Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios

In Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios Gilda, Flo's college roommate, invites her, Cookie and Grandma Florence to the set of her new show. Not surprisingly (at least if you're familiar with any of PlayFirst's Dash games), as soon as the women arrive they'll be required to make use of their top notch cooking skills. Will the second installment by Playfirst and Aliasworlds be an as entertaining and witty challenge as every dash fan expects it to be, or will players have to face a letdown?

Like its predecessor, Cooking Dash, Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios features 50 levels in the story mode across five different locations, and an endless mode, where the player can replay each stage with three varying levels of difficulty: easy, medium and hard. At the different films sets, including science-fiction, western and royal court themes, you will meet a lot of familiar characters, but also some new ones.

In addition to the usual cast of Bookworms, Cellphone Addicts, Kindly Seniors or Students, you'll meet new characters like the Director, the Celebrity and the Starlet. Like all Dash titles, knowing the personality traits of the different customers is highly important to play the game successfully. Some of the guests cause noise with their cellphones, thereby bothering all the other guests who prefer to eat in a calm atmosphere. I am still waiting for an option to throw out guests, although I doubt that will ever happen.

This is only one aspect you have to consider while seating customers. Apart from this you also have to take into account the colors of a customer's outfit, because each time you seat a person on a stool with the same color you will earn huge bonus points. Besides color-matching you are also able to earn massive amounts of points by chaining similar actions, such as clearing dishes, or serving and cashing out customers.

Your goal is to constantly serve entering guests with meals like fries, cutlet, pizza, ice cream or pineapple juice. To increase your effectiveness you can upgrade your equipment at the beginning of each level, or boost Flo's and Grandma Florence's skills. Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios offers a decent amount of decorative as well as functional upgrades, such as a more elegant interior design, quicker grills or an additional prep-table.

The two most important and noticeable changes from the first Cooking Dash game are "celebrity power-ups," and the Cookie-Meter. Celebrity power-ups can increase Flo's walking speed even further, cause every currently eating guest to instantly finish the meal, or give every seated guest a patience boost. These power-ups are activated the very moment you clear the dish of any celebrity.

This complicates the effective usage of power-ups strongly, since it constantly gets in the way of your chaining. However, after the player gets used to those power-ups and integrates them into the general routine, they are a welcome addition and interesting twist to the gameplay.

The same basically goes for the addition of the Cookie-Meter. After delivering a certain number of correct orders to the guests, you are able to click on a phone to call Cookie, who will immediately appear and take on the task of cooking the dishes and giving Grandma Florence new orders. Like the celebrity power-ups, the cookie meter makes the pace of the game even more frantic at first, but when you have used it a couple of times, it really simplifies the otherwise challenging levels in the later stages.

The game is as fast-paced as one expects a game in the Dash series to be, and fortunately you will also find the general dose of humor which is so typical for games from the DinerTown universe. Graphics are lively and extremely colorful, the animations are smooth and quite cute.

Regarding difficulty, Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios is definitely easier than the first game, and experienced time management players might be disappointed in how quickly they will have finished the story mode with expert score on every level. However, the endless mode offers an additional challenge with lots of replay value, and it can get quite addicting to keep trying to improve scores in story mode as well.

Cooking Dash - DinerTown Studios certainly has not moved mountains in comparison to its predecessor, and significant changes are few and far between. However, the game concept still has not lost its appeal, and fans of the dash series will be absolutely satisfied by this product without any doubt.

Review by David Becker
Gamezebo

Hotel Mogul

Are you ready for another time management and building simulation game? Yup, Hotel Mogul game is out and it’s the closest antidote to your building simulation game cravings! This time you have to help Lynette to gain back her family business which was cheated out by her husband. Show him what you are capable of and bring him down to his knees! (I’m feeling a little of the dark side today, haha!)

If you have been keeping up with most of building simulation games like Build-A-Lot, this game shouldn’t be a problem to you with all the building experience! As usual you will be given a sum of money, materials and workers to start off as you work your way to complete the level goals to advance to the next level. I would say the game is very similar to Build-A-Lot series where you get to buy your materials, develop, upgrade and repair your properties. Since you are allowed to sell your properties, developing and selling strategy works very well in this game.

