The Farm Frenzy trial is available as a free download from the Nokia Ovi store.

The chickens produce eggs, which is then turned into cakes, the sheep produce wool and cows produce milk, all of which is then sent off to be sold at the market.

All of the animals need to be fed well and protected from the dreaded bears before they are eaten and all your hard work is undone.

Once you have enough money in the bank you have the choice of upgrades, a new car to get your goods to market quicker, a bigger warehouse to store your produce and contain your caged bears, a new bigger bakery allowing you to make more cakes to sell at the market and increasing your income etc.

This game constantly keeps you on your toes as you work to keep your farm running efficiently and move on to the next level.  Farm Frenzy rewards you for each section that you complete until you’ve built yourself an entirely self-sufficient working business, great fun.

You can try the Farm Frenzy Trial game for free before you decide whether you want to purchase the whole game but once you’ve tried it you’ll be hooked.

You have been warned!

Friday Town

Friday Town is a brand new groundbreaking social game created by a partnership between Cadbury’s Crunchie and nDreams, it launches today on the social media website Facebook.

Friday Town invites players into a virtual world and challenges them to help its inhabitants brighten up their lives with a series of puzzles that will unfold over the coming weeks and months.

On arriving in this virtual world the player takes on the role of a Friday Feeling Engineer, whose job is to make everyone feel more Friday-ish, with progress measured on a Friday-o-meter: the more fun and excitement generated, the better the player does.

The aim of the game’s first chapter is to help the Friday Engineers make the town fountain pump out chocolate instead of water, and turn it into a giant sundae!

As each additional chapter is then unlocked, players will face a whole new set of puzzles, meaning the game is constantly evolving to bring new bursts of that Friday Feeling. To add an extra level of competition, the game rewards those who recruit new players, via their own Facebook friend lists, with access to a secret area.

The theme of the game has been developed in parallel with Crunchie’s new TV advertising campaign, which sees a team of Friday Engineers helping a man singing to himself in a Monday-type way ramp it right up to that Friday Feeling with lights, fireworks and a full-on festival stage.  The TV campaign is in support of the launch of new Cadbury Crunchie Rocks, crispy Crunchie honeycomb pieces and golden cornflakes tumbled in delicious milk chocolate.

The game has been developed by an expert team, headed up by former Eidos Creative Director Patrick O’Luanaigh, who has worked on twelve worldwide number-one selling games over the last fourteen years.

Past successes have included overseeing a return to form for the Lara Croft franchise with Tomb Raider Legend, two Conflict: Desert Storm games that have sold well over 3.5 million copies, and Xi, the first console ‘Alternate Reality Game’, which had over six million visits in the first six months.

Patrick moved from Eidos to become CEO of nDreams in 2007, and has brought the same instinctive flair for creating addictive games that led to these hits to the development of Friday Town.

Ross Farquhar, brand manager for Crunchie, comments: “People are going to love this game. We’ve deliberately chosen to work with the experts behind some of the biggest gaming success stories of recent years, as we knew they’d be able help us realise our ambition: a truly immersive game with real fun-factor that brings that Friday Feeling to anyone who plays it, any day of the week.”

Patrick O’Luanaigh, CEO of nDreams, adds: “The challenge with Friday Town was creating a genuinely entertaining game that people would want to play, while also delivering an experience that reflected Crunchie’s brand identity. There are so many social games on offer now that having a recognisable name attached isn’t enough to make a game a success on its own. We’re confident that with Friday Town we’ve struck the right balance between exciting gameplay and brand messaging, and we have lots of great things planned as Friday Town grows week by week!”

To take part in this exciting new social game visit Crunchie at Facebook.

You may have the original Sony Playstation stashed away safely in your room somewhere, but gaming on the go is the newer way to play, and if you haven’t yet caught on to the Sony PSP (PlayStation Portable), where have you been?!

The stylish portable games console lets you access games, music, videos and photos at any time of day. The PSP also features a TV-out socket for displaying content on a television.  As far as Sony PSP games and accessories go, there’s a mountain to choose from.  If you like a good grapple, you can’t beat Sony PSP’s Tekken: Dark Resurrection.

If you’re not familiar with the Tekken series, it’s about time you looked them up. The arcade style games let you select from an impressive list of diverse characters each with their own fighting style, before you pick your opponent and try to knock their block off.  What better way to pass the time on an otherwise dull train journey, or the miserable morning bus ride to work?

Delivering everything that makes the Tekken series so popular, Sony PSP’s Tekken: Dark Resurrection is an impressive graphical game.   One for the lads, it’s a staple PSP game that ticks all the right boxes.

