I've believed that the Earth revolves around me for a very long time. Topsy Turvy is the first game that has told me that I'm right.

Made by Mint and Codeheads, Topsy Turvy is a game in the proud, recent tradition of platformers with a twist. Like others in the genre, Topsy Turvy is focused around simple, familiar mechanics: use the [arrow] keys to move left, right, and jump, avoid enemies and spikes, and get to the goal at the end. We all know how to play that game, right? Well, Topsy Turvy says, now gravity is relative. Chew on that.

Whenever your cute, customizable avatar approaches a drop-off, instead of falling into a bottomless pit a la Mario, the entire topography of the level rotates 90 degrees. Suddenly the walls are the floor, the floor is the walls, and the ceiling... well, there isn't one anymore. Spikes that were formerly easy to avoid are suddenly obstacles in your path to the coveted flag, what used to be a safe walk has now turned into an ominous precipice, and so on. Topsy Turvy's 30 levels are all variations on the theme of variable gravity.

It's fun to play, and surprisingly varied as well. I've always liked games like this, where a new element is introduced into the traditional model of platforming. The best games always seem to encourage experimentation, sometimes even making you believe you've found a new way to accomplish an old level. Topsy Turvy is definitely one of these.

Unfortunately, it too has its problems. While its minimalist art style is readable and charming enough, I ran into a few problems with collision detection. During the course of the game your little avatar will fly about the landscape as the gravity shifts radically. Timing is very important in a lot of puzzles, as there are moving obstacles added into the mix in the late game. However, I kept running into problems where I'd do a running jump, but somehow catch the edge of the spikes' collision block. This happened while I was falling past them, while I was flying by them, and in one notable instance, when I ran into them from underneath. Even still, this wouldn't be much of a problem except that the game counts your deaths in big letters on the top screen. This was especially frustrating the few times that my right arrow key seemed to stick (as sometimes happens when you take focus away from Flash games) and I ran into the same spikes again and again, watching the death total count rise dramatically. You get used to it after a while.

Despite its problems, Topsy Turvy had me spellbound. Each level follows the previous one immediately, so it came to pass that I started at level 1 and didn't look up until level 26. If you liked Portal, Braid, or Gish, you'll like Topsy Turvy.

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The "run right and jump" genre has been around about as long as gaming. Many people's first encounter with the concept was Super Mario 3 on the NES, or maybe Sonic the Hedgehog on Genesis. Since then there have been some advances, particularly in the case of Semi Secret's Canabalt. It wowed players with its minimalist retro style, and kept them nodding with the catchy score.

Raitendo's Action Turnip!!! definitely knows its roots. It has two modes: Run N' Gun mode, which is an interesting cross between Robot Unicorn Attack and shmups, and Turnabalt mode, which is like what you'd get if Canabalt and a movie's credit sequence had a baby. Except you can turn into a rainbow and fly around.

If that sounds fun, chances are you'll like Action Turnip!!!. A lot of this game's charm is in its presentation; in Run N' Gun mode, you use [WASD] or the [arrow] keys and [IJKL] or the mouse to move and shoot, respectively. You'll be blasting eyeball bats and armadillos while avoiding gaps and obstacles, all of which are rendered in a sketchy Doodle Jump/MS Paint Adventures style. It's a lot of fun to watch or play. It's possible to collect powerups which give you a double-jump, let you shoot Star Wars-esque rings, and other powers. In a neat twist, getting kill combos or other accomplishments results in the message literally changing the ground beneath your turnip feet: before long, you'll be hopping between the letters of NICE COMBO and RAITENDO like the best of them.

Turnabalt mode is simple, yet familiar. Like Canabalt, you run forward at a set rate, using one button to jump. Once in a while you'll hit a rainbow, which changes the background and lets you fly along on a wavy rainbow beam. This mode seems tacked on: although the ability to double-jump is nice, the obstacles which add dynamism to Canabalt are absent. Chasing better high scores is fun at first, but grows old quickly.

