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Why do I persist in doing this to myself? It’s not as if I don’t remember the previous years; it’s not that I can’t recall feeling grumpy and bloated. It’s not like I’d managed to forget that a Baby Ruth bar at 4 in the afternoon (and a Snickers at 5) can and will spoil my dinner. I remember! But having candy in the fridge is like having a large wasp loose in your bedroom: it may not seem like a big thing, but while it’s there, you find it hard to think of anything else.
After a few days of decadence, I finally just stuck the remaining bars in a bag and brought them to the office, where they joined everyone else’s Halloween leftovers on the break room counter. Somebody’s going to eat the rest of this stuff, but it is not going to be me!
Of course, I’d feel a lot prouder of that decision had I not eaten two Snickers bars in the car on the way to work.
As a point of interest, the break room counter at a videogame company is about the best possible place to dispose of unwanted food. Yesterday’s pizza, leftover stale pastry, bags of homegrown tree fruit, those little cups of macaroni salad you get with a boxed lunch but nobody really likes… no matter what it is, it’ll vanish in a flash. Seriously. I think if somebody did a full-blown DNA comparison study, they would discover that game testers were descended from goats.
But enough about sweet food; let’s talk sweet games!
Same jewels, different quest
It’s no secret that I’m a total geek for the Jewel Quest series of games. Ever since the first one added a new and challenging layer to traditional match-three gameplay, I’ve been raving about them. And there’s also no question that I love hidden-object games. So when I first saw Jewel Quest Mysteries: Curse of the Emerald Tear, my first thought – well, after I finished hyperventilating – was “if they manage to pull this off, it’s going to be awesome.”
A few hours and plenty of levels later, I can officially say that they managed to pull it off. Emerald Tear is, at its core, a hidden-object game, and an excellent one by all my usual standards. The settings are interesting, the art is both crisp and layered with plenty of eye-catching and interesting red-herring detail, and most of the objects are things that an ordinary human being would be expected to have some passing familiarity with (meaning that you actually recognize the darn things when you see them). And that’s important, because it means that even without the Jewel Quest trappings, this game could stand on its own against the best of the genre.
But then you add in all the familiar elements of the Jewel Quest series, used throughout this game in both standard and novel fashion, and what you end up with is… well, I hate the term “a perfect storm”, but you get the idea. For traditionalists, a standard jewel board awaits after each level. The board is also used in logic-puzzle fashion to unlock some of the scenes: you’ll have a small set of gems to place, each of which covers a certain shape of blocks and toggles the squares underneath to gold or stone. Some of these are real stumpers when you first look at them!
Best of all, though, are the little touches. All the jewel shapes you know so well are scattered throughout the scenes. Finding them is optional, and you won’t know how many are hidden in a particular scene, but if you collect enough, you can use them to purchase extremely helpful gameplay upgrades. Just a few gems can buy you an extra gold tile on each jewel board, or an extra hint in each level. Save up for several levels, though, and you could get something even more useful. Do you have more patience than I do? (Hint: mayflies have more patience than I do.)
You’ll also find the little gold lion-face coins hidden here and there. Collecting three of these gets you a “special”; in the main game, you can use a special to find one hidden item in the scene, and on the jewel board, using a special turns one square gold. Let’s see… other Jewel-Quest-y goodness… oh! As always, the story is told through diary pages, and the characters are of course Rupert and Emma. This time, they’re chasing down the legend of the very first jewel board, through four countries and a wide variety of different scenes…
…okay, yes, I’m just a little excited about this game. But then, it is awesome.
One fish, two fish, red fish… ate my blue fish, d’oh!
One of the things I love about videogames is their ability to make things that, in real life, are annoying, unpleasantly hectic, or incredibly dull seem like lots of fun. For instance, I’ve been playing a lot of Parking Dash lately, and somehow, in the context of a game, parking cars for a bunch of self-absorbed people that I would probably dislike in real life seems really enjoyable. Go figure! Then there’s Garden Defense, which is all about keeping ants out of your garden – ordinarily a frustrating and hair-tearing experience, but a lot more engrossing once you take the rocket launchers into account.
Today, I’ll add one to that list: Fishco. If Insaniquarium is too fast-paced, and Fish Tycoon much too slow, we’ve got the perfect game for you now. And it’s all about breeding and selling fish… and cleaning aquariums. Yep, cleaning aquariums, which in the real world is every bit as thrilling as watching paint dry. But you know, when you don’t have to manhandle the vacuum hose yourself, or scrub algae off the glass, or smell the dirty water (blargh), all of a sudden taking care of an aquarium is a lot more fun!
And even for diehard time-management game fans, the gameplay in Fishco is challenging. For the first few levels, you’re dealing with a single tank and one or two species of fish at a time. Add a second sale tank or a breeding tank, though, plus potentially incompatible species of fish, and some plants, and the different medicines, and the different types of food, and the market value of everything, and and and… heh. Let’s just say that you’ll start to consider the five-second animation of tank cleaning as a welcome break.
I just need to keep telling myself not to run out and buy a fishtank again. I do that every five years or so (because fish fascinate me), and the maintenance always drives me crazy enough to give it away within six months. For now, I’ll just stick with the game.
Oooooo, I’m so excited!
We’ve got something really cool in the works here at MSN Games, but I’m not allowed to talk about it just yet. So look for a happy squeal in the next Coffee Break, and be expecting a big announcement about a certain new game in the near future!
I’m really not very good at waiting!
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