Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive
Developer: The Games Company
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows XP or Vista; Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or 100% compatible CPU; 512 MB of RAM; 4 GB available HD space; 64 MB DirectX-compatible graphics card (GeForce 3 or higher; MX series cards not supported); DVD-ROM drive
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

There are three sure things in life: death, taxes and a new point-and-click adventure game every month. Most of them simply dress up the genre’s basic gameplay elements with new coats of virtual paint, but with the release of Everlight of Magic and Power, The Adventure Company and JoWood attempt to stretch the boundaries of PAC adventuring with a variety of diverse characters, a surprisingly adult story and more extensive use of 3D technology.

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Publisher: THQ
Developer: 5th Cell
System: Nintendo DS
Genre: Real-time Strategy
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

When you think about games for the Nintendo DS, story depth and character development don’t usually spring to mind. Most of these games are meant to be played in small chunks while riding the bus to school or the subway to work. Playing them for extended lengths of time usually results in aching neck muscles and eye strain, but with the release of Lock’s Quest, THQ and developer 5th Cell have given us an immersive and entertaining reason to fight through the pain.

In the Kingdom, Source is life. This magic substance, found in wells throughout the land, is used by the Archineers to build and maintain structures. The greatest of these Archineers was Agonius, who through the course of years had become the King’s favorite. But Agonius wanted to use the power of Source to create life; an ability that the King feared would endanger his reign. So the King forbade Agonius from proceeding with his experiments. This prompted the angry and ambitious Archineer to desert his King and disappear into the wilderness.

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Publisher: Telltale Games
Developer: Telltale Games
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows XP/Vista
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

Episodic gaming is very similar to episodic television. Each new story has to build from or add onto what has come before, or the series eventually feels the mortal slice of the executives’ cancellation sword (ask the producers of CBS’ The Ex List how that feels). Into the fray leaps web comic hero Strong Bad and his oddly shaped cartoon compatriots in Episode 3 of developer Telltale’s Cool Game for Attractive People series, The Baddest of the Bands.

As the new story opens, a gray cloud of depression hangs over the House of Strong. The Fun Machine, Strong Bad’s ancient 8-bit game console, has gone up in smoke in a crackling imitation of the Xbox 360′s Red Ring of Death. This not only ruins our hero’s day, but it also endangers the safety of his home, since his monolithic, monosyllabic brother Strong Mad has threatened to “throw stuff, break stuff” if he can’t play his favorite game.

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Publisher: THQ
Developer: Rare Limited
System: Nintendo DS
Genre: Sim
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

Being a childless single guy from the Northeast, my Mexican-themed birthday party experience is somewhat limited. Growing up, I never experienced the visceral joy of swatting colorful party favors with a stick while blindfolded, and now, with the release of developer THQ’s Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise, I’m glad I didn’t. These critters are just too darn cute to demolish just for a few pieces of candy.

VPPP is the Nintendo DS version of the Xbox 360′s Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise. You are transported to the idyllic home of the piñatas, an island covered by lush foliage, grass-and-dirt fields and some oddly anomalous items, as if one of Santa’s bags ruptured, littering the island with toy-like trash. You are a gardener who has been given a small, square patch of land that has to be cleared of debris and prettied up with fast-growing grass seed to attract the island’s unique inhabitants.

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Publisher: DreamCatcher Interactive
Developer: Alcachofa Soft
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows XP/Vista; 1.4 GHz CPU or Equivalent; 512 MB RAM; 3 GB free disk space; 64 MB graphics card, GeForce4 Ti generation or ATI Radeon 9500 (DirectX 9.0c compatible); DirectX 9 Compatible Sound Card; 4x CD-ROM; keyboard, mouse and speakers
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

The gaming public must really love their point-and-click adventures. Publisher Dreamcatcher Interactive pumps them out so fast; it’s hard to keep up. Now they’ve teamed up with Crimson Cow and developer Alcachofa Soft to release Murder in the Abbey, a murder mystery with a very familiar plot.

Brother Leonardo de Toledo, a former imperial advisor, has a keen analytical mind and a dark past. Bruno, his novice, is the teenage son of an aristocrat.
They are traveling to a remote monastery to investigate the mysterious death of Anselmo, the abbey’s gatekeeper, who has had an unfortunate encounter with a 200-pound frankincense censer. Before they reach the monastery’s front gate, a shrouded figure tries to crush them with a rolling boulder, and thus begins an investigation that leads to more murders and reveals links to the occult within the abbey’s walls.

