Hospital Haste

Hospital Haste is a time managment game that has you dashing around as an overworked nurse, trying to care for a whole hospital full of people. Hectic? Yeah, I'll say!

There have been a bunch of good games like it, if you like the medical theme, including Hospital Hustle and Fever Frenzy. Don't count on realism, of course...for that, instead try the Emergency Room series by Legacy Interactive. And of course, there's the ever popular Trauma Center games for DS/Wii (I love those), which is enough to give you carparal tunnel syndrome...but it's probably worth it!

So, how does Hospital Haste game stand out from the sea of medical games? Well, for one thing, it's quick and casual. Everything is done with the click of your mouse, so you basically play by clicking on patients in need. If you're a fan of the Diner Dash games, you'll find it much the same. The difficulty is there, but while it's challenging, most players shouldn't have trouble advancing, and it's fun to play. As for the graphics, they're midway, suitable enough for a casual game but not stellar. I'd say this is a nice addition for fans of the time management genre.

If you'd like to play Hospital Haste, there's a free trial of the game available.

There's a MAC version available, too. The system requirements to play this game on your PC include:

• OS: Windows XP/Vista
• CPU: 1.4 GHz
• RAM: 512 MB
• DirectX: 9.0
• Hard Drive: 134 MB

And, here are some in-game screenshots:

Review by Neroli

My Kingdom for the Princess II

Follow Arthur and Helen on a grand new adventure in My Kingdom for the Princess II, the highly anticipated sequel to the award-winning game My Kingdom for the Princess.

Princess Helen and Sir Arthur decide to go on a honeymoon after their glorious wedding when adversity strikes once again. Now, Arthur must clear the land, defend against invaders, and work with magical beings as he chases after Longbeard the Dwarf, who has kidnapped the Princess.

Lend Sir Arthur a hand and save the Princess. Guide workers to clear the roads, build structures, and collect resources that will get him through. Think your way to triumph as you strategically plan the best course of action. Do you build a warehouse first, or repair the sawmill? Do you use the speed power-up, or add on an extra worker? It's all in your hands! With 60 challenging levels, fun mini-games, trophies, and a whole new kingdom to build, this exciting adventure is certain to please you.

My Kingdom for the Princess 2 game features:
- The award-winning Simulation/Resource game returns with an all-new adventure.
- Follow a whimsical storyline featuring flying cats, witches and wizards.
- Collect resources to clear roads, build structures and rescue Princess Helen.
- Enjoy 60 challenging levels, fun mini-games, trophies, and a whole new kingdom.

Review from macgamefiles

Wedding Dash 4-Ever

For many people, getting married can be one of the happiest moments of their lives, but the amount of planning and preparation that goes into making the big day perfect can bring with it a tremendous amount of pressure. People get so stressed out that they break down and hire a wedding planner. It’s no wonder that business is booming for Quinn in Wedding Dash 4-Ever, the newest installment in PlayFirst’s popular wedding-themed Diner Dash spinoff franchise.

As this bridal-themed time management game unfolds, wedding planner extraordinaire Quinn gets a surprise visit from her mother, who hasn’t been informed the engagement between her daughter and Joe, the photographer, has been called off. When mom swoops in to micromanage the wedding planning business, she also begins planning Quinn’s wedding, leaving the supposed bride-to-be in a bit of a pickle. With some help from her pal Flo (of Diner Dash fame), Quinn has to figure out how to keep up with a new batch of weddings to plan while also dealing with the situation with her mother.

With Quinn’s mom in the picture to handle the nitty-gritty prep work, one of the biggest changes to the series found in Wedding Dash 4-Ever is you no longer have control over any of the pre-wedding details. Instead of selecting wedding accoutrements for a couple based on their budget and interests, you’ll focus on making sure the reception and other aspects of the festive event go off without a hitch. As in past games, this means you’ll seat guests based on their personal quirks, provide them with three food courses, keep them from wrecking the occasion, and make sure everyone has a good time – including the bride and groom.

