Fuzzy Games’ Neighborhood

The first television show that could seriously double as birth control, Fox's "Nanny 911" showcases troubling tantrums, disgusting messes and thoroughly exhausted parents who get little sympathy and absolutely no breaks. But that's what you sign up for when you pine for little moppets floating around the house -- even if it means you need some big-time help to corral and feed them, and shut their chocolate-covered, spit bubble-making mouths.

Reality show won't mean much to anyone without children, but for those blessed enough to get disrespected as spaghetti is thrown on the floor during dinner time because you won't let them watch Nickelodeon, this is heaven. Show is a facsimile -- OK, a ripoff -- of ABC format buy "Supernanny," which has no airdate yet.

Opening hour has a SoCal clan of four struggling to make things less hectic. Mom Karen is a psychomama control freak, and dad Matt hates everyone so much, he'd rather stay at work than come home. The culprits are familiar types: Four-year-old Dylan is already starting to curse, while his little sister, Natalie, is a crybaby -- with pipes like Sarah Vaughn.

Overscored and overedited, show is both an example of bad television and great train wrecks. On the easy-to-analyze side, everyone needs to just calm down and realize kids are terrible little monsters most of the time -- until they kiss you.

On the more practical side, this family, which eventually gets help from Deb, one of a cadre of specialist nannies chosen by head nanny Lilian, was in dire need of some outside help before someone lost it -- exactly why they wanted to be on the show.

That or the cruise they got as a parting gift.

Review by MICHAEL SPEIER

Variety

From the makers of Burger Shop comes the wildly anticipated Burger Shop 2! In Burger Shop, you successfully created a universal chain of restaurants and found fame and fortune... Until one day, you found yourself in a dumpster with a bump on your head, your restaurants boarded up, and no memory of how any of it happened. Now in Burger Shop 2 you must rebuild your restaurant empire, adding new twists to your menu to entice new customers while uncovering the truth about what happened to your original restaurant chain. Grab ingredients from the BurgerTron2000 to create tasty food items to serve hungry customers in this fast-paced food making game! Burger Shop 2 game features 120 levels of story mode, 120 levels of expert mode and endless play in Challenge and Relax Mode. Start your food making adventure today!

The newest installment of the Delicious series, Emily's Taste of Fame takes you on a journey with Emily and Francois as they make their way to Emily's new cooking show. With all sorts of hazards and detours along the way, it will take creativity and strategy to proceed in this outstanding new time management title brought to you by GameHouse. 

The game begins with a flashback to one month ago, where a wrecked car sits on the side of the road near a diner. Emily and her friend Francois enter the diner to think of what to do next: they're on their way to Emily's new cooking show, but they don't have enough money to repair their car. Instead, Emily strikes up a deal with the owner of the diner to do what she does best: cook and work in the restaurant and earn enough money to get their car fixed. Emily and Francois find themselves in interesting new places at every turn as they make their way to Emily's cooking show, but time is running out and the producers are waiting! 

Emily's Taste of Fame is the fourth official Delicious title in the series. Continuing the legacy of the series, Delicious: Emily's Taste of Fame is a restaurant-based time management title controlled solely with the mouse. Emily must cook and prepare food in a variety of combinations for a variety of customers, all while being careful not to make them angry and instead have them leave satisfied.

Delicious features two daily goals: a standard goal that will allow you to progress, and an expert goal. Achieving the expert goal allows Emily to earn extra money, which can be used to decorate the restaurant. Each decoration has a special quality that will improve Emily's service or the customer's actions in the game. True to the previous installments, Emily's Taste of Fame also features five main restaurant areas with ten days each, for a total of 50 bustling levels. In each of the 50 levels are hidden a mouse, allowing for bonus play and challenges all while maintaining the restaurant. There is also a variety of Easter eggs that GameHouse has cleverly slipped into various levels. 

Emily's Taste of Fame is a whole new animal compared to the previous and even recent Delicious titles, improving and expanding with flying colors. This particular title features a new and refreshing feature in which every single day has a particular challenge or task that needs to be accomplished in addition to running the restaurant.

