Complete Poker Software Listings
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PC Reviews
Plants vs. Zombies
Peanut butter and chocolate, Tango and Cash, Martin & Lewis, the PS3 and rumble sensitivity – there are plenty of examples of pairings that are not supposed to work but do. The world is also rife with examples of odd pairings that don’t work out – like Metallica and file sharing. Fortunately, PopCap has forged a strange union that adds another to the list of pairings that seems at odds with the natural order of ...
Defense Grid: The Awakening
Somewhere around level 8 in Defense Grid: The Awakening things got really tricky to the point where I had to restart the level several times before figuring out how to move forward. By that point, however, I was already hooked. I was determined to break through this wall and see this game to completion.
Defense Grid: The Awakening is a “tower defense” style game – a mass of enemies comes along and the player needs to ...
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
I had a hard time getting through Sacred 2 for review, not because it is a bad game, but because it is so big and I have a limited amount of time to play these types of games. I have been following this game for a long time, so I was eager to place in my PC. Sacred 2 is a big title, not just in questing, but in literal size – you’re going ...
Hoyle Card Games 2009
Much like its Hoyle Casino Games companion piece, Hoyle Card Games offers up a nicely comprehensive collection of card games to while away your time, either online or offline, with free online play, including no monthly fees. A clear and eye-catching upgrade to the boring game of Klondike Solitaire included in every version of Windows since Bill Gates first crawled out of his dinosaur egg shell, Hoyle Card Games has a little of everything.
Whether your ...
Hoyle Casino Games 2009
If you have ever wanted to experience Vegas without putting your wealth at risk, Hoyle Casino Games is the game for you. Offering a large variety of slot machines, video poker, roulette, blackjack and even horse racing, Hoyle Casino Games is relatively comprehensive, with over 600 casino games to choose from.
The graphics are sharp but won’t push most graphic cards, and there are both online and offline play options available. Fortunately, online play is free, ...
Music Wars Rebirth
The latest offering from Wolverine Studios is not a sports game.
OK, now after you’ve allowed that stunner to settle on you for a while, consider what their latest offering actually is, rather than what it is not: Music Wars: Rebirth is a music industry sim that allows the gamer to take on the role of heading up a major music label, managing the careers of established stars, signing acts away from rival labels, and ...
Pipe Mania
Pipe Mania is not a new idea. Then again, not many games are these days. Back in the 80s and 90s, this game was called Pipe Dream. Modern gamers might recognize it as the hacking minigame from Bioshock. In any case, the formula behind it has been around for decades: place random pipe pieces on a grid so that a liquid (seemingly invariably called “flooze”) gets from point A to point B without spilling.
While ...
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Make the Grade
If you spent even a brief time looking over my review of the first game based on TV game show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? About a year ago, you’ll know I thought it was complete trash. Just about everything they could have done wrong with that game, they did. Any place they could have screwed it up, they did. If it was any more awful, I suspect Jeff Foxworthy would have ...
Line Rider 2: Unbound
The Line Rider series started out on the PC as an interesting little physics experiment – drop a sledder from the top of a hill, and task the player with creating a safe path for him to follow to reach the bottom of the hill, drawing in the missing pieces in the layout of the level for the falling sled to slide on and bounce off of. As Gary’s Mod taught us, playing with ...
Review: American McGee’s Grimm
Most folks are familiar with Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Or, more accurately, they are familiar with the family-friendly, Disney-fied versions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that have been made into popular movies over the years.
Yet the Brothers Grimm, who originally wrote their dark fairy tales in German in the 19th century, had far darker visions than the versions traditionally passed down by Walt Disney and Company. In fact, most of them would seem like appropriate bedtime ...
Out of the Park Baseball 9
Text-based sports management sims have come into their own heyday recently, and one of the franchises that’s been around since before they became cool again is the Out of the Park Baseball series by Out of the Park Developments. The latest iteration, OOTP 9, is a game that had a generously-sized development team for a game of this type – four people.
That team includes two lead developers, an art designer and a product ...
Total Extreme Wrestling 2008 (PC)
I’ve played demos of Total Extreme Wrestling long before I was asked to review this title, and I must say that with this latest version, the game has improved considerably. While there is still room for growth, with this version Total Extreme Wrestling 2008 officially becomes “playable” in my book. What were the problems with previous versions? Well, for one thing, the series seemed dead-set on including a graphical wrestling match simulator that simply never worked ...Political Machine 2008
It’s been four years (wow!) since I reviewed the last version of this PC game, and in that time, although the political landscape has changed quite a bit, Political Machine 2008 has changed hardly at all. Sure, there’s a roster update, but the game itself, as well as its art and design, have hardly changed at all.
