Preview: Avenue Flo


Avenue Flo features Flo, the beloved heroine of the Diner Dash series, and positions her in a more active adventure game where she must traverse the length and breadth of DinerTown on her latest quest. The game also marks the first speaking role for Flo and her cohorts adding a vibrant and more interactive feel to the game. Fans and newcomers will face Flo's nail biting goal of saving DinerTown from the worst wedding disaster it's ever faced - a potential catastrophe that touches almost every character and business in town!




Coming soon from PlayFirst!

Preview: Passport to Perfume


Passport to Perfume introduces players to the luxurious and adventurous world of perfume making. This title allows players to coordinate every part of the process from sourcing exotic olfactory ingredients from different corners of the globe to designing custom perfumes. A unique mash up of three different game genres: time management, economic simulation and hidden object, the game also introduces players to a striking new central character yet to be revealed who is part adventurer and part sophisticated designer.




Passport To Perfume takes you around the world as Sophia, a young adventure-seeker, perfume maker and shop owner in the 1940's. You'll manage a perfume shop, create scents, select from elegant perfume bottle inventory and sell your creations to customers. On weekends, travel the world searching for rare ingredients, perfume bottles and new fragrance recipes. Will you find rarest of all—a secret fragrance worn by Marie Antoinette herself? Or will a rival perfumer find it first?

* 48 ingredients to mix and match
* 5 exotic hidden object locations
* 16 elegant perfume bottles

Coming soon from PlayFirst!

A Gamer's First Peek
by Pinky1130


In Playfirst's attempt to produce games that are different and appeal to larger audiences by combining several genres, the game play seems to be suffering. Such is the case with Passport to Perfume. I found the time management game play to be boring and not challenging. Although new tasks were added to each level, the difficulty level did not increase at all. The hidden object game play was laughable at best. The objects were huge and not hidden at all except for a few items that the player had to use a brush to uncover, but it was very obvious where I needed to apply the brush. I played for the entire hour trial and this part did not get more difficult either. There is a section where I mixed fragrances to find the fastest refill time while not compromising the price of the perfumes. This wasn't thrilling either. Lastly, there is tycoon game play where I was asked to manage my funds and purchase items needed to sell the next day in the perfume shop, as well as buy upgrades. This is done with up and down arrow buttons like those in DinerTown Tycoon. The graphics were poorly done, and overall this game is just a dud, in my honest opinion.

Preview: Gemini Lost

Gemini Lost finds a misplaced community unwillingly transported to an untamed world with limited resources. The overriding mission in the game is to develop a nurturing and constructive environment that will enable your community to expand and strive and eventually uncover the key to enable a safe return home. This life simulation title adds a clever layer to the genre by positioning astrological signs as key elements that reflect different character traits and desires and effect gameplay. With enhanced resource management, a rich storyline, and challenging puzzles, Gemini Lost adds a fresh new twist to the growing life sim genre.

SCREENSHOTS




While exploring an ancient astrological site, you and your friends find yourself suddenly teleported to a new world with nothing but the clothes on your back! It is up to you to lead your people and get them safely home. To succeed you will have to manage your community to gather resources and food, build structures and conduct scientific research to help your community succeed. Grow your population by matching-making happy couples (make sure to check out their astrological signs to see if they’re a good pair!) and keep everyone happy as you face daunting tasks and puzzles in your quest to find the lost keys to the teleporter and return home.

* 12 zodiac artifacts to collect and use to restore your teleporter
* Over 20 puzzles that unlock new abilities, tools and challenges
* 3 mini games to play that unlock new tasks
* 20 trophies to earn as you increase your skill levels
* 18 science upgrades to further enhance your world

Coming soon from PlayFirst!

A Gamer's First Peek
by Pinky1130


I generally don't enjoy these life sims type games but I found Gemini Lost to be both enchanting and captivating. The world was fantasy like, similar to Wandering Willows, and that is an element I found very appealing. Instead of animals though, the game characters are people who are trained and skilled in varying tasks rather than having quests assigned to them, making the game more like Virtual Villagers, in that aspect. While I was matching mates with compatible astrological signs at the chapel, scientists were researching and gathering ingredients for medicine, builders were busy repairing bridges so they could get to the next lost key, farmers were steadily farming and bringing their produce to the eating place, babies were born, etc. One option I found most appealing is that I could let the game keep playing when I exited, or I had the option to turn this feature off. I'm excited for this game's release. It's definitely a 'must have'!

Wedding Dash: Ready, Aim, Love!

Love is in the air as Cupid visits DinerTown and Quinn starts planning her OWN wedding. With the magic of Cupid's love arrows, anything can happen! Match the right guests together at the new cocktail tables to earn a love bonus, but watch out for the wedding crashers or they will ruin the party.