Tasks can be as simple as picking up packages, or complicated as saving a life. The tasks are also varied in style, some departing completely away from time management and straight into the genre of hidden object. With a strong non-corny storyline and lovable characters, and furthermore an entirely new cast of customers, this game is a beautiful blend of heart-warming adventure, hidden object, strategy, and of course true to its core, time management.

Featuring an improved sprite and animation style, in addition to a thoroughly enjoyable and environment-complementing soundtrack, Delicious is more expressive and enjoyable than ever. But that's not all. Instead of taking place solely in restaurants, this title allows Emily to also work in shops, and even on a farm. While previous titles may have felt repetitive due to the strict restaurant environment, this one is anything but. 

The only drawback to this title is the fact that "Emily's Diary," a feature in the previous game Delicious: Emily's Tea Garden, will not be returning. Emily's Diary allowed the player to play through various days with various special challenges, including a non-stop game mode in which you served as many customers as possible until three left angry, or allowing you to perform such challenges as cooking strictly barbecue for customers. Hardcore fans of the series may be disappointed to see this feature gone, but Emily's Taste of Fame still provides a good amount of replay value in the mice, Easter egg, and trophy challenges. 

Without a doubt, Emily's Taste of Fame is the best game of the Delicious series yet, and takes it in a whole new direction without straying from the core and heart of the series. It does an excellent job of balancing old with new, providing a seamless adaptive gameplay for veterans of the series and an outstanding tutorial and hint system for people new to the game.

Hints and tutorials can be skipped or turned off at any time, but even more impressive is the adjustable difficulty, allowing each player to choose exactly what fits them best. Hardcore fans can play at the super-hard difficulties and those new to time management can play it at easy. The normal difficulty level is a very sound line that should be comfortable for old and new players alike. The difficulty can be changed at any time, even during gameplay. It's an excellent feature that should really be implemented into more time management titles. 

Delicious - Emily's Taste of Fame is a truly wonderful game for anyone: young or old, new to the series or well-acquainted, and has rightfully proven itself as one of the best time management titles released yet.

Review by Gamezebo

Is it possible to get cute-poisoning? I'm feeling a little faint. It could be abundance of happy, awesome, adorable-ness-itude-ism of this game I'm playing, or maybe it's just the fact that I've been sitting in one position in front of my computer all through the night. Hmm.

Wandering Willows begins by dropping you on a mysterious island in the middle of nowhere. This initially sounded a bit too much like the plot of Lost for my taste, but luckily there aren't any mysterious "Others" running around trying to kill you. Who would guess that falling out of the sky and crash-landing could be fun, anyway? Most people would be overcome by such trivialities as internal bleeding and broken bones, but not your character. No, you're tough. You pick yourself up, brush yourself off and start exploring the new world around you. Friendly (albeit weird) people, yummy food and cute critters (such as a donkey-triceratops lovechild companion that follows you around and does your bidding) abound.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of the game experience/controls, I should say this: It's funny. The character interactions and dialogue are extraordinarily cute and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious. The writers/designers employ innuendo and silliness to make Wandering Willows a joy to play. My neighbors probably think I'm nuts from all the snorts and chuckles coming from my apartment.

Anyway, this game requires the acquisition of a lot of stuff. You get to gather stuff, grow stuff, make stuff and distribute stuff, all in the name of helping the other people on the island. That sums up your activities pretty neatly, methinks. What, no? Oh fine, I suppose I can elaborate. In order to repair the hot air balloon that you crash-landed on the island, you need to make friends. In order to make friends, you have to do a lot of favors in the form of errands. These errands range from collecting berries to sewing fuzzy bear costumes. One by one, they help you collect the items needed to repair your balloon and get the heck out of dodge.

The controls are straightforward. Point and click to direct your character (and/or your little animal buddy) around the island. You can either move about freely on the main screen or select a faraway part of the island to travel to with the help of a small world map. If you select a person or place on the world map, your character automatically walks from where you are currently to the selected spot, unless you see something or someone you would like to interact with instead.