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Publisher: Telltale Games
Developer: Telltale Games
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows XP/Vista
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

The stars of the “Homestar Runner” web comic return for the second installment in Telltale Games’ five-episode series, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People. In this new segment of the point-and-click comedy-adventure series, the sharp-tongued, boxing-glove-wearing luchador has a new mission: world domination.

One fine sunny day, Strong Bad fires up his trusty laptop computer to read his email and discovers that the local ruler, the King of Town, has imposed an email tax on all of his subjects. For every message sent or received, the King is to be paid one cream-filled snack cake. Being a heavy email user, Strong Bad has been especially hard-hit by this new tax, and since this is the first that he’s heard of it, he’s seriously in arrears—he’s been fitted with an electronic monitoring collar and placed under house arrest.

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Publisher: The Adventure Company
Developer: Phantomery
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows XP/Vista; 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 or Similar Athlon XP; 256 MB RAM; 1.5 GB available disk space; 3D Video Card with 128 MB Onboard, DirectX 9.0c compatible with 2.0 Shaders Support (GeForce® FX 5200 or Radeon® 9600); DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card; 16x CD-ROM; keyboard, mouse and speakers
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

The millions of gamers who made Myst the now second-best selling PC game in history must be feeling a bit neglected these days. The advent of 3D video cards and the decline in popularity of the adventure genre has forced many mysties to move out of the 1990s and into the modern gaming era, but those of you who still yearn for the good old days of slide-show adventuring, fear not: The Adventure Company and Russian developer Phantomery Interactive haven’t forgotten you. They’ve created an homage to your favorite game in Outcry, a moody and stylish trip down the Myst rabbit hole.

You are a writer who has just received a message from your inventor brother, to whom you haven’t spoken in years. He has invited you to his apartment, where he wants to show you his latest creation, a machine that he says can separate a person’s consciousness from his body and allow it to roam freely through time and space. Intrigued, you decide to accept the invitation, only to be informed that your brother has died a mysterious death.

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Publisher: Telltale Games
Developer: Telltale Games
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows XP/Vista
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

Telltale Games seems to have found the secret of episodic content. Ritual failed to make the Sin Episodes last longer than one installment, and Valve has stretched out its planned release of the entire Half Life 2 series from one year to more than four (with Episode 3 still in development). But Telltale is already in its second “season” of Sam & Max adventures, and has released the first of five planned monthly episodes of a new saga, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People.

Strong Bad is the star of Matt and Mike Chapman’s web comic, Homestar Runner. Sporting a luchador’s mask, boxing gloves and a snarky attitude, Strong Bad lives with his brother, Strong Sad, a giant whining version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man who spends almost all of Homestar Ruiner in his bedroom, refusing to come out except to participate (reluctantly) in the game’s tutorial. They share their three-floor suburban home with a strange, orange-striped combination of Pikachu and Garfield known as The Cheat, who waits patiently at the dryer for Strong Bad to kick him into it.

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Publisher: Koei
Developer: Koei
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Pentium III 1GHz; Windows XP/Vista; 256MB RAM; 2GB Hard Drive Space; 1024×768 High Color display; 32MB VRAM; DirectX 9.0c or higher; 3D accelerator Video Card; 16-bit stereo 44KHz
Genre: Strategy
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, stretching back thousands of years marked by tremendous civil and military upheaval, so it’s not surprising that a game series based on Chinese history would also be one of the longest-running in the history of the industry. Starting on the NES in 1990, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series has appeared on almost all of the world’s gaming consoles, including the SNES, many of the Sega game systems, the first two Playstations, and the PC. In developer KOEI’s latest entry in the series, Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI, gamers are once again transported back to an era of feudal warlords and shifting alliances.

The RTK series is based on an epic historical novel by 14th century writer Luo Guanzhong that covers the period from 169 to 280 AD. In the final years of the Han Dynasty, a warlord pretending to be a traveling healer incited a revolt now known as the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which eventually led to a devastating civil war that divided China into three kingdoms until the nation was reunified in the late 3rd century.

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Mostly, I spent my time dealing with the everyday problems of life — working, eating, sleeping, trying to play Far Cry 2 multiplayer without either being kicked by Punkbuster or being sent unceremoniously to the desktop by the game’s annoying memory leak, which has survived multiple patches.  It doesn’t help, of course, that I suck at multiplayer deathmatching, but it’s nice to be able to blame the game instead of my deficient skills.  So, if you see someone named Bad Santa getting his butt squashed out there, show him some pity, OK?  Thanks!