In Hotel Mogul, you can build hotel, service and commercial types of properties. Hotels are built to host guests and in some levels, the number of guests is one of the level goals in order to complete the level. Building commercial buildings helps to increase the value of surrounding properties and service buildings to give you an edge over game play like Construction Mill which has an Instant Repair feature to help you maintain your buildings. You can buy any property that goes on sale but take note that the sale only last for awhile so do buy it before it goes off.

Every level has a few goals that you have to meet and you can try to beat the time in order to go for the expert score. Although getting the expert score is not a basic requirement to advance the level, you can always replay the levels if you want to keep it perfect.

Overall, I find the game pretty interesting with the different locations, rather nice game play and quite alright. The tutorial was not really detailed enough but well… who needs tutorial if you have lots of building experience! Hahaha! I wouldn’t say it’s easy or challenging as I did have my fair share of replaying of levels but one thing I know for sure is that getting expert score all the way is possible! Thankfully the hidden object mini games are not difficult if not I probably have to keep the game until I have the right mood to continue it!

Review by Jasmine

Build-a-lot 4: Power Source

Build-a-lot 4: Power Source is the fourth installment of the popular Build-a-lot series. It’s a strategy game where you make money constructing, selling, buying and renting houses.

Build-a-lot 4 keeps the main attractions of the previous series and adds new exiting features. This time you pursue clean and cheap energy sources making your houses more energy efficient.

Along with the Deadline Meter at the top of the screen you can notice a Power Meter. It shows how much power is been generated and used. The Purple part of the meter is how much power you’re generating while the Blue part shows how much power is required by the neighborhood. Keep an eye on the Power Meter as you won’t finish the level if the renters suffer from blackouts.

A blackout can be caused by too many power hungry houses.With the help of Technicians you can improve houses with Energy Savers and make them more energy sufficient. Met all the goals but the neighborhood is still in the darkness? You need to construct another power generator or reduce energy consumption. Houses do not generate rental income during a blackout.



Build-a-lot 4: Power Source features lots of recreational facilities: tennis, public pool, mini golf and amphitheater. Build any recreation and add increase the total appeal rating for the neighborhood.

To win a campaign you have to meet the goals set for each level. They include building various types of houses, raising your town's appeal, landscaping the neighborhood, earning cash, and more. Build-a-lot 4: Power Source has more things to concentrate on. Along with money, materials and workers pay attention on the Power Meter, wrench icons, appeal and technicians.

There is a variety of houses to build: Duplex, Condos, Georgian, Apartments and no blueprints! You can also build other structures like shops, buildings and power sources which provide additional services.



Visit a variety of towns and neighborhoods performing special tasks for local the mayors and generate a specific amount of money using any strategy you like with Build-a-lot 4: Power Source.

Review by Awem studio

Burger Shop 2

It's safe to say that if you liked Burger Shop, you're going to love Burger Shop 2. The fast-paced assembly-line time management game is just as fun as the original and, like any good sequel, expands on the formula with additional levels and fun new twists like extra dishes, characters and trophies.

At the end of the first game you were on top of the world thanks to the BurgerTron 2000 machine, but by the start of Burger Shop 2 your restaurant empire is in shambles - and you don't know why. All you know is that you woke up one morning in a dumpster with a bump on your head to find that all your restaurants have been shut down and boarded up. When a shady character appears and offers to sell it all back to you for a dollar, you take him up on it. As you retrace your steps to try to find out what went wrong, you'll also rebuild each of your eight restaurants back up to their former glory.

The premise at first seems like a contrived and rather lazy way of all-too-conveniently making you start from scratch again - until you realize that the developers are in on the joke too. The story is peppered with self-referential humor and snappy dialogue that doesn't overstay its welcome and really makes you want to keep playing just to see what happens next.

The layout is the same as the first game: customers arrive at the bottom of the screen and your job is to their food and beverage orders by clicking on the correct ingredients as they're spewed onto a conveyor belt by the Burger Tron 2000. To serve a BLT sandwich, for example, you must click on the top and bottom bun halves, bacon, lettuce and tomato, then deliver the sandwich to the customer.