The gameplay has you simultaneously controlling Quinn and Flo to queue up various tasks in order to keep guests happy and earn enough points to progress through each stage. Clicking on context sensitive tasks sends either Quinn or Flo scrambling about to handle the little details and food-related jobs respectively. This aspect of the game hasn’t changed in the slightest. You get bonus points for chaining the same tasks together and lose points when guests get too grumpy. Failing to meet the minimal score in a stage forces you to restart, while beating it lets you push for the tougher-to-achieve expert score benchmark.

Wedding party guests still have oddball preferences about who they do and don’t want to sit next to, many of them eat at different speeds, and some have explosive behaviors that you have to quell before things get out of hand. You’ll run into chatty aunts who freak out about their missing pooches, wedding crashers who try to ruin the party, old guys who fall asleep and forget which course they’re eating, and bratty little ring-bearer girls who throw food fight tantrums, among others. Though the drawings are a little different, a lot of the same special character behaviors are carried over from the last game.

The bridge and groom also want to get in on the action, and they like to mingle with the guests as much as possible, making handling their needs part of the big chaotic shuffle. Quinn has a few special duties as well, including ushering guests in front of the camera for a picture with the (hopefully) happy couple, providing the microphone for any guests that feel like spouting words of praise for the bride and groom, and fixing any unforeseen issues that suddenly arise with the venue or guests.

A few new mini-games and other activities have been added in to replace the elements that have been cut from Wedding Dash 4-Ever. Each level now has a new hidden object element to it. In each case, the bride and groom have lost some important set of items, and you can try to hunt them down in the scenery amidst all the hustle and bustle. This earns you extra points and unlocks a special gift for Quinn’s wedding, and it adds an extra level of challenge when you’re juggling the needs of so many guests at once.

There's also now a seating mini-game lets Quinn help seat guests at the wedding ceremony itself, which is a first for the series. You’re given a bunch of guests with specific seating needs and a limited number of seats on the pink bride’s side and the blue groom’s side available to work with. It has a fun puzzle element to it, and doing a decent job earns you extra money for upgrades.

You’ll also find a new conga line mini-game that has you picking up guests along the way and delivering them to the bride and groom. While they’re not major game-changers, these diversions happen several times in each of the five wedding locations, and they change the gameplay up at the right moments.

New wedding venues, special mini-games, and a few other subtle updates offer enough change to appease fans of the series who simply want another solid helping of Wedding Dash fun, but the lack of real growth in this fourth installment in the series is a bit of a disappointment. To be sure, it’s a well-made and enjoyable game that has tons of stages and plenty of challenge. It just doesn’t have that extra spark to make it completely stand out from its predecessors.

Review by Nathan Meunier

The Treasures of Mystery Island: The Gates of Fate

Some people just seem to attract trouble. Take Alex and Lisa, a young couple who have stumbled from one mysterious island adventure (2008’s The Treasures of Mystery Island) to another. To reveal the main plot device that drives the action here would be to spoil an early twist, so all you really need to know is that The Treasures of Mystery Island: The Gates of Fate offers more of the same accomplished hidden object gameplay.

This time Alex and Lisa find themselves separated on the aforementioned mysterious island after the intervention of a tricksy shaman. This sets about a fine (if nonsensical) cooperative adventure as our heroes bid to reunite and return home.

It isn’t spoiling too much to reveal that your quest involves the collection of four tiles from the magical gateway that got you into this mess. These are spread throughout the island, but the bulk of your time will be spent carrying out relatively mundane – if ingenious - tasks such as repairing bridges, drying out papers and chopping fire wood.

As this suggests, The Gates of Fate adopts the same approach to the HOG genre as its predecessor – that is that each bout of locating scattered objects contributes more to the game than just ticking off an arbitrary list. Rather, you’ll be collecting each of the components and tools for the aforementioned bridge repair, and you’ll need to recall where in an earlier scene you saw the chunks of wood for the chopping task.

