I’m already ready for more and hope that Hipsoft, the company behind this brilliant addition to the tycoon genre, works on a sequel (could be same topic or something different with a similar concept). No one thing makes Build-a-Lot special — it just has the right amount of challenge, an easy to figure out interface, and absorbing game play.

Rub elbows with the mayors of eight locales where you buy and sell land, build and upgrade homes and special buildings, and help communities make their dreams a reality and thrive. The settings take builders from ornery towns and the countryside to the not-so-wild west known as Granite Springs and to Palm Grove, a Hollywoodish spot aiming to have its own film festival in hopes that it rivals Cannes.

The key factors involve buying blueprints, training workers, purchasing materials, inspecting houses to stave off damage, and building, of course. The steps to take depend on the goal and resources available. Two special buildings, the Workshop and the Sawmill provide added bonuses in lowering the cost of training workers and the price of lumber. It still takes money and workers to build these and these don?t bring in any rent money.

You can also build two types of banks, one where all profits go to charity and one where you keep the profits. However, keeping the profits means Mr. Taxman will come knocking on your door with a huge property tax bill especially on larger homes. If you don’t have the money, the tax bill climbs faster than a credit card with high interest rates.

In Career mode, what most know as story mode, buildings must meet all the goals for the level to move forward. The mayor is the boss and sometimes the boss makes requests in the middle of a job. But rewards will follow upon successful execution. A level begins with a specific cash amount, available workers, and units of material. And the hard work comes in carefully using these resources while obtaining more.

The interface uses tabs for easy switching to get the needed information. The all-important goals that take you to the next level always appear at the top of the screen complete with checkboxes letting you know when you?ve met the goals. This lets you spend more time focused on the other tabs that keep the work moving.

Most games have a second game mode to extend the game’s playability. Usually, the casual or endless game mode doesn’t interest me or they look like an afterthought in meeting gamer expectations of a second mode. Build-a-Lot gives players more freedom for creativity.

Rather than endlessly building and selling homes and lots, you can do whatever you want as long as you reach the financial goal. With many possibilities for reaching the goal, the casual game mode compels builders to play again after conquering all the goals. Furthermore, after completing Career mode, you can return to any level and play it again especially for those that don’t have a star indicating you beat the deadline.

I’d like to see more buildings to include a special feature like the one that comes with the post office. After building the first post office, you’ll get mail at any of the places you own. These letters are usually the bearer of great news and added funds — small but helpful. Perhaps, the cinema could send movie rentals and a much needed break from hard labor. OK, maybe that doesn?t have much to do with the game, but you get the idea.

The game also attracts those not into tycoon or diner style games as it capture my better half’s curiosity and he loves the game. This alone should speak volumes for Build-a-Lot -? a game of a specific genre that could convert non-fans of tycoon games and rivet those who are. Speaking of rivets, I had better return to work on those extravagant mansions and castles and sell those lower-priced Rambler, Colonial, and Tudor homes to make room for them.

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/2000/XP/Vista
• 500MHz or faster Processor
• 256MB RAM

Gamezebo has tips and tricks for surviving the more challenging levels of the game.

[Download free trial of Build-a-Lot]
[Buy Build-a-Lot]

Escape from Paradise with an island adventure includes five games to take a break from the beach grind. Beach and grind in the same sentences? When your people spend most of their time cutting trees (sorry, Al Gore and environmental activists — these aren’t real trees, y’know?), building huts and catching food, you’d call it drudgery too.

In doing reviews, I try to avoid referencing other games except to indicate what the game resembles. However, I can’t overlook the similarities between this one and Virtual Villagers. Even having played and finished Virtual Villagers 2 (VV2), I had a good time playing Escape from Paradise.

Both games offer advantages and disadvantages. If you can only get one, I couldn’t begin to recommend one over the other. Let’s talk about Escape from Paradise for a bit as VV2 has had its day. You land on a tropical island when your cruise ship crashed and encounter Mr. Tiki Man. Tiki dude guides you through your adventures on the island, so talk to him often.