Overall, Action Turnip!!! is a produce-fresh take on the genre. Although it isn't revolutionary, it's still a lot of fun to play. Whether you're new to the world of side-scrolling runners or a jaded pro, Action Turnip!!! will give you a fun time.

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The myth of the trick-shooting sharpshooter has been around since before the first Sergio Leone westerns, carried through to Robocop and even this year's Red Dead Redemption. Anyone who's seen Eastwood narrow his eyes before pulling off an impossible shot has dreamed of doing the same.

Happily, Mibix has made those starry-eyed dreamers' hopes come true with Ricochet Kills 2. A polished and refined version of the original, Ricochet Kills 2 keeps the same control scheme: you are a duster-wearing mysterious gunman standing in the corner of the screen and must pull off complicated trick shots by banking bullets off of girders and weak, pliable human flesh. Since you are cool as ice, you pull it all off without even moving. All you do is aim with your mouse and left-click to shoot, eliminating all the enemies on the screen before you run out of ammo.

It may seem simplistic, but bouncing bullets off of corners, walls, exploding barrels and people is satisfying and fun. Throughout the game's 50 levels, you'll have to pull off increasingly difficult shots to kill larger and larger amounts of enemies. After the first few levels, you'll even have to stave off death yourself; while you don't get hurt by your own bullets, it's possible for girders, crates and barrels to squish you and give you an instant fail. If you finish the entire thing and still want more, there's an included level editor to create your own maps and share them with your friends.

It's easy at first, but Ricochet Kills 2 will surprise you with how engaging and enjoyable it is. Before long, you'll be watching in awe as a bullet bounces in an unexpected direction and destroys everything on the screen, making you mutter, "I meant to do that."

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Blue Lacuna is one of those rare experiences that turns your set of assumptions about a medium on its head. Like Memento or The Usual Suspects or The Outsider, Aaron Reed's game transcends its medium to become more than the sum of its parts, an artwork that leaves a measurable change in the player. You might finish this game, but it may never leave you alone.

On the surface, Blue Lacuna looks like most other examples of contemporary interactive fiction: a screen full of text, a status bar, and a prompt. You interact with the world by responding to the prompt with a simple declaration: "EXAMINE STATUE", for example. Once you spend any time with it, however, you'll see that this is actually a unique interface. Taking a cue from hypertext authors, Blue Lacuna works on a keyword-based system. Blue words are objects to interact with, green words are places you can go, and bolded words are conversation topics. While the traditional way of playing IF is still viable, it's possible to simply type "statue" instead of the above example.

With that small amount of knowledge and the excellently done tutorial system, you're ready to go. Although I've been playing traditional interactive fiction for years, I almost never needed to use a verb to interact with an object, and when I did it was extremely clear what I needed to do.

If that weren't enough, at the end of the game's prologue it will assess the choices you made and give you the option to play a story-based game or the more traditional puzzle-based adventure. Rest assured, neither side is missing out; the story-weighted version has the same puzzles, but they're vastly streamlined in comparison to the more traditional fare. Personally, after finishing the game I had a peek at the walkthrough, and if you're not the kind of person who enjoys working out alien linguistics from a few clues, I can heartily recommend the story mode.

To those involved with the interactive fiction community, Blue Lacuna's elements have a fairly prestigious heritage: the adaptive hints and keyword-based conversation system evokes Emily Short's Alabaster, the surrealist nature of the story, Andrew Plotkin's Delightful Wallpaper, the deep world and puzzles, Graham Nelson's Curses. More importantly, though, are the things Reed does differently.

Analysis: Emergent or branching narratives have been seen as a red herring in game development for a while. Chris Crawford calls them a failure in First Person, the game theory reader. This is mostly because with every choice you implement that drastically affects the story, you essentially double your workload from that point on. In the world of AAA titles, this means exponentially greater costs: after all, with every new conversation comes new models, textures, voice actors, and animations, all of which have to be created by paid talent. However, with interactive fiction comes the freedom to try such unique approaches to game stories.

