Game Reviews

I spend way too much time playing games. It's my way of dealing with stress. The game landscape has changed, though. It used to be that you would buy a game in the store, bring it home, unpack the disks, spend several hours installing it and setting up your system to play it, then spend hours playing. Now, most games are online, or have an online portion. It keeps me on task most of the time, since I can't play unless I'm online and when I'm not home, I'm usually not online so I don't play games. But it also can get annoying when I want to play games and I'm not home.

Then there's the whole issue of paying for games. I prefer paying for the game upfront. Most games use the in-app purchase options to make their money. I hate it. I feel nickel-and-dime'd to death when I play. Or then there's the games that require you to have lots of friends also playing the game in order to get anywhere in the game. I hate those games. I have a hard time even sharing the Wii games with a second player. MMO's? Totally out of my play-time picture.

So where can I go to find fun games that aren't going to cost me an arm and a leg or require me to have massive ranks of game friends that will still fill that need to wreak global havoc and relieve stress?

Here's a site my kids pointed me to. A lot of the games are not my thing, but they are free on the site. I've found a few on there that I enjoyed so much I went and bought the game so I could download it and play it whenever I want. Search by genres, player ranking, keywords, or a host of other ways to find your particular poison.

The site also lets you create a profile so you can save your favorite games and scores. I haven't explored any of the other social connections available through the site because when I'm off playing games, I'm not in a social mood. Besides, most of the players come across as adolescent males, not the group I'm looking for most of the time.

Here are a few of my favorite games from the site:

Cursed Treasure 1, Cursed Treasure Level Pack, and Cursed Treasure 2
These are tower defense games that don't require much coordination but they do require some strategy to be successful. You play as the dark lord defending your treasure from thieving heroes. Simple to figure out, but it takes some luck to get the highest scores on each level. The sound effects make me giggle, but then when I'm playing this type of game, I'm in a violent mood anyway so screaming and explosions are what I'm looking for.

Sushi Cat
The first of several games, Sushi Cat is an overload of cute animated cats, animated happy sushi, plinko, and sound effects. The storyline is silly. The blue blob kitty has his pet/toy stolen and he wants it back, but he isn't big enough to overcome various obstacles. He has to eat lots of sushi so he can get bigger so he can get his brown blog thing back so he won't be sad anymore. You drop him through various mazes. He eats any sushi he encounters and gets bigger. He bounces off things, so it's like playing plinko with sushi and a cat. Now that I'm trying to explain it, I realize how bizarre the game is. Just go try it out. It's easy, mostly, strange, silly, and candy colored. Watching the extreme cat jiggle and ooze his way through obstacles is worth it, though.

William and Sly 2
I play this one mostly because it wins for gorgeous graphics. You are a fox, jumping and running through a beautiful but kind of bizarre forest looking for lost pages of a research journal for the sunbathing, half-naked guy that I still don't understand why he's there. But you find fairies, sprites, mushrooms, and other fun things.

If you have time and want to jump down a rabbit hole, check out a few of these games. Have fun and don't destroy too much of the world in the process.