Arcade Pool reviews
Pool is such a classic game, and there have been so many digital versions. Miniclip.com’s8 Ball Pool is one of the most played of all time with over 1 billion games played online. The game now comes to iOS, and is all about speed. You’re given the regular rack of 15 balls, and you try to hit them all in as quick as you can. You start with 3 minutes, and you get a 10 send bonus for each ball you hit in. Once you hit 14 balls in, you’re given a new rack of 14 balls, and you keep going through racks for as long as you can.
There isn’t much to the game, and feels just like a basic flash game ported to the iPhone, and that’s because it is just a basic flash game ported to iOS. Once you’ve played once through you’ve seen everything in the game, and there isn’t much to come back to. There are Game Center headboards but no achievements. The game does have a nice arcade style that makes pool extremely dependent on time, and provides plenty of action. It would just be nice to see more game modes, or some type of variability.
You know what you’re getting with 8 Ball Pool ($0.99, iPhone), and there just isn’t that much. The gameplay is good except for the controls which are quite tedious on the 3.5″ iPhone/iPod Touch screen. There are a number of times where you don’t aim precisely, hit with the wrong power, or just perform a shot before you mean to. There is a multiplier system from sinking consecutive balls, but the entire time you’re playing you just want there to be more to the game.
8 Ball Pool is worth skipping for even $1, and if you really want to play the game just try the free flash version.
Enjoy Yourself By Playing Arcade Games Online
There are thousands of great arcade games online and the good news is that you can play many of them free of any charge. If you have some spare time on your hands, playing arcade games online can be a relaxing and interesting way to spend it, especially if you don’t mind sitting for hours in front of your computer. But you don’t have to be a computer geek to have a good time with these games, as they are destined for everyone to enjoy. So, if you’re looking for arcade games online, here are a few recommendations.
If you’re the nostalgic type, you really should be playing some of the classic arcade games online. Remember Pac-Man, Super Mario or Space Invaders? If you do, you can now play them online for free, along with many other classic arcade games, such as Prince of Persia, Moon Patrol or Final Fight. You can even play Tic Tac Toe online, not to mention Hangman, Minesweeper and the many different versions of the Solitaire card game. Some of you might think they’re old-fashioned and boring, but they still have many fans and even gaining new ones.
But if you need something to get your pulse going, why don’t you try some of the action & adventure arcade games online. If you think you have something of a warrior inside you, then these are the games for you. You can fight battles, travel into space, kill evil aliens, make a dangerous escape and engage in many other action-packed activities – the only constant being that you get the chance to save the day in the end (and maybe even get the girl).
There are enough arcade games online to satisfy all tastes. Girls and boys, kids and adults, teenagers and their grandparents – they can all enjoy these games in their spare time. Take, for instance, some of the role-playing arcade games online – they let you become a virtual gold miner, soldier, gangster, knight, salesman, gardener, fitness instructor and so on. You can also become a virtual cook with games such as Top Chef, Pizza Frenzy, Burger Shop, Cake Mania etc., even if in real life you never set foot in the kitchen.
If you’re into sports, you can discover how it is to be a professional athlete by trying out some of the sports games you can find online. Basketball, football and baseball are some of the most popular arcade games online, but even if you prefer other sports, it wont be too hard to find a game for you to enjoy. For instance, you can pick golf, horse racing or softball. There are also many casino arcade games online, for all the gamblers out there – giving them the chance to play poker, roulette or blackjack without causing any damage to their budget.
All the arcade games online are a great way to fight boredom. So, if you don’t have much to do with your leisure hours, playing arcade games online is definitely a good idea.
Xbox 360 Game Review: Bodycount
In this review, I will talk about Bodycount, a first person shooter for Xbox 360.
Bodycount is one of those games which mean serious business, by this I mean that the game itself doesn’t tell an epic tale, instead it puts weapons in your hand and allows you to kill everything and anything in your hand. Bodycount normally offers a shooting experience that is normally fun, but some drawbacks keep it from becoming a great game. Bodycount is all about shooting, so anyone who is looking for a game that offers a little bit of narrative should not look for one in here. To find out more, read our review.