This is really where Reed excels. After the prologue, you find yourself on a nearly-abandoned island. Your only companion is a mad hermit, a man who talks in broken sentences and shouts at the ocean. Throughout the game, your interactions with him (or even actions in his presence) shape his opinion of you, his relationship with you, and how the eventual ending plays out. Depending on your actions and conversation with this man, the game could play in vastly different ways. He doesn't affect the puzzles themselves, but so much of the incidental dialogue and description of the game is influenced by his mood and relationship with you that it'll end up with an entirely different feel. More than anything else, Blue Lacuna is a game about emotion and memory, and it excels at manipulating both.

Blue Lacuna is something unique, as close to 'interactive literature' as I've ever seen in gaming. You owe it to yourself to try it out.

Windows:
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Mac OS X:
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Linux:
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When we're kids, Egypt seems like the wondrous land of delights that it was in the eyes of Victorian England. Given the chance, we'd all gleefully use mummy spice on our fries, because it's not as if we'd ever get the chance to do it again. As we grow older, for many of us Egypt retains its splendour in our minds, retaining the glitter of gold funerary masks, exquisite organ jars, and baroque gods waiting for us to reach them after a Lord of the Rings-esque quest.

What we never expected is how claustrophobic the sarcophagus would be.

Dan Efran's title Ka, an entry in our interactive fiction and escape themed Casual Gameplay Design Competition #7, starts in decidedly close quarters, with your royal spirit crammed in next to your corpse. Most text adventures struggle to some degree with pacing, but in Ka, at least, your initial goal is clear: leave. After that? Well, you're dead. You have to come to terms with it sometime.

Like other text adventures, Ka is played through a command-line interface, where the player types simple sentences like >EXAMINE COFFIN and the game responds appropriately. On the user-friendliness scale, this one tips more towards classic fiction than Alabaster, which means that brand-new users might have a bit of difficulty with it. Although there is an "about" command for new users, it doesn't help with the restrictive first scene. Most puzzles are solved by singing ritualistic songs that you've brought to the afterlife, so a tutorial on that mechanic would have been welcome.

Ka is light on story and long on puzzles. If you're an aspiring Mensa member, or just someone who likes doing the crossword, this one will intrigue you. Some of the puzzles are quite ingenious; one, involving a mechanical beetle, was a lot of fun, although my head spins at the thought of trying to code it. Technically, Ka is impressive: considering that the main element of play involves a lot of custom vocabulary and verbs, the lack of bugs is commendable. The writing can be sparse at times, but on the whole the image of an Egyptian afterlife is well realized. One standout character is the game-playing automaton, who I found very vivid despite his lack of dialogue and constrained movement. The puzzles share a basic structure and ramp up in difficulty gradually. At first the songs you'll need to sing to proceed are clear, but eventually you'll need to use your ingenuity to make it all the way to the end. Although I was sometimes stuck, I was never frustrated.

All in all, Ka is a fun excursion into Egyptian myth, and well worth a try.

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If there's one thing I associate with being a kid, it's piracy. Not the software kind (although, judging by my little brother, that's changing) but the tales of the rapscallions who sailed the Spanish main, armed with letters of marque and blasting ships to smithereens if it looked like they had even a gold earring. The salty wind on your face, the rolling ocean, the three-headed monkeys... it was a good time to be a seaman.

Trafalgar Origins, from Preloaded, is a top-down naval combat game commissioned by Channel 4, created to promote their upcoming television show. It plays similarly to Sid Meier's Pirates: use the up arrow to raise anchor, down arrow to lower anchor, left and right to steer, and [Z] or [X] to shoot port or starboard cannons. Use [space] to switch between ammo types. You create a ship's captain, name him and choose how he looks, and then you're given a ship to sail around and shoot other ships. There's some customization involved, as after every mission you earn experience points and gold coins, and you're able to spend them on upgrading your ship's crew. An interesting aspect is that while you can hire different crew members to fill different functions on the ship, they'll also take a salary from your end-of-mission earnings. You're left to decide whether to run the ship with a skeleton crew and take all the lucre or be nice, share, and lay waste to your enemies.

