where are the good games?

When my cousin introduced me to Mousehunt, I sneered at him. What is so nice about a game where you just click to catch mice? It seems he has the last laugh. Two months down the road, I'm still playing Mousehunt.

Mousehunt is exactly what its title implies, hunting mouse. You play the role of a mouse hunter in a kingdom overpopulated by mutated/evolving mouse. Starting with the choice of either a tacky glue mouse trap or a high tension spring trap, you travel through the region and upgrade traps to catch more challenging mice.

Part of the rising wave of passive games on facebook (ghost trapper, myth monger etc), it is meant to be played while browsing the web or whatever you are doing on your PC. You can either login once a day or sound your horn to catch a mouse every 15 minutes.

Initially, I was bored by the mousehunt. I mean, you have to wait 15 minutes for another catch? I actually ignored mousehunt for a while until I realise that there is hourly mouse traps. As long as I login once day, I can still progress in the game. Since I spend a horrific amount of time reading romance fictions online, Mousehunt eventually becomes a favourite of mine.

You can add people hunting in the same area - change your piracy setting if you do not want people to see your details - to sound your horn. Afterwards, you just need to visit the page every hour - since the others are doing the work! - and enter the code for king rewards every 3 hours. It's a lazier but faster way to move up the ranks.

Mousehunt is also attractive in terms of its content. There are some gorgeous artwork for the 145 mice available in the game. The game also allows you to craft cheese and traps. It also has an option to donate money for special cheese for potions. You can also join the tournaments to win tokens and chest, of which the use is still not known. The tourneys are fun but I enjoy catching every single mouse better. I'm a collector - anyone who has seen my book shelves will agree - and the sense of achievement, even if it's by luck, from catching a rare mouse is strong.

The game is not without its flaws. At its worst, Mousehunt reminds me of mmorpgs. It is a never-ending game. As you progress, each rank becomes progressively more difficult to obtain. There is no end to the game; you just catch more mice and travel to whichever area you can go to. Eventually the game will get monotonous. For now, as a legendary, I still have plenty of content go through with. I dreaded the day when I finally reach the hero rank when I can access the last part of the currently available game content.

Nonetheless, the game is still rather fun to play with as long as you take your time to enjoy it.

Rating: Try it at least once

I like playing bejeweled. There is something remarkable about a game that wastes 1 hour of my ought-to-be productive time each time I click on the site. It happened when I was a silly emo teenager - as well as with bookworm adventures but that's another story about PopCap's addictive games - and it still occurs now.

The current reincarnation of Bejeweled on facebook is more or less the same as before with one big difference. You have exactly one minute to obtain the highest score humanly possible. It is also what makes this bejeweled so addictive to me. I often find myself mumbling under my breath, 'just one more time and I'll stop'. As you can see by the amount of time since I last updated this blog, I do not stop.

The game comes with stats that tells you how well you do. It also comes with the levels for badge you obtain. In my opinion, I think it's just a disguised way to shout to the world how addicted to the game you are.

Frankly, I do not like this version of Bejeweled Blitz at all. The funky looking 3d shapes and that movie trailer voice? Yuck. Yet, I find myself returning to the game again and again. If I can remember who it is on my friendlist that introduced this game to me, I'll going to give him/her a kick.

Rating: Try it at least once

I hate the bloody popcap game ( I want the old version back!) but I have to admit it's good, considering how addicted I am.

This site has not been updated for 2 months. Not my fault! I have been distracted by my on-going challenge - and making good progress on it - among other things while my team has been doing whatever they are doing. Apparently it involves work and de-stressing of said work on iphones and DS.

I doubt you care so let's get to the main point. I'm not about to let watgg languish so do expect from now on, at least one review each week. The next few reviews will be on my current addictions on facebook, and some freeware iphone games. Do look out for them!

Published under the Personal Trainer series in US, Cooking Guide is one of applications created for the DS. With 245 recipes from around the world all in 1 cartridge, Cooking Guide can be said to be better than most recipes books! It certainly offers functions that a traditional book cannot compete with.