You get to find and collect a wide variety foods, natural materials, sewing supplies, flowers, recipes, critters and much, much more. You spend your time exploring, gathering, growing, sewing, cooking and even soldering. In order to sew a costume, you first need to find a pattern, gather the required materials (by growing cotton, gathering dye, saving some money and purchasing thread), then you actually get to make the desired item. The process is similar for recipes and floral arrangements. When you are out and about gathering items, you and your little animal companion come across other animals. There are all kinds of creatures that you can charm to drop items. If you are lucky, they drop an egg that you can use to hatch a controllable companion animal. Each animal has different attributes — some are great at climbing trees, while others are better off digging or charming other animals. Luckily you can train any of them to improve their skills and equip them with items that boost their attributes. For those of you who are achievement happy, you can earn medals for things like finding every recipe in the game, or collecting one of each and every animal species.

I have very few complaints about Wandering Willows. Actually, I just have one. It's not even a real complaint, really, depending on how you look at it. I found one of the food items to be visually distracting. The designers of Wandering Willows may want to reconsider the appearance of the maple syrup. If you look at it and don't understand why, well, you're a much better person than I am. Seriously. But you'll just have to get the game to see what I mean.

Overall, it's a really fun experience. The game is cute, quirky and surprisingly long for a casual game. I would even go so far as to call it delightful. If cooing at cute virtual creatures warms your heart and running around doing in-game errand-quests gives you a false sense of accomplishment, then this is the right game for you. It's like someone threw a unicorn that poops rainbows in a blender with an RPG, snuggles and your silly aunt Karen.

Review by  pragmacat

DinerTown Tycoon - Get The Zombies Out!

While PlayFirst are mostly known for their dash games, now they offer us a totally new genre in the old good atmosphere of DinerTown - a tycoon game. Here you'll have a possibility to try your prediction and strategy skills and see whether you can compete with the evil corporation.

Let Grub Burger turn everyone in DinerTown into zombies? Never!

Mayor Whimple, the leader of DinerTown, is not willing to accept the generous "donation" from the large fast-food corporation Grub Burger at all. He knows very well that the citizens of his city have enough great restaurants to satisfy the most exquisite demand. But the owners of Grub Burger have their own opinion about this. And they have a powerful weapon to support their point of view - Ingredient X. As soon as you taste any food containing it you turn into zombie - and get under full control of the dishonest businessmen. Very soon their restaurants start appearing on every corner and someone has to repair the situation ASAP. Who will it be? You, of course!

You will start from Darla's Sidewalk Cafe and try to conquer DinerTown's eaters back district by district. For each district you'll have a goal - to serve each customer type a certain minimum number of healthy meals before the Grub Burger makes a certain progress. The meals are served during a day, but you can't influence anything at that time. Instead you have a number of tools to get prepared before each day's work.

First of all, you'll have to check the news and see the estimated crowd and demand for the coming day - this will help you plan your menu and stock. After you've got all the information you go to Prep (separate for each restaurant you already own) and determine menu by buying new dishes and setting prices (sale or regular), stock ingredients according to the crowd prediction and purchase some decors for your diners (those become available consequently one after another). All those items need careful budgeting, as the money you have are limited, and the needs grow every day.

After you have prepared everything you can go to your neighborhood and start your day. But before that you'll have a couple more options, like advertising helping to draw customers to your places or new restaurants available for purchase. Once the day is started all you can do is click customers with coins over their heads for extra tips and watch your progress. There are some hints that will help you build a better strategy, like broken hearts when a customer is dissatisfied or red crosses when you run out of a certain ingredient. There are also some special people who can help you advertise when clicked, like Flo, for example.

After each day you can see you progress to the goal. If someone is not a frequent customer at your restaurants, you can order a market research and see what you should do to please him or her. You can also win the Chef Challenge for each day (look for it in the News screen). Doing this will slow down your competitors.

On the whole DinerTown Tycoon is a quite addictive and interesting sample of tycoon genre, so if you like the genre - it's a perfect choice to try!