There are a lot of enemies in this game. There are both single player and multiplayer game modes, and each has 3 different types of gameplay. In the single player, there's Arcade, Historical, and Tutorial missions, which are oriented towards recreating historical battles, teaching you how to play, and just shooting stuff and defending targets for fun. In the multiplayer, there's Vulture, which asks you to hunt down a specific ship and loot it for a reward, Survivor, which sets you against other places in a bid to live out the time limit, and Contract Killer, which is basically Deathmatch: Naval Edition. All of these modes are fairly hefty in their content, and will keep you playing for hours. Oh yeah, and if you're a diehard completionist, there's an achievement system as well.

Analysis: Trafalgar Origins is a very well-made and polished game. While somewhat simple, its graphics are well-designed, and I was never in doubt about what I was looking at and whether I needed to shoot at it. Despite some naysayers in the game's comments over on Kongregate, I never had any trouble handling the ship, as the wind physics are well-implemented and predictable. However, I was surprised by the lack of options when it came to acceleration — either you've dropped anchor, or you're traveling with full sails. I got used to it, but it seems like a glaring omission in an otherwise well-produced game.

The combat is both fun and challenging, as I found out when I spent the better part of an hour on a Historical mission. If you know what you're doing and the rudiments of sailing, this game can still get difficult. It's a different story in multiplayer, as I ran into a lot of lag and rubber-banding, which made it hard to get a decent volley off. When it worked, though, it was a lot of fun.

Overall, Trafalgar is an entertaining and educational peek at the age of sail, and one that will take you many hours to beat with quite a bit of replay potential.

Play Trafalgar Origins

Note: If you wish to login and play using Facebook Connect, you will have to play the game over at Channel 4

Haunted houses are a dime a dozen in videogames: if Luigi, Lara Croft, Leon Kennedy or the protagonists from any number of other horror games weren't trapped in their spooky prisons, it'd have to take a pretty unique game to make us pay attention.

Sorcerer's Maze is one such title, a challenging and compelling retro puzzler from David Frankel, Alex Camelio, and Tommy Pedrini (No Vinegar Productions). You play as Clyde Michaels, intrepid explorer, who must explore a mysterious mansion that stands alone in apocalyptic desert where he lives. It plays similar to Bomberman combined with one of the NES Metal Gears: using the [arrow] keys, you guide Clyde through the labyrinth of the house, avoiding or destroying skulls, ghosts, mermen and other creepy-crawlies on the way.

It sounds simple enough, but each level plays out like a logic puzzle where you can't run into any of the pieces. As Clyde navigates each floor, he doesn't have the advantage of Snake's radar: you can only see what he can see, and there are a lot of blind corners. If that weren't enough, it's impossible to open some doors unless one has killed all the monsters in a level. By the way, the monsters are color-coded, and the magical blobs that let Clyde kill them only show up once a level. And you don't know where they are until you die a few times.

Some items exist to help you out. While one scroll shows the entire map, another tells you where the exit is. Fluffy kittens give you multiple 1-Ups, which is useful when trying to puzzle out your enemies' patterns by running into them. If you get frustrated, there's a level select option to let you skip to the next floor. Occasionally you'll run into a mysterious cloaked figure who follows Clyde from floor to floor. Who is this figure, and what do they want?

Analysis: It almost feels wrong to play Sorcerer's Maze on a modern computer. It feels like something better experienced on an Amiga workstation or an old NES. The team at No Vinegar Productions replicates the retro experience perfectly, from the cryptic sprite-based cutscenes to the bloops and beeps that serve as sound effects and the pleasant chiptune soundtrack. The detail and care shown in presenting the game's art style are a large part of the game's charm; as I continued playing, for some reason I kept flashing back to playing Bard's Tale 3 on my old Commodore.