Like VV2, you help your people build, eat, drink and socialize. Otherwise, if they’re unhappy, they work slower or leave your tribe for another. The game also involves finding parts to build a radio and playing one of 17 mini-games, which is where the game resembles Tropix.

The games help you score points and other surprises. Thankfully, you don’t have to win all of the mini-games to complete the game. I simply sucked at some of them. Five of the games appear somewhere on the island and you unlock their levels as you progress in the game. The other mini-games appear where the 30 challenges you have to do one-by-one to survive on the island.

With many elements thrown into the game, the whole thing comes together nicely to create an adventure game with strategy, arcade and puzzles thrown in. The variety works great for those (me) who bore easily like with Nanny Mania, but that’s another review.

The speed and inability to move people from one spot to another drove me berserk. Like Sims-style games, this one plays out in real-time and at times, I can’t do anything but wait for the people to build something before I can move on. I’d love to click a fast forward button. You can play the mini-games to help past time as the people continue working while you play.

It’s a long walk for the little people to go from the starting part of the island to the latter part of the island. In Virtual Villagers 2, I could pick up villagers and plop ‘em wherever. This one requires waiting until their little feet get them to the destination. One of the cuter parts of VV2 was helping villagers become parents and watching the babies grow up. The villagers had more personality than those in Escape from Paradise. I laughed more with VV2.

Unlike VV2, this one doesn’t take days to finish. It took me about two days plus I did it without help (there wasn’t much available yet). I needed more help with VV2 and picking up all the items turned into a chore. Your people work to rack up skill in both games. This one had three skills while VV2 had five, but I preferred this one since it was easier to get an idea of how much work it’d take to move up to the next level. VV2 could take twice as long for one skill for one person than it does for another.

VV2’s ending could’ve been better considering it told you bits and pieces of history and it could’ve wrapped up nicely had it told you the complete story. Both games equally drew me in and their endings were about the same — not as exciting as hoped, but not terribly disappointing either.

Side note: The game crashed when I tried to play two mini-games. Thankfully, I didn’t lose my place in the game. I’ve reported this to the developers.

[Download free trial of Escape from Paradise]
[Buy Escape from Paradise]

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/2k/XP
• 600MHz or faster Processor
• 128MB RAM

Tags: pc games, meryl k. evans

It’s no surprise the Donald has found his way into a computer game. The Apprentice: Los Angeles might not be what you expect. The game combines four Diner Dash style games taking place in different locations and a boardroom memory style game. Those not familiar with the TV show can learn more about The Apprentice on its official NBC site.

If you’ve played the original The Apprentice, don’t expect this one to resemble that flat attempt to take advantage of the TV show’s popularity. A look at screen shots from the two games easily shows the new version contains better graphics, and perhaps better games.

The success of Diner games depend on the game’s design and storyline. The Apprentice: Los Angeles has a strong storyline. Players run a sushi bar, boutique and beach rental. The fourth, a hotel, comes later in the game as the final task.

You play five levels of one task (a task in this case would be working in one of the stores) and then move on to the next. When you don’t score high enough to beat your rival team, you go to the boardroom. Each level contains a monetary goal, but even if you miss it in one level — you can make it up in the next.

A visit to the boardroom means playing a memory style card game. Race against two other players you take to the boardroom with you by finding matching pairs. Make high point matches and take away other players’ points until you reach a specific number of points.

The game play is another story. The customers in the stores drove me crazy and not in a good way. They were more impatient than customers in other games of a similar style. It didn’t take long for them to go from happy to throwing a tantrum like a child.

The levels grew too hard too fast and my hands cramped when I tried to move quickly. A little chaining (clicking ahead multiple tasks) is possible, but you don’t receive bonuses. Even with chaining, I wasn’t fast enough for these spoiled-rotten customers. Some Diner games characters don’t move fast and smoothly, but that’s not an issue with The Apprentice: Los Angeles.