Intended as a quick-play title that brushes over the details, Political Machine 2008 lets you choose to play ...
Crazy Machines 2
For those who don’t know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, take a minute and type the term into YouTube and watch a few videos. Go on, I’ll wait. Essentially, we’re talking about a “machine” consisting of various everyday objects linked together to form chain reactions resulting in an outcome that’s generally ridiculously simple compared to the complexity of the machine used to do it.
Much like its predecessor and the Incredible Machines series, Crazy ...
Jack Keane
Let’s face reality – the heyday of the adventure game is long gone. Sure the genre has a dedicated following, but the sports games and action titles that are all 3D get the big sales figures these days. Games such as Maniac Mansion, The Dig and King’s Quest are still held in high regard not only with adventure gamers, but also the videogame community as a whole.
Even though the popularity of the adventure ...
Draft Day Sports: College Basketball
When some companies update their sports games, the changes from release to release are so minor, so cosmetic, it would make Jane Iredale jealous enough to look into IP infringement. That’s not the case with Wolverine Studios and developer Gary Gorski.
2007 has been a banner year for Gorski and Wolverine; they began the year updating their pro basketball game into the well-received Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball, them releasing the second iteration of their pro ...
The Witcher
Those of us that grew up playing pen and paper RPGs will certainly appreciate what The Witcher has to offer. Unlike many of today’s games that throw in a lot of swearing, violence and perhaps a topless woman or two in order to demonstrate how “adult” they are, The Witcher tackles adult themes in an adult manner. Sure, there’s a fair bit of gratuitous and visceral adult trappings to be found here, but the ...
Tarr Chronicles
The similarities between Tarr Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica are not lost on me. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it as much as I did. Humanity is on the run from an alien force that is so devastating half the galaxy has already fallen. Enter the mysterious ancient artifact, another race, and thing start heating up.
Basically Tarr Chronicles is your basic space combat type of affair. There are escort missions, search, recon, but everything pretty ...
Escape From Paradise City
Escape from Paradise City is a combination strategy/RPG title that has players attempting to take over a city’s crime business. Sort of. The game has players taking control of three different characters, then work on taking out the local gangs – of course never starting out by taking down the boss outright. Over the course of the game players will gain new equipment and skills with which to take down even tougher criminal elements.
...
The Secrets of Atlantis
A game like the Secrets of Atlantis could be great. The 1930’s settings, the old-school point and click action, and an intriguing storyline, all work as the skeleton of greatness. However, when that is mixed with filler puzzles, a distinct lack of direction, and uninspired design: this game becomes that model half finished in your kid brother’s closet, it’s better as box art.
Secrets of Atlantis manages to prove why Adventure Games fell to ...
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer
One of the best things Atari ever did with the Dungeons and Dragons license after splashing onto the PC scene with the Baldur’s Gate series was to create its spiritual successor, the original Neverwinter Nights, which not only offered epic storylines in the package, but a robust set of tools to encourage user-created adventures and mods so that, quite literally, there’d never be any real reason to stop playing the game.
It worked well, and ...
Sam & Max Season 1
I don’t know how to describe Sam & Max Season One without sounding like some sort of fanboy. The duo was long overdue for a return last year, and the high expectations of fans were met. The high quality of gameplay and sharp writing in each episode kept players engaged and acted as a breath of fresh air into the stagnant adventure genre. Now developer Telltale has teamed up with The Adventure Company to ...
Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
Ever since Regis Philbin helped turn "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" into a national phenomenon, it seems as though every now and then, a new game show becomes a big ratings-grabber for a little while, only to be forgotten within a year or two in favor of some new fad. We had "The Weakest Link" and "Deal or No Deal" among others, and apparently, the latest of these games to make the rounds is ...
Bioshock
I’ll cut to the chase - Bioshock is easily one of the best games of the year. Now, what makes it so special isn’t some new graphics technology or some great gameplay innovation - most of the elements that makes Bioshock what it is can be tracked back to older games like the Half-Life series and even Bioshock’s spiritual predecessors, the System Shock games. However, while on a purely technical level there’s little here ...
Destination: Treasure Island
Destination: Treasure Island is an adventure game. It will scratch the itch for genre fanatics, but lacks distinctive character. Trying to pen a sequel to a novel that is over a hundred years old is tough, but trying to do so within the framework of a videogame is doomed from the outset. The player takes the role of Jim Hawkins, who has built a respectable life out of his share of the treasure ...