Although there isn't much story, there also isn't much need for one. The attraction is all in the gameplay: if you remember trying to fit a rectangle with sharp corners into your palms, then chances are you'll like Sorcerer's Maze for its retro-inspired gameplay style and aesthetic. It's difficult, at times almost impossible, but you're always free to skip to the next level. Just be careful; in your rush to get to the end, you might miss something important. Like the platformers and adventures of old, Sorcerer's Maze rewards persistence and attention to detail. If you want to get the best ending, you'll have to play the game like you would sitting in front of the TV in 1980: trying again and again until you can do the whole thing perfectly, without missing a beat.

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Cassandra's Journey 2: The Fifth Sun of Nostradamus, like the first game in the series, puts you in the role of Cassandra, a clairvoyant who solves cases with the aid of a mysterious ring and training from her mentor Nostradamus. Conveniently, she solves her cases by spotting hidden objects in various settings. Cassandra attempts to divine the location of her missing boyfriend but gets overwhelmed by a malevolent, evil presence and knocked out. While she sleeps, Nostradamus visits and tells her that she must find and destroy this evil presence to save the world.

You'll spend the majority of your time looking for hidden objects. At the bottom of the screen is a list of the objects that you're trying to find; at first it'll just be a simple list, but as you progress you'll have to decipher riddles and outlines of the objects you need instead. Then, all you have to do is find them within the room and click them with your mouse.

Like with any hidden object game, this sounds simple but it can end up being quite challenging. While typically the objects are in places you'd expect, sometimes they're in improbably (and sometimes physically impossible) places. You'll get stuck more than once, especially with the picture clues in the late game that are often reversed or upside down compared to the object you're looking for.

Fortunately, Cassandra's a fortune-teller, and you have the option of casting spells to show you where objects are. She knows five spells, with increasingly specific hints, and require an increasing amount of power as well. You start each level with a full hint meter, but if you click randomly or cast hint spells, it can quickly shrink. To refill it, either wait or find more objects. It's a system that's elegant in its simplicity, and keeps you from getting frustrated or stuck.

It's a system that you'll appreciate, especially when you enter one of the game's many minigames. In the course of her adventure, Cassandra will find clues that she must reassemble or puzzles she must solve in order to progress the plot. For the most part, these minigames are a fun diversion, introducing a jigsaw puzzle or some light Wheel of Fortune-style decoding into what would otherwise be a pretty bland game. It's nice to have variety. However, sometimes the puzzles might prove too challenging for you, or maybe you're just not in the mood. In that case, there's a convenient 'skip puzzle' option, which activates after a set amount of time fiddling with the puzzle. When you just can't see the solution, it's nice to be able to just move on with the game.

Analysis: Cassandra's Journey 2: The Fifth Sun of Nostradamus is a surprisingly pretty game. Every scenario is well-done, and the quality of the art is so high that I found myself wondering if the characters and settings were photographs retouched to look painted, or if they were just excellently-done paintings. Every object is gorgeously rendered, and unlike other hidden object games I've played, I always knew what I was looking at.

The story, however, is sadly lacking. Although Cassandra's Journey 2 is just a hidden object game, and is just as fun to play without the story, so much effort is put into the gorgeous plot sequences that take place between levels that it seems a shame that they make so little sense. Without spoiling anything, part of the plot revolves around Cassandra's divination to tell the two where to go next, but it's accomplished with ordinary playing cards and a form of Solitaire. Cassandra explains that the last four cards left on the table are "numbers that fate has chosen," but I had a hard time suspending my disbelief when they immediately went to an address which included a K and an A. Still, no matter how you feel about fortune-telling and clairvoyance, the core gameplay is entertaining.