Serve customers quickly and they'll leave cash and big tips, but take too long and they'll storm off. By earning a certain amount of cash you can advance to the next level and even earn an Expert score. There are eight restaurants and 15 levels per restaurant for a total of 120 levels.

Like the first game, there's much more to Burger Shop 2 than simply serving sandwiches. In between levels you can upgrade your restaurants to serve fries, beverages, ice cream, condiments, and more. There are more than 100 different recipes to make in the game, and you'll always be adding one more upgrade to the shop right up until the last level.

The ingenious thing about the upgrades is that many of them do double, or even triple duty. Take the vanilla ice cream machine. You can fill a glass with ice cream then drag it onto the milkshake machine to make a vanilla milkshake, or fill a glass of cola with ice cream to make an ice cream float. Combine ice cream with a paper cup to make vanilla soft-serve, to which you can add sprinkles, a cherry, chocolate sauce, sprinkles with chocolate sauce, chocolate sauce and a cherry.... You get the idea.

Burger Shop 2 features new breakfast, lunch and dinner menus that introduce a ton of new foods and ways of preparing them. Breakfast plates include eggs, sausages, hash browns, orange juice and different kinds of cereal, as well as English muffins, toast and waffles that can be placed in the toaster one- or two-at-a-time. New dinner options include steak, pork chops and salmon that must be baked in the oven, various pizzas, and vegetables and pasta that have to be boiled. There's also a selection of soups, desserts and donuts.

Many of the customers will be familiar, but there are some fun new ones as well. The clown - with his crazy orders of vanilla ice cream with mustard on top, empty fry cartons and lettuce burgers - is still my favourite customer, but I also got a kick out of new customers like "animal lover," a highly impatient who can be placated by giving her dog a biscuit, and "shirtless guy," whose flabby, exposed torso offends other patrons until you can slap a T-Shirt onto him.

Although the pace is relentless, the control is exquisite and you'll never find yourself fighting with the mouse. There are some nifty tricks and short-cuts that you can use to make the controls feel even smoother, all of which are clearly explained in tutorials. The game's graphics and audio are equally enjoyable.

Once you've completed Story Mode's 120 levels, there's still plenty to do. You can go back and try to beat your score on individual levels, try the more difficult Expert mode, play Challenge Mode to see if you can achieve a Gold rating in every restaurant, or chill out in Relax Mode where customers never get upset. Trophies you've earned along the way - 120 in all - can be admired at any time in the Hall of Fame.

As long as you don't mind your time management games a little on the frantic side, Burger Shop 2 is a must-download.

Review by Erin Bell

Gamezebo Inc.

My Kingdom for the Princess

Walkthrough for My Kingdom for the Princess.

How to play:

My Kingdom for the Princess is a strategic game, where you click on locations, places and people to interact with them, and complete the tasks set out for you in that level, and create a clear path for you to exit the level.

Bonus:

At the bottom of the screen, you see a bar that slowly fills up, with a little logo in the middle. This logo shows you which bonus the level has, and once it lights up you can activate it. In later levels, you will have the choice between multiple bonusses; so if for instance (see screenshot) you want an extra worker instead of extra supplies, just wait for the extra worker-icon to light up.

An important tip when it comes to bonusses, is to time them right, so you can make the most of it. For instance, if you want to use the "work faster"-bonus, don't activate it immediately when available, but wait until one of your workers has actually started working. And if you want to use the "extra supplies"-bonus, wait just before your worker enters the house. This way, you don't spend valuable time on just walking somewhere.

Reading the walkthrough for My Kingdom for the Princess:

The first few levels, will describe pretty much step by step what to do and where to go. This is to help you get a feel of how you plan effectively in this game.

After that, I will list the priorities in which you can best take up tasks, in order to play the level most effectively, and go for an expert score. The trick is to work your way in one main direction, constructing the buildings as you go. Unless stated otherwise, constructing a building has priority over finishing a certain part of the map.

By Martijn Mueller

Gamezebo Inc.