Publisher: Viva Media
Developer: Braingame
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Windows 2000 SP3+/XP/Vista; NVidia 6600+ or ATI9600XT+; Intel Pentium IV 1.5GHZ (or comparable AMD ATHLON XPTM); 512MB RAM; DirectX 9.0 compatible soundcard; 4GB free hard disc space; DVD-ROM
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

I have been a science-fiction fan all of my life. I grew up reading the stories of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card and Anne McCaffrey. I had never heard of the character of Perry Rhodan until I received the Viva Media-Brain Games point-and-click adventure The Immortals of Terra, but it turns out that Rhodan has been around about as long as I have.

Perry Rhodan is the main character of a German pulp novella series created in 1961 by K.H. Scheer and Clark Darlton. Originally conceived as a 30-part weekly series, Rhodan’s intergalactic adventures have extended into the new century, surpassing 2400 editions as of the summer of 2007. His stories have inspired comic books, plays, original music, and even a poorly received 1967 feature film, “Mission Stardust.” Immortals is, however, Rhodan’s first foray into the gaming world.

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For better or worse, I seem to be Avault’s go-to guy for point-and-click PC adventure games.  And that’s fine; one of the things I love about this gig is that I get to play games that I probably wouldn’t buy for myself otherwise.  But a major factor in all of the Mist wannabes I’ve played in the last eight months is the need for a walkthrough to finish them.  This made me recall an ongoing argument to be found on a number of gaming forums concerning whether or not using a walkthrough while playing a game is cheating.
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Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: BioWare
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Internet connection; Windows XP/Vista; 2.6 GHz Intel or 2.4 GHz AMD; 2 GB RAM; ATI X1800 XL series or higher, NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX or higher; 12GB hard drive space; DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
Genre: Action RPG
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

Combining seemingly disparate things can produce surprising results. Gas and electric engines join to power our hybrid vehicles. Chocolate and peanut butter give us the peanut-butter cup. And now, Bioware and Electronic Arts have fused the RPG and squad-based shooter genres and created Mass Effect, a sprawling, epic port of the successful Xbox 360 game from 2007.

Humans became a true space faring species in 2148 with the discovery of buried alien technology on Mars that unlocked the secrets of faster-than-light travel, but even with this knowledge, traveling to even the closest stars was impractical until the discovery of the mass relays, ancient artifacts that act as giant slingshots to hurl interstellar ships across light-years of space in the blink of an eye. As human crews started to explore the universe, they began to find and reactivate relays that had lain dormant for centuries, leading them deeper and deeper into uncharted territory and awakening an ancient evil that threatened all life in the galaxy.

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Publisher: Activision
Developer: Vicarious Visions
System: Nintendo DS
Genre: Rhythm and music
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

The first game of the massively successful Guitar Hero series arrived on the Playstation 2 in 2005, with other versions released later for the next-generation consoles and the PC. You could even play it on your cell phone starting in the spring of 2008, but owners of hand-held gaming systems were left out in the cold — until now. With the release of Guitar Hero: On Tour for the Nintendo DS, Activision has finally invited on-the-go gamers to the party.

The biggest hurdle to pass for designers has been a control method; nobody wants to have to carry bulky peripherals with their portable systems. GH: OT‘s creators solved this problem with a guitar controller small enough to make the game practical with a minimum of inconvenience. The four-button controller is inserted into the Game Boy Advance slot and includes an adjustable strap to anchor the system to your hand. Players still using the original DS system haven’t been forgotten, as GH: OT ships with a small adapter that allows the controller to attach to the console. If the geek factor isn’t a problem for you, the game also includes stickers you can use to decorate the controller.

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Publisher: The Adventure Company
Developer: Frogwares
System: PC
Minimum requirements: Pentium IV 1.5 GHz or equivalent; 512 MB RAM; 2.5 GB hard drive space
Genre: Adventure
Release date: Available now
Review by: Michael Smith

Irish author Bram Stoker wrote 12 novels and a handful of short stories, but his most recognized work is “Dracula,” a tale of adventure and bloodlust that has spawned countless adaptations since its publication in 1897. The newest addition to the vampire canon is Dracula: Origin, a point-and-click adventure game from Frogwares, Dreamcatcher and The Adventure Company that takes some of the characters from Stoker’s book and places them in new peril.

The story opens in the London apartment of Professor Abraham Van Helsing. He receives a letter from an old friend, Jonathan Harker, who writes that he has become the latest victim of Count Dracula, the legendary vampire whom Van Helsing has been pursuing for some time. Recent events suggest that Dracula has come to London, and further investigation reveals that the undead Count is searching for an ancient manuscript that could be used to resurrect his first love. When the professor learns that the lovely Mina is targeted to be the vessel for the spirit of the vampire’s long-dead lover, he sets out to find and destroy the bloodthirsty Count, tracking him to Cairo, Vienna and eventually, Transylvania.

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