Overall, Cassandra's Journey is a gorgeously presented hidden-object game with solid core gameplay. If you ever enjoyed I Spy as a kid, you'll love this game.

Windows:
Download the demo
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Mac OS X:
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The play's the thing. Shakespeare wrote that, and while I am reasonably sure that he was not referring to video games, if he lived today he would be talking about Shadow Game, an eight-level mini-game from wmarsh.

Featuring realtime light and shadow, Shadow Game is an impressive demonstration of how far Flash games have come within the last ten years. When I was first introduced to Flash gaming, Unreal was making waves with its hardware-assisted coloured lights, and real-time light and shadow on the order of Shadow Game was still a pipe dream in John Carmack's head.

The way the game works is thus; after clicking through the disclaimer that the game is unfinished, you're given control of a spinny floaty thing that moves through either the [WASD] or [arrow] keys. Your mission: collect stars in levels strewn with light sources. Your opposition: automatic weaponry that fires on anything it can see, as well as an arsenal of laser beams which can destroy you instantly. Don't let them see you, stay in the shadows, and avoid the beams.

At its heart, Shadow Game is ultimately a proof of concept. Each of the eight levels demonstrates a mechanic that would be at home in a longer puzzle-based sim, but here it functions more as a taster than anything else. The puzzles range from physics-based to stealth to enemy pattern recognition, and although short, each level feels fresh. Ducking in and out of lit areas and outsmarting sentries is surprisingly satisfying, even on a fifth playthrough.

The simulationist nature of the game means that you can depend on the game's physics to stay constant and reward creativity. Each puzzle can be solved through the obvious solutions programmed in by the designer, but also through innovative treatments. For example, one level revolves around stacking boxes to block light sources so you can collect stars. At first, that's what I did, but eventually I found that I could trick the automatic turrets into shooting the light-generating fixtures, moving them out of the way so I could get at their prize. Unfortunately, it ends all too soon.

Shadow Game is unfinished, so once you get past the eighth level and collect all 34 stars, the game is done. There's no ending other than a screen saying "Thanks for Playing" and only limited replayability, focused around finding new ways to solve the same puzzles. But despite that, Shadow Game is a great way to spend a coffee break, and it'll leave you hoping to see the finished game for more light-based puzzles. I know I am.

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Okay. Look. If you're reading this, chances are you're on the Internet. If you are, you hate other Internet users. It's just a natural law. If you've ever watched a YouTube video, you've seen the kind of detritus some people pass off as opinions. When a video of a zebra farting is riddled with comments about conspiracy theories, well, something is clearly wrong with the world, and there's nothing you can do about it.

That's where Berzerk Studio's new hit-people-with-things simulator, Homerun in Berzerk Land, comes in. Using elements from their various other games, your goal is simple. Take a short, blunt object, and a passing geek who epitomizes everything bad about the Internet, and hit him. Hit him as hard as you can, and see how far he flies. It's simple, satisfying, and surprisingly fun, if inappropriate for kids.

The controls are simple: at the tee, you're presented with two gauges, one for the angle of your hit and one for the power of your hit. Click your mouse when the moving indicator is at the angle or power that you want the geek to travel. If you get it just right, your character exclaims "Killer Shot!" and gives you a big thumbs up. Once the geek's on his way, you have the opportunity to hit him again when he hits the ground for a Power Smash, sending him back into the stratosphere. After that, there are many random objects, culled from Berzerk's various games, that will either send him further along in the air or stop his progress dead. While he's in the air, he can hit either a cash sphere or a bee. Cash spheres, surprisingly enough, give you cash, which can be exchanged for goods between levels. Bees change his flight path by a few degrees depending on where he hits them. If he's travelling at a fast enough clip, it can make his trajectory shallow enough that he'll fly for ages before hitting the ground.

Analysis: That's the underlying goal, of course. Make the geek fly as far as he can before he stops in a bloody pile of gaming t-shirts. We've seen this before, in games ranging from turtle shotput to Japanese bicyclist tossing, but Homerun in Berzerk Land's production values put it ahead of the pack, along with a surprisingly deep customization system.

