I never bought a lot of music CDs which is the main reason why I suck in games like Jams Match that force you to combine album cover art with album titles in a short period of time. Would not it be for the different genres I would probably end up with one or two hits only and probably none in the Hip Hop/Rap and Electronic/Dance genre.

Five genres, metal, indie / alternative and rock&pop besides the two mentioned previously and one difficulty level from three has to be chosen to start the game. The player has 30 seconds on the novice level to drag nine of the available twelve album cover arts on the nine fields with album titles.

Each successful combination will be awarded with 10 points, a mismatch brings a reduction by 5 points and no match brings zero points. Intermediate and Expert levels bring in two and three times the points respectively.

It’s a fun game where I’m spending most of the time trying to decipher the album title from the tiny thumbnails that can be dragged to the album title fields. Most unfortunately are either unreadable or not there at all. Mean.

How about a game that puts you in the role of designing a deadly virus, bacteria or parasite to kill the world’s population ? The game starts harmlessly enough by selecting a name and if you want to be a virus, bacteria or parasite in order to exterminate the population of the world.

Each type has distinctive traits like their speed of evolution (virus best, parasite worst) and how they are affected by the environment. There are also two game modes, one fast mode and one realistic mode that takes longer to play and offers additional options.

The Take 9 virus began to appear and spread in South Africa mainly through the help of Rodents who transmitted the disease that caused fever in infected humans. The virus appeared somewhat heat resistant as well.

Slowly afterward Insects and Airborne animals began to transmit the disease as well. New symptoms began to appear after five days namely fatigue and nausea and the average infections a day rate climbed to a all new high of 50.

Three days later waterborne creatures became another source of transmission for the disease which began to spread to 95 people per day. It became more resistant to cold and moisture and heat resistance was increased even further.

The average infection rate increased to 208 on day 11 of the outbreak and remained still pretty much unrecognized throughout the country and rest of the world. First infected with symptoms of Ataxia began to emerge on day 12 which saw a huge jump of almost 1000% in the average infection rate per day.

More than 66000 people were infected with the Take9 virus after twelve days after its outbreak. The disease spread to North Africa on the same day. Hemorrhaging became the fifth symptom of the Take9 virus which now infected 441000 people a day only 13 days after it’s initial outbreak.

The disease spread to the Middle East on day 14 and the first death caused by the virus was confirmed in South Africa. It began to accelerate on day 15. The disease spread to China, India, East Europe and Indonesia on that day and more than 290 million people were infected by it.

The governments of earth decided to research a vaccine for the Take9 virus on day 16 which would approximately be finished in 24 days. The virus managed to meanwhile spread to Canada, West Europe and Brazil.

First reports of victims with symptoms of hypotonia and blindness came from South Africa and the death toll reached a new high with 833000.

That’s one typical scenario of a quick game of Pandemic 2. Sounds disturbing, don’t you think ?

Dark Cut 2 reminds me of the game Trauma Center for the Nintendo Wii. The player steps into the role of a doctor in both games who has to cope with a few emergency situations. Even the game mechanics are similar. In each game the player has to choose the correct medical tool for the situation at hand, for instance disinfecting the wound with alcohol before using the scalpel to cut into the flesh.

Dark Cut 2 plays in the American Civil War which hints at what you are going to expect in the game. The tutorial is about a patient with a bullet in his arm. Most tools that can be used throughout the game are introduced in it if you can make it that far. The time limit is rather challenging and it will definitely take a few attempts even for seasoned players before the tutorial can be completed.

The other missions of the game are not really easier and it would have been nice if the developer would have added a few difficulty levels to aid players who have troubles with the extreme time limit.

It’s still a fun game but it’s more about hasting from one medical tool to the next and less about enjoying the game. On the other hand, maybe I’m a bit slow when it comes to games like these. Could very well be that ten year old brats beat the game at the first time.

Inquisitive Dave is a typical adventure game where the player collects items and uses them with other items and objects in the game to advance in it. The character is moved with the WASD keys where W makes him jump and SPACE being the main key to interact with the environment.

The main task of the player is to explore the environment. His first task for instance is to escape from the prison which opens up several new levels for him.

It’s easy to die in the game, one misstep and it’s game over which is fortunately not a big problem because the player can restart the game in the exact same position. The game gets autosaved at various points in the game from where the game can be continued.

Inquisitive Dave has some elements of a jump and run mixed into the adventure, especially jumping is needed quite often to reach higher areas of the game map.

It’s definitely not a bad game but it could use some polish.

Remember Arkanoid and Breakout? Those use a paddle to reflect a ball that has to hit all bricks in a level that can be destroyed to reach the next one type of games? I always liked to play those games if they would feature enough extras and interesting levels to make it worthwhile.

Many clones nowadays come without extras and boring levels. Aztec Bricks brings some fresh content to the paddle-ball-brick genre by introducing a different sort of bricks that can be destroyed. It’s basically what you see you can destroy with beautiful levels that resemble structures of the Aztec culture.

The game has been created by the same company that created the Eldorado Puzzle game. You can expect a high quality game with unique ideas. I like puzzle games that lock levels until the user reaches a certain point in the game and Aztec Bricks does a very good job at it. The user has to beat levels before new ones are unlocked, that’s great for motivation.