One of the game’s strengths is its beautiful and crisp graphics. Thanks to the first rate graphics, you can’t miss what goes on behind the scenes like a chef trying to catch a fish in the window at the Sushi Bar for a few laughs. You also meet customers who obviously represent certain stereotypes.

The game also includes the Donald, Don Jr., Ivanka and 12 Apprentice players from the past six seasons. When Mr. Trump fires someone, we get the usual “great experience” and “I did a good job and shouldn’t have been fired” taxi talk. Trump mostly says, “You better work hard and reach your goal” or “Your team failed!”

Unlike other Diner games, the game avoids monotony by having three regular Dash games and a card memory game. Those who like Diner games will like this one whether or not you like The Apprentice since it doesn’t play a big role.

[Download free trial of The Apprentice: Los Angeles]
[Buy The Apprentice: Los Angeles]

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/2k/XP/Vista
• 800MHz or faster Processor
• 256MB RAM
• DirectX 8.0 or higher
• 32MB video card

Tags: pc games, meryl k. evans, donald trump, apprentice

Thank goodness this doesn’t come with smells like the upcoming My Name Is Earl smell-o-vision episode then it would be impossible to play without craving chocolate. You may want to play Chocolatier on a full stomach with the graphics clearly showing every delicious ingredient in the 60 different kinds of bars, squares, infusions and truffles.

The game comes with Story and Freeplay modes with over 130 quests taking place in 14 cities. Working through the tutorial, the game looked complicated. But it wasn’t. Give it time and it will become as addicting as chocolate. Thankfully, unlike chocolate, this didn’t hurt my waistline — maybe my bottom from sitting on it for hours in eager anticipation to progress in the game.

Not only do players buy ingredients, make new products, sell chocolates, buy factories and stores, and travel the world; but they also try to get the story behind a family squabble. Since we only use the finest ingredients, we must travel to cities around the world for specific ingredients. The two U.S. cities didn’t carry cacao. In fact, they carried the least amount of ingredients in the whole world.

Expensive products sell at higher rates because they contained ingredients specific to a region like the Sulawesi Macadamia Cacao Infusions, which contain one ingredient from Sulawesi. When you don’t have a lot of dough, you want to travel to the locales that pay more for the chocolates you have available.

Upgrading a factory from bars to truffles doesn’t simply involve changing the ingredients, but also buying new equipment. Those cost you a pretty pound. As soon as you assign a new recipe to a factory and have its ingredients, it turns into a race. You have to make as many as you can of the candy following the recipe within a set time. Unfortunately, this made me dizzy considering my susceptibility to things moving in circles. The amount of chocolates made during that time is the amount the factory can produce in a week. The bars are easiest to make since they contain two or three ingredients while the truffles can contain six unique ingredients.

Every city contains a store that buys chocolate, a market that sells ingredients, a special crop for the hard to get ingredients, and one or two local hangouts for talking with people to get the scoop on the business and the family. Some hangouts also give you a chance to gamble and double your money or lose it.

The game screen has a message section. This section lets you know about any problems in your business — such as degrading food supplies — along with any action items you promised to take and tasks you’ve done. This message section is small, hard to read and slow in scrolling. Sometimes I had more than one action item and it was a chore to find them in the message section when they didn’t appear at the top as current tasks did.

I loved the diversity in this game. There was no right or wrong, or a set path you must take. You could make whichever recipe, and travel to the destinations of your choosing unless you needed to find an ingredient only available in one place. You could help people along the way and haggle prices. The game slowed when I had tons of money, but still needed more recipes and couldn’t accomplish things until I found the right person. During that time, I traveled from port to port trying to find someone to help.

When I finally got a hit, the game picked up again and kept me hopping for the rest of it. I never thought I could manage six factories — the thought of that sounded like too much multi-tasking, but it wasn’t. In fact, I wish I had more places to visit. Chocolatier didn’t attempt to copy any of the “run a business” style games. Rather, its creator developed it from scratch as the game package turned out beautifully as the chocolates.