*Play the most romantic Wedding Dash® game yet!
*55 levels of romantic wedding reception antics
*All new Cupid mini-game to spice things up
*Expanded wedding planning stage with more customization options

Play Free Trial or Buy Now!



Check out our WD3 Walkthrough in our Forums!


Hobbit Hollow Review
By: Lattegato

After a rough start from PlayFirst and developer Sarbakan which saw the game released with major glitches like level scores not adding correctly, plus screen display as well as several game play issues, the fix is finally in for Wedding Dash: Ready, Aim, Love!

Quinn returns, in this third installation of the Wedding Dash series, having finalized her plans for her wedding to Joe. Except he doesn't know it! Cupid sees an opportunity to meet his overwhelming quota by using Quinn's wedding planning skills, in exchange for making sure Joe pops the question in time for the big event.

5 new wedding venues with colorful graphics, opportunities to meet or beat your budget during the themed wedding planning stage, a whole new set of quirky wedding guests, a fast pace, earning Cupid's Love Tokens, and helpful upgrades make this a fun sequel for the new or experienced Wedding Dash fan!

Our favorite game play items included wedding favors, chimes, the wedding crashers, and a cocktail table for bonus "flirt" points. Make sure the Mother of the Bride and Uncle Billy end up at the cocktail table together! There's a reason the Father of the Bride doesn't make an appearance here *wink*. Upgrading Flo's speed and choosing twin cherubs for an extra set of hands to help Flo deliver our wedding reception dinners were especially helpful.

We could have done without the mini shooting game which occurs once in each venue, and entails Cupid shooting arrows at wedding couples. Not only was it not very skillful, but replaying and choosing "Skip" would allow you to move past this obstacle without penalty to points. If you are intent on obtaining a perfect score of matching 10 couples in a row, aim high above the heads of the brides and grooms on the right side of the screen, as the arrow will fall as it shoots from left to right.

Wedding Dash: Ready, Aim, Love has a skill level similar to the original Wedding Dash. Obtaining Expert score on each level is extremely easy. We would have liked to see a more challenging game, where Expert didn't mean just slightly harder than Goal. With a wide age range of customers at PlayFirst, however, it's understandable. Achieve Expert on all levels and receive one extra bonus level per venue. The bonus level points add onto your overall total score, unlike Diner Dash Hometown Hero, which we thought was a great improvement. The entire game was engaging enough to replay over and over on a quest for all PlayFirst game medals and reaching the top spot on PlayFirst's Global High Scoreboard.

Overall, a fun game for the whole family. Just watch out for Cupid's wayward arrows....or you could find yourself making googly eyes at a lukewarm hamburger!

DinerTown Tycoon Walkthrough

Click here to check out our Walkthrough & Screenshots!!




Introducing a whole new way to have fun with Flo and all your favorite DinerTown friends! Oust the evil fast food chain Grub Burger by using your restaurant savvy and business smarts to stock your restaurant,set menu prices, and purchase new decor in this all new economic strategy game.

From Squid Row to Champagne Falls, help DinerTown bring back wholesome food and local eateries, then finally give Grub Burger the boot once Economic Simulation and for all!

It's a new twist on strategy – Dintertown Tycoon brings the familiar characters of DinerTown to the popular genre of Tycoon games. You’ll have to come up with the right strategy to manage multiple restaurants and successfully meet all of the customer’s specific needs.

How to Play

Simply visit each neighborhood and save the Dinertown residents from Grub Burger’s food. The only way to snap these residents out of their funk is to serve them delicious, wholesome, home-cooked meals to revitalize their taste buds. Serve the target number of meal to each customer type to win them over. Once all of your customers have been served the target number of meals, you’ve won the neighborhood!

Tips & Tricks

• Keep your eye on daily demand in the weekly news to see what dishes might sell well that day.
• Jazz up your restaurant with cool décor to bring in more customers!
• Buy advertising to get your restaurant noticed. There’s nothing like a man in a gorilla suit to catch your eye!

Only you can save the people of DinerTown from ingredient X by serving up the wholesome food they love.

• Over 25 beloved characters from the award-winning Diner Dash® series
• 5 different neighborhoods to win back
• More than 90 recipes to add to restaurant menus
• Meet 8 new DinerTown chefs

Play Free Trial or Buy Now!

Click here to check out our Walkthrough & Screenshots!!

Game Industry Insider: George Fan


In the third installment of our Game Industry Insider interviews, we hear from George Fan of PopCap games, the mastermind behind Plants vs. Zombies.

What is your current job title and main responsibilities?

I'm a Senior Game Designer at PopCap, which means it's my job to come up with new game ideas and make sure they don't suck!

What is your favorite all time game to play?