Review by GameMile

Flipping burgers and serving fries makes you a success story? It does if you own your own burger franchise! That's the idea behind Success Story, a hectic burger-themed time management game.

Down in Burgertown, Mc Moo-Moos fast food chain is in serious trouble. A professor suggested they hire robot servers to make business more efficient, so they promptly fired all their staff. Things went from bad to worse when the robots went haywire and attacked customers. Then their former employees, still holding a grudge, refused to come back to work. You play as a teenage boy, in the right place at the right time, who offers to help. Thus begins your exciting fast food career.  

To play, you need to fill customer's orders quickly and accurately. Ingredients appear out of tunnels. To make up an order, you need to click on the proper ingredients in the right sequence. For a basic burger, this might mean clicking just a patty. As the game progresses, the orders become more complex, sometimes involving half a dozen different ingredients. There are also sodas, desserts, and fries which can be added to the end of an order.  

Accuracy is very important. You must complete burgers in order. For example, add the patty first, then lettuce and pickles. If you try the reverse, the customer will storm off. Likewise, selecting incorrect items will cause a customer to leave. In general, accuracy is more important than speed.

The more complex the order, the more cash you earn. If you take to long filling an order, the customer will run out of patience and change her mind by ordering something simpler... and cheaper.  

In addition to picking up ingredients, you can also pick up bonuses and tips. The burger bonus highlights the next ingredient needed for an order. The sale bonus boosts the price and quality of each ingredient while on-screen. The radio bonus soothes customers, so they won't leave even if you mess up their order, and the time bonus slows down the pace so you can catch up. The robo-cook bonus puts a robot to work, cooking your burgers automatically. You can also buy upgrades and bonuses in between levels, although these take a while to unlock.  

You sometimes encounter mini-games as part of the regular game play. You may also face another speed challenge, like collecting as many coins as you can.  Most mini-games can be played in the main menu. In "match" you must match ingredients by type, sort of like in a memory card game. There are 10 tunnels, and you click each one to reveal an ingredient. It's simple, and probably more appealing to kids. In "super shuffle," you rotate tiles in groups of four, trying to match the pattern shown.

Stack attack is a bit tougher. You need to shuffle tiles one by one, like a slider puzzle, in order to make the picture shown. "find the food" is confusing. I think you need to select the burger items in order, but it's tough to figure out which tiles you should be selecting. The instructions are a bit unclear. "Xs and orders" is tic tac toe with food. “Backwards burger” has you making burgers backwards, as the name implies. You get $100 each time you solve a minigame, and you can play as much as you like. Some games are easier than others, so if you want fast cash it should be easy to earn it.  

You must meet the income goals to go on to the final franchise, and might need to replay levels in order to earn enough cash to advance. The game play starts off easy, but the pace and challenge pick up drastically after a few levels. The items flip and change, and you must assemble increasingly complex orders. Customers also change their orders, making the pace very frantic. The customer's burger orders come in threes, so you can predict how many of each item you will need, which gives you a chance to form a strategy.

As for production values, the graphics are pretty typical. The length is about average, taking roughly 3 hours to complete. The music is alright, though it can get repetitive.  

It gets a bit confusing when you have multiple customers waiting. You can assemble the order for any one individual, but once you start building a particular burger you need to complete it before building the next one. It can also be tough to tell some ingredients apart when they appear in an order. For example, eggs and fish are both white slabs. Still, you can mostly guess what comes next.

Once the lids start appearing, things get a bit out of hand. You have to click twice - once to remove a lid, and once to add an item. It's difficult to keep so many tasks in your head, and very easy to get disoriented.  

Success Story is a tough game towards the middle, but the pace is generally good, and it definitely keeps you on your toes. Towards the second half of the game, some users may feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the customers' orders. It can get frustrating to manage the lids and multiple clicks, and the customers are very unforgiving. If you're good at multitasking, and want a real challenge, you might appreciate the difficulty in Success Story. If you get easily confused, however, it's safe to say that you won't have much success at all.