The paddle of the player can be moved with the mouse and the ball plus extras are activated by the left mouse buttons. You find your usual assortment of extras like smaller and bigger paddles, sticky balls, multiple balls and cannons. A unique idea is that they stack with each other which means that you can catch an extra to extend the paddle and the next extra of the same kind would extend it just a bit more. Same works for pretty much all the extras like multiple balls. Becomes a bit complex if you have 10 balls flying around in the level though..

You see lots of effects on the screen up to the point where it’s to much, at least for me. Witness lightnings, fireballs and other effects that ripple through the screen. Oh and yeah, it’s another one of those girlfriend games.

eldorado puzzle

Eldorado Puzzle belongs to a group of games that I causally refer to as girlfriend games, you know, those type of games that girlfriends usually like and play a lot. It reminds me a bit of Dynomit although the game mechanics are different. You do however collect parts of ancient artifacts throughout the game.

The game is available for free download at the developers homepage. I find it a bit surprising that such a high quality game is not a commercial game. Graphics, game play and motivation are top notch and on pair with games like Dynomite.

It combines an addictive gameplay with enough variation to keep the player playing without boring him to death after a while. Game modes are mixed throughout the levels and the first few contain introductions of various game elements.

eldorado puzzle

All evolve from the same basic concept though. The task of the player is to gather the artifacts that are hidden in the levels. The game board itself is made up of squares that contain various symbols. When those symbols are connected to the same type they vanish and everything on top falls down to fill the gaps.

One of the most common game modes is to remove symbols from every square of the game board at least once and most of the other modes make use of this basic mode as well.

A variety of this topic is to guide one or two avatars on a path on the game board so that they can reach a certain destination which is usually a switch of some sort. Add keys, doors, dynamite, fire and several other items to the mix and you got a pretty solid understanding of the game.

It’s a time based game which is not a huge problem in the first levels. It is starting to get a bit more complicated from level 4 on which is usually caused by board layouts that are more difficulty to play with

I’m only playing one game at the moment and that game is Team Fortress 2. It reminds me a lot of my favorite shooter of all time Unreal Tournament. While gameplay is different the fun is the same and that’s what counts in the end, at least for me.

One thing though that is annoying the hell out of me are the objective popups that appear for a certain time at map start. They contain general information about the objective of the map and are located at the center of the screen blocking part of the view.

Those popups remain for an undisclosed amount of time, I think it must be somewhere near 10-15 seconds. It’s real nasty because they cannot be removed after they appeared. No weapon switching or hotkey removes the popup.

I had to research that topic for quite a while before I came up with a solution. The file viewed.res contains all the information that we need. You find reference to any map that you ever played in Team Fortress 2 in there along with a number. That number seems to reflect the times the map was played already.

All that needs to be done is to increase that number to a value of 50 or greater to remove the objective popups from appearing for that map. Yes, it has to be done for all maps if you want to get rid of the popups and again if you play a map for the first time.

If 50 is really the play count before the popup disappears I have to say that this is way to high and that Valve should definitely provide a key to remove the popup and an option to turn that feature off completely.

Totem Destroyer reminds me a little bit of the excellent Nintendo Wii game Boom Blox. In it the player has to destroy a certain number of blocks that hold a golden totem on the top. The difficulty of the game comes from the rule that the totem cannot hit the ground. If it does it is game over and the player has to try the map again.

The game consists of 25 levels and only three different types of blocks. This is enough to create an interesting addictive puzzle game though.

Totem Destroyer is solely played with the mouse. The player can use the left mouse button to destroy one brick at a time. It takes a while before he can use that function again and gravity takes it toll in the meantime.

Interesting game albeit a little bit short. The game saves the progress and the player can continue where he left of.

Gemcraft is an interesting Tower Defense Game that adds a new game element to the genre. The player places gems in towers that are placed along a road that is used by the opponents. The task is similar to that of all Tower Defense Games: Prevent the enemies from reaching the end of the road.

So far so good. The new element is that it is possible to combine gems to create (more) powerful gems that hurt the enemy more. Gems come in different colors and pure gems, those that consist of only one color are generally more powerful than those that are made of mixed colors.

The mixed colored gems on the other hand inherit some of the powers of each gem color which makes them unique as well. Creating new gems and uniting gems costs mana which is earned by defeating enemies and over time as well.

The game is made up of several levels and the player character can earn levels. The player is awarded with four skill points each level which can be used to increase the maximum mana or generate more money for killed enemies.

Gemcraft is an interesting variant of the Tower Defense genre, one that’s definitely fun to play for a while.

Toribash is a rag doll fighting game that makes use of an innovative system that is relatively hard to learn. I strongly suggest to play through the tutorial at first to make sure you understand the basics of the game and continue in single-player mode before you start facing other human players in multiplayer.

The basic goal of the game is to move the limbs of your character in a way that will beat the opponent. Each fight lasts a set amount of frames where the characters limbs can be moved to perform various actions.

I suggest you take a look at the video below to get an understanding of the game elements.

The game is pretty violent if you manage to hit the opponent in the right spots, the tutorial gives you a first impression of what a free game will look like. It definitely takes a while before stylish moves can be made that look awesome in the replay but once you are there you will enjoy the game tremendously.

Toribash is available for PC and MAC.