscribers only

Oh...whoops. Did I say some? Obviously I meant a lot. :P

In fact, I downloaded a couple of things while I was posting the links here. I really didn't mean to, as I have too many objects already. So many I think, that some stuff doesn't show up in the game. I am supposed to be going through them and deleting the ones I don't like. Oh, I use a great program to view the furniture, walls and floors without opening the game. It's called SimExplorer (available on this page) and it's so handy! The next thing I want to do in the game is edit the categories that the objects are placed into. I find that only certain objects show up in the different sub-categories and that the rest can be viewed under the "View All" tab.

Anyways, I have some work to do so I best be off!

So.....

So, it seems as if I have joined the throng and have created a blog. I have no idea what to write about!

Um....last night I finished Adventure Chronicles: The Search for Lost Treasure. It was a pretty good game, the hidden objects were not too hard to find, but not too easy either. In fact, my daughter Heather shamed me a couple of times when she found objects before me! (She's six). No replayability value though. The extra items that they added to locations after you were done I found while I was playing the game so there was nothing for me to do after I finished the game. I uninstalled it as there was no point in keeping it on my computer.

Be warned though, I needed help from this walkthrough a couple of times. Some tasks were confusing! Graphics were pretty good, though they did get blurry on the "zoom in" sequences (when the camera would zoom in as if you were moving forward). Oh my god, the talking sequences were so annoying! After you finished a area (or quest) there would be a cut-scene in which characters talked to each other, and there was no way to go fast through the text without skipping the whole scene. It seemed as if they left the text on the screen forever! I guess people are slow readers. But those scenes seemed to drag on forever.

Anyways, I am still playing Hidden Expedition: Everest, which I am really enjoying so far. I love how you're in competition with three other teams and it really feels like you have to go fast to win over them. Objects are not too hard to find, and you can find coloured gems in each scene to add extra hints. I also like how the game has Ed Viesturs(real life mountain climber) narrating it and popping up little trivia on the map page. It also has photos and video of his real life climbs of Everest.

Logged in to my nightly session of Urban Dead recently, and so proud of myself, I'm not dead! Whoohoo! I swear you log in sometimes and you have a whole list of stuff that happened while you were "asleep" like a zombie broke down the barricades (of the place you're hidden) and bit you and now you're dead. If you haven't tried this great online mmorpg game, you should. It's pretty simple but it works. Let me tell you though, it takes forever to get to level 2, or at least it did for me. As you level up you can add on more abilities (every 100 xp) so the game gets easier. Yeah, so I'm totally addicted to it. And you only get 50 action points a day, so you have to log in to use them!

I don't know what else to write about, so I guess I'll be going. Thanks for reading!

Oh and welcome to my new blog :)