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista
• 700MHz or faster Processor
• 128MB RAM
• 800×600 minimum screen resolution
• Sound Card recommended
• DirectX 7.0 or later
• 30MB+ available drive space

System Requirements: Mac

• Mac OS X 10.3.9 or newer
• G4 800 Mhz or faster or G5 or Intel processor
• 800×600 minimum screen resolution
• 21MB+ available drive space

Tags: pc game, meryl k. evans

Not having played Mysteryville, Mysteryville 2 instantly reminded me of Magic Academy in the game play style and interface — Nevosoft is behind both games. The developer does a first-rate job in telling a strong story in its hidden object games and continues the tradition with its latest entry.

Journalist Laura Winner returns to the little town of Eurekaberg for vacation at the invitation of a friend, but finds herself unraveling a mystery when her friend goes missing. The town also plans an auction to raise money for repairing the leaky pipes. It doesn’t take long before realizing something isn’t right about all of this.

While the characters have commentary that references the previous game, it doesn’t confuse first-timers. I love the conversations between characters as the dialog interjects a lot of humor. I would like to see the interface improve in how it displays the conversations and the characters because it looks outdated and feels unwieldy.

Having reviewed many hidden object games, it doesn’t take much to see which stand out and which are run-of-the-mill. While the game play is ordinary for a hidden objects game, the well-written story and humor stand out from the very crowded genre. The lead character and other fun characters keep you interested as you feel like a part of the story.

It’s not easy to make the characters come alive and have an identity — and Mysteryville 2 succeeds here. You get to know the characters beyond the surface and discover their flaws. The smarmy lab guy makes my skin crawl, the sheriff doesn’t earn my trust, and the restaurant owner is like an uncle who wants to take care of you. The game play, speed and object selection move along nicely except when an object is long and narrow like cigarettes. That’s when clicking gets difficult.

Besides finding hidden objects to get information from characters and clues, players compare two scenes to find differences, find objects based on shadows of the object instead of words, put jigsaw puzzles together, and search for a bunch of similar object such as business cards, gems, goblets, and beakers. Hints are available based on timing. Once used, you must wait for the hint to charge back up before you can use it again.

The game breaks up into stages where each stage involves visiting a different location — some locations require more than one trip. In total, there are 22 stages, which makes Mysteryville 2 short enough that I finished in less than a day. I liked the ending and the story potential for Mysteryville 3, which would (I hope) venture beyond the little town.

Download and try Mysteryville 2

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/98/2000/XP/Vista
• 500MHz or faster processor
• 128 MB RAM
• Video card with 16 MB video ram
• DirectX 8.1 or later

Tags: pc games, meryl k. evans

Surviving many bad dates can make a single person cranky, but it’s worthwhile when finding the right person to marry. Next comes planning the wedding, which sometimes can feel like a disastrous date. And then the worst wedding nightmare of all — the wedding planner bowing out too close to the wedding, but not close enough to the big day that all the work has been done. Instead, the wedding planner turns the already nervous bride into a panicky one.

The wedding planner hadn’t taken care of the appetizers, side dishes, main dish, honeymoon, flowers, or cake. One bride faced with this situation lucks out with help from her friend, Quinn, who happens to be a friend of Flo’s from the popular Diner Dash series that started the game genre often referred to as “Diner Dash style.” Such games involve a lot of frenzy where the main character must accomplish tasks, keep customers happy, and reach the goal for each level to advance to the next level.

Wedding Dash has the advantage of being a Diner Dash spin off complete with the same cartoon-style graphics, story line, and likeable characters. Welcome to the wedding-themed version of Diner Dash. One might think after three versions of Diner Dash that the series could start to turn formulaic. On the contrary, Wedding Dash earns its success. Sure, Flo appears in the game on occasion, but Quinn does the heavy-duty work.

After saving her friend’s wedding, Quinn wins another job and soon the weddings start pouring in. As an accidental wedding planner, Quinn starts small by holding backyard weddings. As business grows, she moves up to a hotel, ship, island, and castle. Before the reception begins, Quinn selects three things based on the bride and groom’s background and interests. For each correct selection, the player earns $100 toward the next level of the game.