One of those function is voice recognition. If you have your hands tied up preparing or cooking, you only have to say "Continue!" and the guide will read out the next step for you. Can't catch what the Guide is announcing? Just say "Repeat!" and the instructions are repeated for you. The drawback is, you may have to lean closer to your DS or articulate louder to get your voice register.



You can choose several ways to view the recipes: by country, by ingredients (great when you just want to cook whatever that's in your refrigerator!), by requirement (selecting the difficulty level, cook time etc), and by keyword. You can also exclude ingredients. Recipes with those excluded ingredients will be marked by a X. Cooking guide also allows you to resume your recipe from where you last stopped. Pretty handy hmm?

If you are take Cooking Guide: Can't decide what to eat as a game, it will most probably score zero. But as an application, Cooking Guide is brilliant and I expect more of such applications to come out on the DS. As a matter of fact, Nintendo has just came out with My Healthy Cooking in various languages. It'll be interesting if it can best Cooking Guide (once I get my hands on it of course).

I found a local store selling it at S$30 which is in my humble opinion, a reasonable price for an recipe 'book' that provides videos, recipes and other functions.

Rating: Not a game but still Fantastic!

Ever wish to play scrabbles on the go but couldn't because it just too hard to bring it around? Well, you still can't do it but there is now an alternative: Bananagrams.

A play on the word, anagrams, Bananagrams is a mixture of Boggle and Scrabbles. Perhaps one of the main complains of playing scrabbles is the long time it takes to finish one game. You often have to wait for players to finish their turn. By the time you completed the game, an hour (or more as this gamer frequently experienced) have passed.

Bananagrams allows you to bypass this waiting time by having each player to form intersecting words with their tiles alone. Once a player used up with original letters, he/she will have to say 'peel', and all players have to take one tile from the pool of remaining tiles. This pool of tiles is also known as the dump in the game. Whenever a player wants to change a difficult letter for another, they will need to say 'dump' and takes 3 more tiles in exchange. The game ends when there are no tiles left in the dump and the first one to complete, wins the game.

You do not have to follow the official rules of Bananagrams if you want. There are other methods of playing the game or you can even make up your own rules. Bananagrams is fairly flexible in this sense. Although you can technically play this on your own, you should play Bananagrams in groups of at least three for maximum fun.

At S$39.90, Bananagrams is quite expensive, however, it allows parents to bond with their children and help them with their vocabulary. The educational and a unique portable packaging gets a thumb up from this gamer.

Rating: At least try it once!

Bananagrams is sold at Isetan Scott, level 4 children department from 10th to 23rd of this month.

Typing Maniac is the latest popular game to hit facebook, judging at least by the the friend list of this gamer. Here, we have a short interview with aboone.

aboone claims that Typing Maniac is "fun but frustrating".

"Thought that (it) makes my fingers more flexible when I play piano," says aboone, a regular player of the game. "Really! I feel the after effects... after I play typing maniac and I practise (my) piano, I feel my fingers responding much better."

Besides this startling effect of flexible piano playing, Typing Maniac, obviously helps to increase the speed of the typing. It might be stressful to fulfil the criteria in the given time, it's good graphics certainly more entertaining than these few and more fulfilling than the limited free version of this. However, it might have a hard time dethroning the famous Typing of the Dead.


This gamer find that the need to press enter after every word, a flaw in the game design. Shouldn't the game register when the word has been typed? Nonetheless, this is a great game for anyone who wants speedy and flexible fingers.

Rating: Try it at least once!

noodles

Has been playing games for a long time but it was only early this year she discovered the DS. Unlike Howl, she prefers rpgs, - a byproduct of playing mmorpgs? - visual novels games, and short puzzle games. She counts Fire Emblem, Ace Attorney series (just started on Trials and Tribulations), and Peggle as her favourite games.

Howl

Into ds, iphone and boardgames. But due to her busyness, she prefers short games. Loves puzzle, brain, spot-the-difference and scavenger hunt games. Some of her favourites are Professor Layton, Chop Sushi, Dinner Dash etc.