There's also a leveling system, where the number of feet the geek travels adds a certain amount of experience points to your chosen character's level. At each level, you can spend points on strength, accuracy of the meters, or ability to control the geek's flight. Although you can use the arrow keys to slow the geek's flight or speed him on his way, at first it's fairly ineffective. It's only when you upgrade the power that it becomes useful, and then you'll wear the right button on your keyboard out.

Each character (you start with three) has its own strengths and weaknesses. You can level each of them separately, as the game keeps a save file on your hard drive keeping track of what you've done. Sadly, though, items don't carry across characters. You also gain diamonds by getting achievements, which can be exchanged for unlockable secret items. All in all, the customization level of the game allows for some pretty powerful min/maxing, enabling you to send the geek into lower earth orbit. It's fun, but sometimes can work against you. As I leveled characters I often found myself waiting impatiently for the geek to stop flying so I could hit him again to collect more money and experience. If you game from multiple computers (say, both at home and at work) then you can sign up for a free account with GamerSafe, which transfers your save files across computers and allows you to challenge friends.

The graphics and music are some of the most polished I've seen in a Flash casual game, and certainly the most polished of any fly-to-the-right genre game. The violence is cartoony and visceral without being gory, and the art style is well-designed so I never had a trouble telling things apart.

If, like me, you have some unresolved rage issues against the Internet and a lot of time to sink into a compelling Flash game, then Homerun in Berzerk Land is the game for you. Just be careful. Like any addictive substance, the first taste is free. Then you're hooked.

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There comes a time for everyone when your mom takes away your car privileges until you get out of the house, you slob. Seriously, what is your deal? Get a job. Your father didn't fight through Contra 2 without the Konami Code to support a good-for-nothing kid. That's how my life story started. It's also how My Life Story starts, an entertaining time management simulation from Game Fools. It's set in an unnamed small town, where your mom owns the only house and she's kicking you out. Time to find a job! Fortunately, like any fictional town, there are job opportunities ripe for the taking.

The game starts with a short tutorial. You have four bars that summarize your needs: Fun, Energy, Hunger, and Health. One larger bar, Happiness, is the average of those four. Every activity in the game affects these bars in some way. You might go to the club for a relaxing night out, but it'll drain your Energy and Hunger while boosting your Fun. Like your mom always said, everything is important in moderation. If you overdo it, it's a round trip ticket to the hospital, costing you half your bank account and a big chunk of your week. Just like real life!

Every activity is measured in hours, and everything, even pretending you're John Travolta, counts towards the weekly total. The white clock at the bottom of the screen counts off the hours to the weekend, when you go home for a well-deserved rest. Over the weekend, your possessions in the house help recharge your various stats according to their quality. My Espresso maker gave a big boost to my Energy, while my crappy VCR gave a small boost to my Fun. Your surroundings matter too: as soon as I upgraded from the Shady Apartments to the hip Camelot Condos, my weekend bonuses were doubled. As you become more successful, this changes your playstyle significantly, as you go from relying on the coffee shop's stream of caffeine to waiting until the weekend, when you can drown your fatigue in a river of espresso.

Added to this is an interesting mechanic borrowed from tabletop games like Risk and Monopoly as well as the Xbox Live achievement system. As your character lives his or her life story, they'll be presented with decisions at the various buildings they frequent in town. Marked by a yellow exclamation point, these decisions usually result in boosts and drains to your stats or cash reserves. However, answer enough of them positively and you'll get the Optimist award, accompanied by a Life Card.