I always say my favorite game of all time is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Great gameplay, great soundtrack, and great 2d graphics during a time when 2d graphics were thought to be going extinct. It's promising to see 2d graphics and gameplay thriving nowadays.

Where do you find new inspiration for freshness in the games you work on?

All sorts of places. As a kid, I would watch Swiss Family Robinson on repeat because I loved the scene where they defended the island from pirates. While making Plants vs. Zombies, I watched the movie again, this time thinking about what made that final scene so exciting. I realized it was 2 things: 1. setting up traps and 2. watching those traps get sprung by the pirates for a big payoff. I tried to work that into Plants vs. Zombies, and that's how the potato mine came about. Potato mines have to be placed ahead of time because it takes awhile for them to arm themselves, but it's extremely satisfying to watch a zombie creep closer and closer to a mine and finally set it off, covering the zombie in an explosion of mashed potatoes.

Name a personal touch or contribution to a specific game that you are really proud of.

Coming up with the Plants vs. Zombies tagline: "Get Ready To Soil Your Plants!" I don't know why, but I'm really happy with that one.

What games have you personally worked on developing?

There have been 4 games that I've worked on so far:

Wrath of the Gopher - A game that no one's heard of. It was my first 'real' game.

Insaniquarium- Winner of a game design award at the Independent Games Festival. It went on to be a big hit.

Diablo 3- I worked at Blizzard Entertainment for a couple of years doing AI programming for this upcoming game.

Plants vs. Zombies- This game is the worst game ever. Who made this thing?

From concept to release, how many people worked with you on your latest game Plants vs. Zombies, prior to its release?

The core team was pretty small: George Fan(me) on game design, Tod Semple on programming, Rich Werner on art, with Laura Shigihara doing sounds and music. However, it took a lot more people than that to get the game released. QA, a couple of extra artists, beta testers, marmot salesmen, you name it!

Was any one person responsible for the concept of Plants vs. Zombies or was it a group effort?

A lot of my games started out with me prototyping a game concept on a computer in my bedroom, and Plants vs. Zombies was no different. At the point which I thought the game was "fun", I brought the game to PopCap and they helped me put a team together to see it to completion.

As a marketing tool do you feel that the music video did its job? I know it caught my eye and sold me on the game.

Most definitely! The music video was born when I mentioned to my girlfriend Laura that I wanted to do something neat for the game's end credits. That gave her the inspiration to write that awesome song, which in turn gave me inspiration to mock up a goofy flash cartoon to go along with it. Tod, Rich, and I then worked for 2 weeks straight putting the whole video sequence together. PopCap's marketing team dug it so much that they thought it'd be a good idea to release it as a marketing tool. I agreed and the rest, as they say, is history.

Where do you see casual PC game development headed in the next 5 years?

To be honest, I haven't been keeping up with the trends of the casual games industry lately, so it's hard for me to predict where it's headed. I'm hopeful that some of the spirit of the indie games community will catch on with the casual games industry and that we'll start to see less games that are direct clones of one another.

Tell us any secret about yourself, games, or the industry.

Psst! If you press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, in Contra, you can get 30 lives!

George Fan
Senior Game Designer
PopCap Games - Home of the World's Best Free Online Games


Plants vs. Zombies, May 5th, 2009 from PopCap Games!

Make your own Zombatar, download free Wallpapers, and read game reviews!

Tradewinds Odyssey




Sandlot Games announces it's upcoming release of Tradewinds Odyssey, another installment in their popular Tradewind series! We loved Tradewinds Caravan and are anxiously awaiting this game's launch!

(Bothell, WA) Tradewinds Odyssey, the latest installment in the highly-acclaimed Tradewinds series, takes you on an adventurous journey across ancient Greece, where gods, heroes and monsters of legend await.

Guide five unique heroes – the Athlete, Philosopher, Priestess, Minotaur and more – as you embark on over 50 chapters and quests, encountering characters both strange and familiar. Build, strengthen and upgrade your fleet into a powerful force unrivaled in the Aegean with powerful spells bestowed upon you by the gods, or use your unique Hero’s Talent to demolish your opponent in battle. Take part in trading like never before by creating and spreading goods to new lands.

Your adventure begins today… in Tradewinds Odyssey!

- Play as 5 unique characters, each with an original storyline
- Create and customize your own character.
- Spread, create and trade over a dozen exotic goods.
- New ramming feature available in sea battle.
- Achieve great feats and build your rank.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

- Windows XP/Vista
- Pentium III 850MHz or better (1.0 GHz Vista)
- 512 MB System RAM
- 64MB Video RAM
- Internet Explorer 5.0+, AOL 5,6 or MSN browsers
- Direct-X 7 (10 Vista)