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!

My New Computer!

Well, I couldn't figure out how to fix my computer....so I bought a new one!

Staples was selling it for $664, which I thought was a good deal. Of course I went to a Best Buy store and TigerDirect first, but didn't find as good as a deal.

Here are the specs for other techie people:

• 2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Dual E7300
  
• 4GB DDR2 SDRAM
  
• 640GB SATA 7200RPM Hard Drive
  
• Supermulti, Double layer, DVD+/-RW, DVD-RAM
  
• nVidia Geforce G100, 512MB add on graphics adapter
  
• 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) LAN
  
• High-definition audio with 5.1-channel audio support
  
• Front I/O ports: Five USB 2.0 ports, multi-in-one card reader, headphone and microphone jacks; Rear I/O ports: USB 2.0 ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, five audio ports, ethernet (RJ-45) port, D-Sub VGA port (VIA Convertor), Serial port, DVI port (on VGA card), HDMI port (on VGA card)
  
• Microsoft Windows Vista® Home Premium 64bit

I'm really liking it so far!

It's really fast, I can do so many things at once, like run Firefox, a computer game, music on my Winamp player, and my email. Even my old programs still work, there's just a secondary Program Files (x86) folder for them.

Some things I don't like about it:

• Dungeon Siege and Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna don't work! Hopefully someone has found a fix for this, I just have to keep searching.
  
• User Account Control - Way too annoying, I've disabled it for now. It would pop up notifications even when I deleted stuff!
  
• You can't customize Vista folders by adding buttons to the toolbar. In Windows XP I used to add the Delete, Cut, Copy and Paste buttons to the top because I use them a lot.
  
• My folders don't stick to the viewing method I want them to. For example, a folder I've changed to tiles view will be details view when I open it again.
  
• The Witcher is still a bit laggy. I was hoping once I upgraded my computer and got a better processor (I had an Intel Celeron chip in my old one) it would run perfectly. But the video is slightly stuttery, and not flowing smoothly.

If anyone has any tips for a newbie Vista User, or if I'm wrong about the above, please leave a comment. Any advice is appreciated. :)

I'm just so relieved and happy that I got a new computer. It's gorgeous and I love it. Now I can get back to posts about computer games, yay!



P.S. I love how tiny it is! It sits right on top of my computer desk and isn't in the way at all. I just won't be able to modify it much as the case is so small, but that's okay.

Dungeon Siege: Legend of Aranna Review

So I finished playing Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna about a month ago, and I would really like to post about it here. I am just going to copy the review I posted to Facebook's LivingSocial: Video Games application because I think I expressed myself very well.

"The game is seriously cool, I mean what more could you want? Great graphics, great storyline, great monsters to fight! This game took me 39 hours to play (spread out over probably a month) and it was well worth it. I loved the addition of the displacer pads, much better than trekking backwards because you missed a quest in a past area (yes, I'm looking at you Dungeon Siege!).

My favorite dungeon was the Mountains of the Dead (exterior and interior), and my favorite monster was the Great Krakbone....just the way it appeared out of the water like that, scared me half to death! I think my least favorite area was the swamps, there's just so much you have to wade through (pun intended). Oh another great dungeon was Halls of the Lost with the Lost Queen.....that dungeon had so much atmosphere, it was great. I just loved how the Lost Queen talked at you while you were coming to get her. Great fight as well, I must have fought 12 of those purple spiders before I realized they were coming from the tail and I had to defeat that first.

Also, I didn't think it was possible, but this game drops way too much loot. I had to drop a lot of stuff because I didn't reach a store in time and wanted to pick up something more valuable. My seven characters and one pack animal (the one that looked like a dinosaur) were always packed full. And yes, they all had backpacks. I probably should've gotten a mule, I think they had more storage space. Also, there was a lot of spells for my nature and combat mages, it was sort of overwhelming.

My other complaint was the final showdown with the Shadowjumper. It just seemed over too quickly! My characters didn't even use that many healing and mana potions. And no, they weren't super characters either. I think he should have run away....to a big massive door with maybe 10 or 15 of his Shadowjumper minions (and him of course). That would have been a boss fight!

But other than those points, the game was totally awesome, and I'm definitely going to play it again sometime with different parties and such. Very fun!"

Without further ado, here are some cool screenshots I grabbed while playing:










See the rest at my photobucket album.

Thanks for reading!