Archive for the ‘Sim’ Category

Create a Mall Review

Sim | Posted by Meg
Mar 14 2010

Create A Mall6
Download Create a MallBuy Create a Mall

If you enjoy creating new towns, real estate or a yacht harbor, this sim Mac play Create a Mall is right up your alley. You will be building clothing, shoe, jewelry stores and restaurants for customers to enjoy. Enhancements to the malls and shopping centers are also part of your duties and responsibilities.

Create a Mall begins with Riworld, a mall developer, hiring Kelly to revitalize ailing shopping centers and building malls to Create A Mall1make a healthy profit. By doing so within their timeline, you will be given a bonus for finishing early. The play has all necessary information and data at the bottom of the screen listing goals at the far left of the boards. The tutorial is explicit and simple enough to learn quickly. Initially you will be asked to improve a shopping center by adding a few shops to increase its popularity. Click on the lease tab to open the file to access building stores such as a clothing shop. You click on that store and drag the outline to an available spot at the mall. Construction will begin and if you do not Create A Mall4have enough workers, must wait until the building is complete before starting on another project. When you click on the stores, it will let you know if you can upgrade or not. It will clearly let you know what improvements you need to make so goals can be met. If you are short of money, labor or supplies you must wait until you have enough income from your stores to buy the necessary items before more construction can be undertaken.

If your mall has the same facades or you need space, you may need to demolish a shop and rebuild another more in demand store. By doing so, you increase the popularity of the mall and will meet your goals.

Create A Mall3Create a Mall is very similar to Jane’s Realty or even Youda Marina. This Mac game may interest people who prefer to shop more than sailing enthusiasts. The play even includes bonuses where you can shop for items from the mall. In Create A Mall5addition to the shopping, you can dress Kelly in all the bought clothes and jewelry. On top of all the bought goods, there are ribbons and trophies to decorate Kelly’s office.

The play is interesting but having to wait for the money to accumulate while the days pass quickly, makes the game a little too slow for me. If there is a bell after the revenue is collected, it might help the play along. Other than that factor the game is good and the shopping fun, especially after many more items are unlocked. Build your own mall and have a ball shopping.

Features of Create a Mall:
-Become a Mall Developer
-6 Different Cities
-22 Store Varieties
-More than 40 Medals and Trophies

Rating: ★★★☆☆

The Flower Shop Review

RPG, Sim, Visual Novel | Posted by Meg
Mar 12 2010


The Flower Shop, not to be mistaken with the sim time management game Flower Shop, is a visual novel with some simulation play on the side. Made by the same developer of Bionic Heart, the story about love, friendship and flowers is progressed with reading the dialogue among the anime characters. You are also in control of some of the conversation when given a choice. In addition to the “talk” in this game, you can direct the mood of each character with your decisions.

In this novel you are Steve, a young, spoiled college boy, finishing his finals after his first year of school and not doing well in his classes, but he is ecstatic about having the whole summer to laze around and see his girlfriend. This type of behavior is quite common among college boys. Not surprisingly his father is extremely angry and decides to send him to his brother’s farm to acquire some discipline. Once removed from the city and delivered to the farm in Fairbrook, California, Steve meets and engages with his Uncle Sam and the town girls.

In the midst of this visual novel, you play a dating and farming sim game. While developing relationships, Steve must weed, water, and keep the land free of insects. During this play you must work as fast as possible because the time is very short. You click on the plot of land you want to weed and then click on the clear button to remove the weeds. With growing the flowers on this patch of ground, you can earn money by selling the flowers. This will lead to an interaction with Susana the town florist and holistic expert on good health. There is a scheduler to plan weeks of activities for Steve. You must balance your schedule to raise your stats and spend time with the girls keeping their relationship gauges in the good rather than bad portions of the scales.

Having lived in California most of my life, I am pleased the game is based in that state. However, the scenery is very generic and I can’t pinpoint what big city Steve lived in or which university he attends. In addition, the small town in the demo is deserted until Steve enters an establishment inhabited only with girls. Also the buildings are all very tidy with nothing scattered casually around the room. For example, Uncle Sam’s kitchen is very modern and neat for an old farmhouse with only a man living there with his cat. I guess I’m being a little nitpicky but I think it would have drawn the reader into the story more with a few more details in the background.