Life Cards are like Community Chest cards in Monopoly: they give you bonuses to your stats and other benefits. The 'Day Spa' card replenishes all your stats at once, while another, 'Gut Bomb', means you never get hungry in the week that it's active. Life Cards can be lifesavers, covering your hospital bills when you forget to watch your Fun meter, or giving you a steep discount on all the cash services in the town. You only gain them when you win Awards, but fortunately you win Awards for doing pretty much everything in the game, from visiting the spa to sitting in front of the TV. It adds a lot of freshness to what could otherwise be a pretty boring sim.

Ultimately, that's the goal of My Life Story. You have two ranks, Experience and Education, which determine what jobs you're eligible for. Each job gets you a varying amount of Experience while stressing you out and damaging your needs bars. For example, my brief stint as a bouncer paid very well, but it wasn't fun and was quite unhealthy for me. Similarly, studying at Dreams University drains all your bars quickly, just like real school. More than once, my character collapsed at school from exhaustion, malnutrition, or severe depression. The game is done when you have both bars completely filled and you achieve the best job available based on your education, career and life decisions.

Analysis: Like the Sims, balancing work and pleasure for your avatar is a lot of fun at first, but watching bars fill gets old quickly. The retro pixel graphics and often funny comments from the people in your town help for a bit, but eventually the game starts to drag. That's when the game turns from a Sims-like virtual life simulator to a time management sim, courtesy of the game's weekly structure.

Some activities boost or drain activities more quickly than others. The real meat of the game is in determining the best jobs and relaxing activities to get the most experience out of every week. At one point, my character was moving from her job as a video game tester, which drained her health rapidly, to the coffee shop to replenish her energy and then to the gym to try and counteract the effects of sitting and playing games all day. That's when I realized the game had become a stunningly accurate representation of my life.

That part of the game is pretty fun! Unfortunately, if you play your Life Cards right, eventually you'll find that you've figured out the best way to replenish your stats, and then the game becomes a merciless slog through one job after another. This isn't helped by one late-game unlock, which replenishes all your stats super-quickly for the right amount of cash. In theory, this cash limit stops you from just using it all the time, but at that point I had enough money saved to buy Atlanta.

All in all, if you've run out of things to do in the Sims, then you'll like My Life Story. There's a lot of replayability if you're into the gameplay, since every career and educational choice affects the outcome of the game. There's a lot of humour in the game too; every character has something funny to say, and more often than not I found myself chuckling at the game's jokes at its own expense. If you want a simple, pleasant-looking and sounding career-building sim, then My Life Story is for you.

Windows:
Download the demo
Get the full version

Mac OS X:
Download the demo
Get the full version

Gear puzzles are popular fodder for games these days. If gears aren't the main feature, as in David Durham's Gear Puzzle, then they're a vital component of a switch box or piece of alien machinery in an adventure game. At first glance, Connect It seems like more of the same, but after exploring deeper, this seemingly simple gear puzzler reveals an entertaining and complex depth.

The gameplay starts simply enough. You begin the game with a bunch of gears of varying sizes, gear pegs and power sources, and an electrode on a track, waiting to be connected to the wire on the other end. The goal is simple: transfer the rotational power from the power source to the electrode, so it moves across the track and completes the circuit. You move the gears by dragging them with the mouse and turn them on and off by clicking. At first, it's as easy as it sounds, but like all fun games, Connect It doesn't stay easy.

It won't be long before you'll be staring blankly at the screen, trying to figure out which of the pegs to use. The pegs aren't spaced evenly, so it often takes some trial and error to figure out the best way to connect the electrode without accidentally putting the wrong number of gears in the sequence and pushing it the wrong way. Fortunately, the 'level reset' button is big and easy to click, and there are multiple solutions to most levels.

Also, this game is extremely pretty. The atmosphere is late Victorian steampunk. The pegs are brass, the gears are polished steel, and the whole thing gives off the impression that you're building a fine Swiss watch - a sequence of gears that not only works, but works beautifully. The music is calm but catchy, the perfect background for killing a few hours.

Overall, Connect It will suck you in with its beautiful presentation, but you'll stay there for a long time, solving just one more puzzle.

Play Connect It