To start off my review, I will talk about the features of the game.
Bodycount is developed by the long running company Codemasters. The developers have succeeded in creating a game that offers you infinite mayhem. Almost everything in the environment can be broken (remember Red Faction?). Here is an example of what I mean, if you see a door and sense there is an enemy behind it, you can literally shoot the door and your bullets will tear through the wood to kill anyone behind it. One of the greatest things about the game is that this mechanic of the game is also available in the multiplayer offerings.
Moving further down the review, the aiming system of the game may annoy new players to the game, but once you start playing the game, you will completely get used to its weird aiming system. One of the most annoying aspects of the game however, lies in the mechanics used behind the grenade throwing. Most of the time, the grenades you throw at your enemy will get stuck around the environment, which can get incredibly frustrating. However the same cannot be said for the A.I, because from what it seemed, they perfectly through grenades at me without giving me a chance to react.
To finish off my review, Bodycount is an average shooter game, if you can learn to master its aiming and the annoying grenade throwing mechanic, than you are sure to enjoy it, however if you are the sensitive kind, you should stay well away from it.
Trauma PC games reviews
From the psycho-sexual phantasmagoria of the Silent Hill series to the nightmarescapes of Sanitarium to countless amnesiac protagonists unraveling the riddles of identity, videogames have a long tradition of creating compelling narratives out of psychological damage and healing. It is a shame that Trauma is not part of that storied (ahem) institution.
A Flash-based point and click adventure game from independent German developer Krystian Majewski, Trauma is ostensibly the story of a woman recovering from a car crash (the crash itself, the game’s opening cinematic, is an artful memory of an accident and is Trauma’s very best moment). The story is concerned with a therapist navigating the woman’s recurring dreams to suss out details of her past and her identity, but why these aspects of her personal history are important to her recovery from something as random as a car wreck is never explained.
Much of Trauma hangs on the ambiguity of its dream stuff. The atmosphere is thick and surreal, underscored by a minimal but moody soundtrack. You wander around a city plaza, a deserted road, an abandoned building and an overgrown hillside, clicking through a shadowy world made of subtly altered photographs. In this, the game feels very much like a borderland of reality.
The action of the game is played out through four very light puzzles, each tied to a specific gesture mechanic – lifting boulders, clearing drains, cutting hedges and capturing ghosts. An additional element involves finding Polaroids hidden around the environment, some of which provide a glimpse of insight into the mystery, but most simply illustrating new gestures for navigating the world.
The gesture commands are a novel interface for a point and click adventure. You simply click and drag the simple symbols across the scene, leaving behind a glowing streak like a flashlight in a long exposure photograph. It works particularly well when interacting with the main story, but fell a bit flat when moving through environments (clicking the mouse the old school way always felt much more expedient).
There is no real challenge to the puzzles, though, the focus being more on experience and interpretation. The experience, however rich it may be, is regrettably short — the main game can be completed, with keen clicking, in less than an hour. Secondary objectives for each of the four scenarios nearly double the play time.
Meanwhile, interpreting the dreams is no easy feat. Trauma’s imagery, while intriguing, seems unmoored from traditional visual symbolism, making intuitive leaps difficult. Connections between the woman’s observations and the artifacts of her past are obscure at best and often non-existent.
Stringing together a cohesive narrative from the puzzle pieces presented by the game is nigh-impossible. Majewski was no doubt striving to create something open to a wide variety of interpretations, but what was meant to be ambiguous winds up simply being meaningless.
Trauma is a curiosity — a bauble, at first beautiful and beguiling, that quickly loses its lustre. As a story it is thin, with the player knowing no more at the end of the game then they did at the beginning. As a game it is simplistic, leaving the player untested.
And sadly, as art, it is an empty vessel. Trauma strives to be profound while saying nothing.
PC Game Review: Atom Zombie Smasher
Atom Zombie Smasher is another game for those people who love blowing Zombie’s into bits and pieces. The game is plain weird, that’s because it has been created by none other than Blendo Games, who are now known to out the weirdest possible ideas. Fortunately enough, weird it might be, but Blendo Games really know how to put the fun in their ideas and Atom Zombie Smasher is no exception. You are tasked with saving the population from the living dead, and your weaponry includes bombs and guns. To find out more, read our review.