The characters are all done well in the anime fashion, but like the Japanese soap operas have happy, sad (neutral) and angry looks to them. Even the beautiful girls get nasty facial features when they are unhappy with Steve. Perhaps later in the story there is a comedic relief and other young male individuals. It’s hard to say how the story develops because the demo is long and drawn out, setting the game up for future outcomes.

The Flower Shop is different from Bionic Heart where the action and drama opens immediately at the beginning. Since there is less action involved in this novel, I tend to focus in on the background more. I’m hoping the later chapters will bring around some vitality with action and comedy. There is a great scene with Steve driving down a dirt road and comes across a jogger. They should have had mud puddles and Steve splashes her with his truck then there would be conflict instead she is angry about his ogling.

The Flower Shop is more a melodrama than a suspense story and should be accepted as such. It appears this game is aimed towards young girls, but I think you should try it even if you do not fall in that category. The music is muted and appropriate, and the anime characters well done. The dialogue sometimes is funny with words like bummer interspersed. I do not remember the last time a college student used that word. With 9 different endings, depending upon your choices, it will bring about surprising stories in this dating and farming sim play in a visual novel.  Will Steve go with his politically aspiring girlfriend Jill, Susana the florist, Clara the opportunist jogger or the voluptuous librarian Marian?

Features of The Flower Shop:
-Visual Novel
-Dating and Farming Sim
-9 Different Endings in Your Control

Rating: ★★★½☆

Cake Mania 2 Review

Sim | Posted by Meg
Mar 11 2010

cake-mania-2
download Cake Mania 2buy Cake Mania 2

Now that Jill has rescued her grandparents from financial disaster (in Cake Mania), she sent them on a Hawaiian cruise in Cake Mania 2. Jill is ready for her own adventures in the baking world in addition to her personal life. Her future outcome is in your hands. Where will Jill end up with 6 different outcomes to her life’s story in this Mac game.

The play starts with your decision to go with Risha, Jill’s friend, and bake in a posh hoity penthouse bakery in the middle of town or work for Jack, her ex-boyfriend who cannot run a water park and is going bankrupt, on the out skirts of the city. The 2 locations have different type of clientele and many personalities.

The play is very similar to Cake Mania, but in multiple scenes. A customer comes in the shop, you click on the customer, they read the menu and decide what shape cake and which frosting they want, you click on the shape on the oven and wait, click on the baked cake to pick it up, then click on the type of frosting the client requested, click on the frosted cake to pick it up, click on the customer and finally click on the money left on the counter. This money will goCake Mania 6 towards your daily cash total. This procedure is done over and over in the course of the workday. You can change it up a bit by picking up the baked cake and click on the next shape before going to the icing station. You need to do double duty to keep up the demands of the impatient customers. You can tell by the hearts what the level of tolerance is for that person.

In order to speed up your production and satisfy your clients, you need to purchase baking equipment to expand your Cake Mania 7shop. You can only do this when you have made enough money for the expensive items. Hopefully you are fast enough to make the daily quota. In addition to the new equipment, there are extras that will allow you to charge more for each cake and make more money.

There are 18 new and different customers from the deep sea diver from Jack’s water park, the security officer, doctor, and the old cat lady at the posh bakery. The areas are new from the first game, and there are 50 more kitchen upgrades to buy and install in your shop. The oven is the same old reliable machine that granny has always used, there are toppers for the cakes, and additional frostings. With a couple hundred levels, play can continue for hours.

Cake Mania 2 has more options and a twist to the story line that the first version of the game did not have. If you liked Cake Mania, you’ll love this second one even more with its options to the story line, different location to bake your cakes and funny characters to satisfy.

Features of Cake Mania 2:
-18 New Customers
-204 Sweet Levels
-50 Kitchen Upgrades

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Westward II Review

Action, Adventure, Sim | Posted by Meg
Mar 08 2010

westward-ii

Download Westward IIBuy Westward II
Westward II is an epic Mac game with a grandiose undertaking to develop and defend an entire town of happy, well-adjusted folks from the Copperhead Gang. What an incredible sim game for anyone who loves cowboys, westerns and pioneer type story. The landscape in itself is enormous and in a wide scaled and diverse environment.