Players, in the role of Quinn, seat attendees at the tables ensuring they seat the guest with the right person or away from the wrong person. Quinn’s assistant picks up the gifts taking them to the bride and groom, feeds three dishes to every guest, and occasionally does special orders such as a request for a glass of wine or pass on a song request to the DJ.

Quinn doesn’t sit around as she puts out the fires, sometimes literally when the kitchen turns smoky. She also soothes the aunt, handles the drunken uncle discreetly, shoos away bees (carefully) and dogs, stops the cake table from falling and averts any other potential disaster. Upgrades appear from time to time giving players the chance to speed up staff, increase the food table size or gain points whenever a guest steps out on the dance floor.

Where Wedding Dash stands out is in the variety. The venues, the wedding couple, the guests, the potential disasters and the funny comments from the couple keep the game moving, As the game progresses, guests ask to move and sit next to someone else keeping things hopping. The challenge increases as you progress, while at times the situation turns frantic forcing the player to replay the level too many times. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s where the biggest frustration with the game dwells. As with most Diner games, each level has a goal score and an expert score. Reaching the expert score rarely happens in this one.

The other nitpick is that clicks don’t always “take.” Click on two dishes and after walking over to the table to serve them to guests, you realize your waitress only has one dish in hand. That wastes precious time which could mean the difference between making and not making the next level.

Typical of a good casual game, two modes are available — the story mode is known as Career Mode and ongoing mode with no story is Endless Reception (plays exactly like it sounds!). No matter the footsteps, Wedding Dash deserves its applause and a toast to many days of gaming bliss.

P.S. Southpaws, Quinn is a lefty!

Download and try Wedding Dash for 30 minutes.

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/2000/XP/Vista
• Pentium III 700MHz or faster processor
• 800×600 minimum screen resolution
• DirectX 7.0 or later
• 25MB available disk space

System Requirements: Mac

• Mac OS X 10.3.9 or newer
• G4 800 MHz or faster, or G5 or Intel processor
• 800×600 minimum screen resolution
• 25MB available disk space

Tags: meryl k. evans, games

There is strength in numbers, especially when shopping online. The more positive user reviews a product has, the more confident you can be in purchasing it. The only problem is great review sites like Amazon don’t always have the lowest prices. So you head on over to Pricegrabber or Shopping.com to find the cheapest prices there. Well, a new shopping site, Wize.com, has just changed the game considerably.
(more…)

There I was going to go and write up a big ol’ post comparing the new IE7 beta 3 and Firefox 2.0 beta 1 releases, and it turns out Scott Hanselman already did a great job of it.

For lots of detail and good review, see Scott’s post. He covers RSS capabilities, the anti-phishing/anti-fraud capabilities (yay, Scott! Heh), usability, download functionality, and more. Well worth the read.

If you run Windows on your Intel PC and have been doing so for, oh, two weeks, then your registry probably has some junk in it that needs some attention. Ever since Windows 95 was introduced, Microsoft’s great way of keeping track of programs and settings has turned out to be not that great thing MS had hoped it would be. Problems come from programs that do not clean up their registry entries when un-installed, from spyware, autorun applications, and just about anything else that touches your operating system. Heck, you don’t even have to be a power user like me to get what we call “bit rot” on your PC. Uniblue says that “94% of computers have corrupt, unused, and possibly harmful files,” on their systems. Ouch! So what’s one to do? Well what do you do after you’ve played a glorious soccer game in the rain? Clean, man, clean! And Uniblue wants to clean your registry with its Registry Booster.
(more…)

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a big fan of the IE front end called Avant Browser. Apparently, I’m not entirely alone. Microsoft itself has included a link to Avant Browser to the featured add-on section of the IE7 Web site.
(more…)

If you are looking to try out one of the latest and best performing video conferencing technologies available out there, you have come to the right place.