Review by Lisa Haasbroek

Having been a fan of the Chocolatier series I was both delighted and disappointed after playing this sequel, Decadence by Design. On one hand, PlayFirst's latest proved to be a highly polished adventure with challenging gameplay and charming characters and story. But despite a few welcome additions, the gameplay itself is virtually the same as the original, which might let down those anxiously awaiting to see where the developer takes this coveted franchise next.

Like the games that came before it, Chocolatier: Decadence by Design is an economic simulation that challenges players to build up a successful confectionary company. Now set in a post-WWII economic boom, you take over the Baumeister family business from Alex, who sets off to find her missing husband after he failed to return home from the war.

You'll start off in Zurich, but as with past games in the series, will travel all over the world in search of new recipes, buying ingredients and selling your creations to markets. These tasks usually come in the form of a quest, therefore you'll be asked by such-and-such to buy XX amount of some ingredient from a person in some town, and you might want to haggle on the price, and then combine the ingredients to create a new product back in Zurich and then deliver to someone in another part of Zurich or the world in order to turn a profit. Characters will often make comments or ask questions related to the Baumeister family, which is a nice addition.

Selling your goods to shops that you own will always net a premium price for your chocolates. You'll aim to, eventually, take control of major chocolate factories around the world, amass your fortune and distribute your goods around the globe. Some of the 20-odd ports you'll travel to include Capetown, Tokyo, Toronto, Baghdad, Havana, San Francisco, the Falklands and Belize. You'll see an Indiana Jones-style map with a little plane flying to each city.

While making chocolates almost always require cocoa beans and sugar, you'll travel to find great deals on milk, hazelnut, lemon, mint, caramel, coconut, honey and other ingredients to bring to the factory and play the arcade-like mini-game to make your new product. The factories used to make the confections consists of rotating machines, each with a number of slots to house the ingredients. You'll use the mouse to aim and fire the correct ingredients into each machine, such as shooting two cacao beans and one sugar to create a Dark Chocolate Bar (opposed to a Milk Chocolate Bar that consists of one cacao bean, one sugar and one milk). While it’s not too difficult – that is, until the machines start spinning faster and faster – some economic simulation fans may not want an arcade element in the same game, but I think it breaks up the game-play nicely.

Without giving much away, Chocolatier: Decadence by Design also lets you create coffee concoctions (with a different mini-game that has you fire ingredients to match three identical ones), truffles and infusions, exotic delicacies, and other products. But the real new addition to this sequel is the ability to design and name your own chocolates, and sell them into the marketplace. Players gain access to a secret test kitchen in Iceland, where they can try out experiments by mixing ingredients -- such as cocoa, milk, blueberries and honey ("Marc's Mouthfuls") -- which become part of the game's recipe book and weaved into the story. Great idea, and it works well as you aim to impress Evangeline Baumeister with a couple hundred cases of your own creation. Too bad you can't upload your recipe to an online -- but in-game -- recipe book and download other player's delights.

Chocolatier: Decadence by Design returns to its roots and proves to be a very entertaining and challenging treat, but this reviewer wishes there were a few more delicious surprises in store. Still, you'll love this tasty simulation.

Valentine's Day Salad recipe:

Ingredients:

Directions:

In a medium saucepan over high heat, bring water to a boil and add gelatin. After gelatin has dissolved, add strawberries, bananas and pineapple, mix well; remove from heat.

Spoon mixture into individual heart molds or a 9x13 inch baking dish; chill until firm.

Top each serving with whipped topping, if desired. A Valentine's Day dish is ready.

An American recipe: Apple Crumb Pie

Ingredients:

Directions:

Sift flour, sugar, salt and nutmeg into large bowl. Stir in beaten egg, sour cream and vanilla. Fold in apples, spoon into unbaked pastry shell. Bake at 400 degrees for 15 min. Lower heat to 350 degrees. Bake 30 min. longer.

Prepare crumb topping. Remove pie from oven. Reset oven to 400 degrees, sprinkle pie with topping. Return pie to oven. Bake until topping is nicely brown.

CRUMB TOPPING:

Mix 0.5 cup of sugar, 0.3 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon and 0.25 cup of melted butter in small bowl until crumbly.