To start my review, I will talk about the design and features of the game.
Atom Zombie Smasher boasts a very unique and simplistic design. You won’t see actual zombies or citizens in this game; instead you are presented with a table top view of the infested city, with purple squares representing the zombies and yellow squares representing the people running for their life. The yellow and purple squares run around the city and your task is to place weaponry at key points in order to stop the zombies. The game at first sounds amazingly simple, but as soon as you start progressing, the zombies start becoming clever, and one mistake can cause you to lose your objective.
Moving further down the review, the mission begins in daylight, and you must save all the survivors before the night arrives. Once it’s dark, it’s nearly impossible to stop the zombies and you will most likely fail if that happens. The concept becomes even more interesting when you find out that zombies can turn your people against you, so if a purple square comes in contact with a group of yellow squares, all those people will convert to purple squares. Blendo has included a number of weapons in your disposal that you will unlock and use throughout the game.
To finish off my review, Blendo Games has once again succeeded in making a weird but fun game, if you love to play and try something unique; Atom Zombie Smasher offers enough fun and uniqueness that will quench your thirst.
PlayStation 3 Game Review: Rugby Challenge
Rugby Challenge is out to take on the world’s most selling game based on sports, FIFA 2011. The game clearly shows that it is serious in taking on the FIFA game franchise by introducing very high resolution player models. The game has your occasional matrix style slow motion sequences during the game, which most likely will entertain the masses easily. As soon as you dig in the world of Rugby Challenge, you can see that developer Sidhe has given its all to produce a game that relates to the actual sport. Every game has you going through the same loading style screen that has become so popular for FIFA games. During the loading screen you can control some players running around the field, and as soon as a game starts, you will be presented by your teams anthem and starting sequences as seen in the real game. To find out more, read our review.
To start off my review, I’ll talk about the design and features of the game.
Sidhe has done a great job with the game, they did not just concentrate on the presentation of the game, and they also included tons of content which includes several teams that are not available in any other Rugby based game. The main play mode of the game is the career mode, which puts you in charge of a country or club. You can play through a total of 13 seasons with your team. This is the life blood of the game, and it successfully keeps you interested for a very long time.
Moving further down the review, as far as the gameplay goes; you won’t find anything innovative here. The gameplay mechanics resemble other rugby games that you have already played. The real deal is the amount of content available here. You are sure to get a lot more then Rugby World Cup 2011 game.
To finish off my review, I will say that if you are a huge fan of the sport, you will find a lot of content here that will satisfy your taste buds for quite a lot of time. Be sure to check out this finest Rugby game of your time.
PC Game Review: Crysis 2
In this review, I will talk about Crysis 2, the sequel to Crysis on PC.
Crysis 2 is the sequel to the hugely popular Crysis game from Crytek. When Crytek first announced Crysis 2 for the PC and consoles, fan of the series were worried that it would not live up to their expectations. The reason for this was simple; Crysis was a game that pushed system hardware to the next level, something that normal next generation consoles still can’t handle. Crytek promised the fans that it would release the game with all its glory, and for consoles, the developer also promised that it would be one of the best looking game on the next gen machines. Thankfully, Crytek has fulfilled its promise. Read on the review to find out more.
To start my review, I will talk about the features of the game.
Crysis 2 will put you in the feet of a U.S marine who finds prophet, the protagonist from the first game. Prophet gives the marine nano suit powers. The nano suit provides incredible powers that boost your strength, speed, vision and gives you invisibility. The controls of the game have been improved here, now you can activate the suit powers with a press of a key, release it and the power is gone. You are tasked with to find out why the aliens have invaded our world.
Moving further down the review, the story contains a lot twists and turns and should be able to keep you interested in the game for quite long. Other than that, Crysis 2 also features a multiplayer mode where you can compete against other players from across the world. You suit powers are available in the multiplayer as well, making this quite a unique experience. As far as the graphics go, the game does not support direct x 11 on its release, but the developers have already released a patch that lets you experience the game in Direct X 11 on the PC.