Quietly launched over a year ago from a group of former Stanford graduate students and professors, VSee is a new outstanding P2P video-conferencing technology that integrates text chat, screen and document sharing, annotation and full session recording while remaining extremely easy and simple to use.

The only drawbacks of this technology are that for now it is only Windows compatible, and second that it is not yet targeted at the large consumer market, but it is almost exclusively sold to a few large and very prestigious corporations.
(more…)

Q: Being a regular gamer, I was interested when a friend told me about software that can create virtual CD/DVD drives. Can you tell me more about it and which program I should use: Alcohol 120% or DAEMON Tools?

(more…)

Looking for an ideal digital camera to take snapshots of your loved ones over the holidays? The ever-insightful DC Views has a full-on comparison between the Sony Cybershot DSC T7 and the Nikon Coolpix S3.
(more…)

My Yahoo! has a note up about a new beta version. The first thing to catch my eye was Webshots as options in the beta portal. I’ve been using Webshots for ages - even my mother noticed the great photographs on my desktop.

That was just the frozen little tip of the iceberg, however. I was really pleased to see that it has begun integrating all the RSS feeds into My Yahoo!. I know Yahoo! 360 Degrees has RSS feeds, but they will be much more useful for me here. I really don’t want to get started in yet another online community or blog network. Having all the RSS feeds I can shake a stick at in one portal is going to be a lot of fun! Not to mention very practical too, of course. Fun… who said that?
(more…)

The Boostaroo Revolution from UpBeat Audio is a pocket-sized portable headphone amplifier and splitter that boosts sound. Before I plugged in to my iPod, I had the iPod volume at about 75%. With Revolution, the volume is at 30% leaving me with plenty of room to make it louder if needed. Also, due to the volume being lower, the Revolution extends the battery life of the audio device.
(more…)

novaPDF is a really neat tool. Basically, it’s a printer driver that prints to a PDF file instead of paper.

All right, so the concept isn’t new, but it’s still cool and cheap. At $19.95 for the Lite edition, novaPDF will convert your files into PDF format without making your wallet cry.

After downloading and installing the program (which takes all of one minute) you’re ready to print to a PDF. Any program that can print via the standard Windows printer interface can print to PDF, including text, Word, Excel, image, and PDF files. Although why you would want to print a PDF file to a PDF file is beyond me.
(more…)

Softland claims that its Backup4all is a “feature-rich, intuitive backup solution for users of all versions of Windows at all levels of expertise from beginner to professional.” That sounded like the backup solution I was looking for, so I took it for a test ride.

As is the case with most software these days, download and installation were simple - except for an unwieldy 60-character registration key. It took me two tries to get it right; the first time, I skipped an entire group of numbers. This would be about the only thing I would change, however. The Explorer-like interface is at once familiar and comfortable, making Backup4all immediately accessible, while its ultra-modern graphic menu icons give it a high-tech look. Hovering over an icon gives the expected descriptive tag and, of course, there is the text-based menu we’ve all grown accustomed to seeing.
(more…)

Do you have two or more computers on a network in your home or small office? Do you wish that you didn’t have to keep running back and forth when you need to do something on the other system(s)? Then Multipicity is for you.
(more…)

To effectively deliver a PowerPoint presentation or screen recording on the Web, the traditional means of converting individual slides to GIF and JPG image files is not the best solution anymore.

It is cumbersome, it takes time, it forces you into a fixed screen resolution, it pushes accepting compromises in image quality, and it creates large files that are slow to download.

So, what are the newer and better alternative tools and services that can be effectively used to deliver good rich-media, Web-based PowerPoint presentations online?

If you have been looking for an online collaboration tool that is designed to facilitate spontaneous meetings for business users, SiteScape Zon may be the application you are seeking.

Zon is able to synchronize contact details with a variety of messaging tools, and allows employees to quickly and easily determine whether potential participants are available to meet. Zon also has the ability to hold the start of a meeting until identified participants are all available, if required.
(more…)