This highlights to another of the features that has been carried over from the previous game. Your hand is held a lot less than in others games of this type, as you’re often expected to use your initiative and powers of recollection to determine where to go next. If you like your HOGs to wrap everything up in tidy, level-based solutions then this isn’t the game for you. There’s a lot of toing and froing just to solve the simplest of puzzles.

As you’d expect from a modern hidden object game, there’s also a fair smattering of mini-games to keep things fresh. While these prove to be the downfall of many, in The Treasures of Mystery Island: The Gates of Fate the hits manage to outnumber the misses. From lining up map templates to a fiendish rotation-based puzzle there’s commendable imagination on show in many of the game’s diversions. The ones that stump you (or annoy you) too much can be skipped at no penalty, other than to your completion rating.

Some of the irritations on show here are tougher to overlook. Quite a few of the puzzles go that little bit too far with their demands on you, sending you wandering through previous scenes with scant direction or justification. In a similar way, many of the puzzles contain unnecessary extra steps that just serve to frustrate, such as having to find something to pin back a tree branch in order to allow the sun’s rays through.

As hinted at before, the story is fairly ridiculous, with many of the puzzle setups clunkily handled and ineffectually justified. This isn’t helped by the two bland lead characters, with the spud-headed Alex and the Barbie doll-meets-extra-terrestrial Lisa wholly failing to engage. You’ll want to see the next puzzle, but you won’t care if the two protagonists ever see each other again.

Despite these shortcomings though, The Treasures of Mystery Island: The Gates of Fate is another enjoyable slice of HOG adventure. Like the prequel, it manages to lend purpose to finding and collecting a bunch of discarded stuff. By incorporating elements of the classic point ‘n’ click adventure genre, it extends its challenge and appeal considerably.

Review by Jon Mundy

Redemption Cemetery: Curse of the Raven

I think you will agree with me, that recently it’s very difficult to find a really interesting hidden object game which differs from the wide variety of other puzzle games. Made by ERS Game Studious, Redemption Cemetery: Curse of the Raven is the kind of game, which won’t leave you indifferent!
One night after a car crash you find yourself being trapped in a strange cemetery that doesn’t let you go. Trying to find a way out of there, you stumble across a cursed graveyard, a restless spirit asks you to save his daughter and promises to help you struggle out of this cemetery. Picking your way through different mysterious places of the Redemption Cemetery you meet many spirits, begging you to save them. Helping them you come nearer to the clue of the curse.

Redemption Cemetery is a typical hidden object game, but its gameplot is so intriguing and interesting that I was really absorbed till the end of the game. The game is a little bit lengthy but I can assure you the game’s three "novellas" and a bonus adventure will win your heart.

As in many games there is a variety of locations here to explore – from the cemetery itself to the different ghosts’ worlds and you will have to return to some places again to complete your tasks. But you won’t be bored because of variety of fascinating tasks that you will have some time to solve. There is only one a little bit preposterous task to my mind – making the stool while the house is on fire. But maybe you will enjoy it.

I would also like to take your notice of hidden object system: once you use a hint, another will be available only after 60 seconds. But the hint by itself is very attractive - the flock of bats that fly out from the gargoyle's mouth to point where the object is hidden. One more interesting feature of this game: sparkling areas indicate places where you can zoom in and play hidden object scenes, so you will always be prepared for seeking objects.

You will find a lot of captivating minigames and puzzles, they are neither too hard and nor too easy.
Graphics of the game are just excellent! It's so skillfully made that sometimes you can't realizeif it is reality or just fantastic world! Mysterious graveyard, parks and an old house!

In my opinion, the all atmosphere of the game is a little bit dreadful. Especially suddenly appearing spirits with their “Whaah, I was murdered!” or “Whaah, save my daughter!”. Ah, and thank actors for their skillful voice acting. I really enjoyed little girl’s and her father's voices!

In summary I would like to say that Redemption Cemetery: Curse of the Raven is a really interesting mix of adventure and hidden object game. So it's really worth spending your time on it!

Review from Game Mile