To finish off my review, Crysis 2 redefines the first person shooter genre; fans of this genre should not miss this game.
Potion Bar
Make delicious potions with Rainbow spray and Vampire fangs and serve them to fantastic clients. Decorate glasses with wild lotuses and Phoenix feathers. Witness your amazing potions endow incredible power, reverse aging and help get to the secrets of the Universe.
Travel the world and space, see prophetic dreams and solve the enigmatic mystery!
The Avengers’ Movie Art Hits the Web (Photo)
Promotional art for Marvel Studios’ all-star hero ensemble The Avengers has been making its was onto the Net in recent days, some of it via a Russian site called SpiderMedia (I know, not very Slavic or alcoholic, but it does say it deals with comics, movies, superheroes and more).
VIDEOS: Disney’s D23 Expo 2011
The art featuring the group shots of the heroes, looking very much as they are portrayed by the actors, has fans all excited.
And Heat Vision can’t blame them.
PHOTOS: 10 Top Summer Superheroes of All Time: Battle of the Box Office Brawn
The idea of seeing all these heroes on the screen at the same time, nay, the very idea that an Avengers movie exists at all, is enough to reduce fans to puddles of quivering nerdy goo.
And if they aren’t talking about the launch of the “New 52s,” the reboot of DC Comics whose first issue came out today, all fans seem to debate now on the movie front is which will be bigger and/or which will be better – Avengers or Warners and Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises.
STORY: Disney’s D23: ‘The Avengers,’ ‘John Carter,’ and ‘The Muppets’ Casts Share Exclusive Stories From the Set
In case you need a recap, Avengers stars Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, as well as Tom Hiddleston,Stellan Skarsgård, and Cobie Smulders.
Mystery Case Files: Return to Ravenhearst
- Most popular hidden object series ever.
- Deep, interactive storyline.
- Point and click adventure game.
Product Description
The top-selling hidden object game of all-time returns for its fifth installment! The first true storyline sequel in the Mystery Case Files series, players will now experience a level of immersion never before seen in a hidden object game. Come solve the mystery of Ravenhearst!
The designers of this sequel to “Ravenhearst” have reached a new plateau of excellence in the Hidden Object genre. “Return to Ravenhearst” is gorgeous, fun, challenging and delightful. Perfect for everybody from older kids on up. Way up. I am 79.
Customer Reviews
You, as detective, return to the creepy old mansion, this time to free the souls of Rose Somerset and her twin daughters Gwendolyn and Charlotte from the clutches of the insane Charles Dalimar, murderer of Emma Ravenhearst. You had freed Emma’s soul in the previous game, but she left behind her maid-housekeeper and the two little girls. Charles is kept alive by feeding off the souls of Rose and the children, even though they are dead. The souls cannot rest in peace because they are figuratively shackled to Dalimar. Their ghosts eerily appear, urging you on, as you journey through the game on your way to setting them free.
The environments are superb, filled with special effects, such a flickering candles, leaves that practically fall into your lap and sullen, spitting raindrops that will set you shivering right in your computer chair. There’s a marvellous bouncing Victorian trolley car, and everywhere raucously cawing crows, for in this game everything is engineered for atmosphere. One scene is of a ghastly bathroom with a shrieking mannequin in the shower and flies crawling all over the garbage littered everywhere.
The mini-games are wonderful and you have to figure out how to open locks to various areas by solving a puzzle. They’re clever, very imaginative and funny. If you absolutely can’t figure any of them out, you can by pass them but they’re too much fun to avoid unless you have to! There are many walkthroughs in Google if you get stuck.
The music is excellent, and although the sarcastic comments that appear when you click on the wrong thing or get in any kind of clicking frenzy might annoy some, I found them funny and often appropriate.
The Hidden Objects are diabolically well-camouflaged and even with your nose an inch from the screen, you’re gonna have to work at finding them. A great evening’s entertainment for the whole family if you can all get close enough, and somebody will frequently be yelling “There it is!” Don’t know what a kazoo or a carabiner are? You will! You have to find all the objects or you can’t move on, but there’s a hint option. However, you have to wait a long time for the hint to rev up enough so you can use it.