You enter this game with music of the great frontier and western deserts and plateaus. Everything you learned or saw in the movies about the early pioneer days will come back to you in this massive undertaking of a Mac game Westward II. You select your person or hero from 3 unlikely characters: Marion unlocks the Windmill and corn, Maureen unlocks the banks a no cost and Terrance unlocks the trading post at no cost. One of them will become your hero so choose wisely. Your job is to build a profitable, happy town in the wild west. An explanation mark over the heads of the people will appear when they wish to talk to you. Just click on the mark and find out what they want. Left click on the people and drag them to another location. To move or look at other parts of the map drag the cursor to the edge of the screen or click on the small map on the lower left side and click where you would like to go. To zoom in or out use the scroll or plus, minus (+, -) keys.

To begin building your town, click on the tool then what you need built (tent, shack, log cabin). Not all the choices will be available to you. You must get experience to unlock more items. Your character is quite amiable to build your shack, but you must get others to help so your person can go and get food, supplies and more shelter. If you keep the people fed, they will work for you, and if you need to build a house, you’ll need lumber and people to build it. You need trees to build so you must drag a person willing to go to a fallen tree and click on it to get him to chop the wood.

In order to buy supplies and items, you have to have gold or money. There are a lot of veins of gold all over the frontier to mine. You can get a mine, have someone work on it and get your gold. People will often barter with you to work on your projects so take advantage of it to progress in the game.

You would think that all this is quite enough to keep you entertained but there’s more. The wild west would not be the wild west without the bad guys, and the baddest of them all is the Copperhead Gang. You need to defend yourself and your town from them by getting a group of people to help you in a shoot out. You drag your cursor around some people, arm them with guns and they will help you defend your stakes.

The meter at the bottom of the screen will help you monitor your necessities so you do not fall behind in the game, because you get so into the play and landscape that you may forget to feed your people and provide water when needed.

I could go on and on about this game, but you need to try it out for yourself. The landscape alone will mesmerize you. I kept moving over canyons, forest, plains and rivers and nearly forgot to get back to the town. Even though it is in a cartoon setting, it’s done so well and beautifully, you forget that it’s not real and you are just playing a very involved game. The dialogue is funny, the music big and the play most interesting, so build your own prosperous town on the frontier of civilization and enjoy yourself for many hours.

Features of Westward II:
-Bring Copperhead Gang to Justice
-Over 20 Buildings
-Awards
-New Sandbox Mode

Rating: ★★★★☆

Hell’s Kitchen Review

Sim | Posted by Meg
Mar 04 2010

hells-kitchen1

download Hell's Kitchenbuy Hell's Kitchen

Gordon Ramsey is famous for many things such as his restaurants, books, TV show, his merciless cuts at his underlings, and now he is known in the Mac game world as the reigning king of culinary arts with Hell’s Kitchen. You can make a career in cooking and develop your own restaurant in this sim time management play and on top of all that get constant gibes from Chef Ramsey. If you have what it takes to run a restaurant and put up with Ramsey’s insults, you will have a pleasant day playing this game.

You begin this game as a dishwasher working in Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant and work yourself up to apprentice, junior cook, cook and senior cook if you survive. If you have seen any of his TV shows you know he will be yelling and Hells Kitchenscreaming at you at every turn. Being called a donkey is softened by him saying he’s a proud man when you are fast and efficient.

The play begins in greeting the customers at the door by clicking the maitre d’s podium, the customers are seated and a click on the table will give them the menus. After taking their order the waiter will process it to the kitchen. You click Hell's Kitchen2on the kitchen arrow and you are now the cook. In this section you need to coordinate the cooking of the different dishes so they finish at the same time. There is another arrow back to the dining room area to serve the people.

If you can take the heat of doing all these things and take the chef’s scorns, you may make a great cook and gamer yet and get access to locked levels and recipes. Gordon Ramsey’s recipes are interesting and sound delicious. This is a definite plus for all the cooks out there. The recipes are broken down as Starter (Appetizers), Main Courses, and Hells Kitchen2Desserts. Pumpkin Risotto with Roasted Mushrooms, Grapefruit and Blood Orange Terrine with Marmalade Ice Cream are 2 recipes available at the beginning of the game. Can you imagine what you will be able to unlock? After opening these locked recipes, you’ll get yourself a full cookbook with 35 recipes.

If you are not a cook and live in the New York City area, you can go to the London Hotel where his restaurant resides and taste some of these delicious dishes for yourself. Have fun getting contemptuous phrases from the famous Gordon Ramsey and play a fast paced sim Mac game and whip up some mouthwatering meals.

Features of Hell’s Kitchen:
-Gordon Ramsey’s Commentary
-In the Kitchen and Dining Rooms
-Unlock 35 Recipes

Rating: ★★★½☆