Fans of spiky-headed favourite Sonic the Hedgehog will no doubt love Sony PSP’s Sonic Rivals.  With high speed thrills, this simple yet staple PSP game combines the old school feel of the Sonic classics with modern graphics and updated features.  Bright, colourful levels with plenty of jumps and loops ensure a rollercoaster ride from start to finish. Providing an interesting twist to the original Sonic game, Sonic Rivals sees Sonic save his friends from classic rival Eggman in a series of one-on-one races.

You’ll be hooked almost as soon as you switch on your PSP.

A game made exclusively for the Sony Playstation portable, Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines, part of the popular Assassin’s Creed franchise, is a real hit with the boys.  The action-adventure game allows players to free-roam an island at will, all while keeping out of sight of deadly enemies on the way.

Fantasy fans can get a load of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, based on the film of the same name. Set in the world of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII, the game sees Cloud tackle the mystery of the ‘geostigma’, which has become infected by being exposed to the planet’s life stream energy. Cloud and the remaining Final Fantasy VII characters are to lash back at the planet, while saving themselves from destruction. Gripping and addictive, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is already storming the gaming charts.

Little Big Planet is the latest Sony PlayStation craze to take the gaming market by storm. Widely regarded as one of the top 10 Sony PSP games, Little Big Planet gives you the chance to step into a world of endless possibilities, where your imagination is key.  You can enhance whatever you see, using your own creativity, while the graphics behind Little Big Planet provide the rest.  Set out with Sackboy and explore a wealth of environments, while overcoming frustrating obstacles in order to build your own creations. The power is firmly in your hands!

Everyone loves a good virtual car chase, so why not check out Grand Theft Auto? Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is a favourite in the Grand Theft Auto series, where players navigate their way through the streets as they uncover the truth behind a tale of crime and corruption. Gran Turismo, the real driving simulator, also recently made its debut on the Sony PSP. Featuring over 800 car models and 35 tracks, there’s mission and arcade modes to choose from as well as a multiplayer racing mode.

Footy fans will love Sony PSP’s FIFA 10, with its improved graphics and enhancements. Featuring refinements based on responsiveness and intelligence, plus a new ‘Manager Mode’ including a whopping 50 major improvements, the game includes the 360° dribbling system, which provides finer dribbling control, as well as more accurate passing and authentic shooting.

But the Sony PSP is not just about games: there’s also plenty of films to be downloaded too, as well as a wealth of gaming accessories. Ensure you get a decent durable case and screen protector, first off. PSP accessories packs come in a variety of combinations, with carry cases and screen protectors often included. Save on batteries and get yourself a Sony PSP adaptor, ensuring you can play without the worry that your game will cut out half way through.

For games, movies and accessories, you’ll certainly be spoilt for choice with your PSP. Happy gaming!

dead santa-spooky spirits

The latest touch friendly puzzle game app, Spooky Spirits: Puzzle Drop!! is now available via the iTunes app store, following the recent launch by developers Innogiant in conjunction with Legendo Entertainment.

Developed by the handheld specialists at newly founded Innogiant, Spooky Spirits: Puzzle Drop!!, will have players traveling the world, capturing  runaway spirits in various fun and exciting game modes designed for puzzle fanatics and casual players alike.

Having fallen asleep on their watch and lost the Spookies, Becky and Tim are banished and risk losing their spirit warden jobs unless they manage to recapture these pesky ghosts.

The unfortunate duo must search haunted locations on Earth to track down the Spookies including the Sphinx of Egypt, a Haunted House in England and an abandoned crypt in Finland featuring none other than Dead Santa himself.

Spooky Spirits: Puzzle Drop!! offers a unique twist on the classic falling block and “match-2” gameplay format. In the game, players build and expand stacks of Spookies in any direction and in any amount.

Three Game Modes:

• In the Panic Mode, players must clear each level by catching an appropriate amount of Spookies before the screen overfills.
• Puzzle Mode is a relaxed mode with no stress – players must outsmart the Spookies’ clever puzzles and beat them in their own game using only a limited number of blocks.
• Eternity Mode is a Tetris-inspired exhaust mode that just keeps going for as long as players can keep it at or reach the max-score of 9,999,999 points (that’s A LOT of Spookies to catch!).

Touch Controls:

• Swipe the screen to control the game, left and right selects blocks, up swaps them and down drops them!

Spooky Spirits: Puzzle Drop!! – Trailer

Spooky Spirits: Puzzle Drop!! can be downloaded from the Apple App Store via iTunes or directly from compatible handsets and costs $1.99 USA, £1.19 UK or €1.59 Europe.

Wii Sports

According to reports, there is to be no price cut for the Wii hardware in the UK, instead, rumour has it that the manufacturer will be offering a new retail package for the continued retail price of £199.

The package is to include the new Wii MotionPlus peripheral, a nunchuck, the original Wii Sports plus its sequel the Wii Sports Resort.

An announcement is due shortly that the US and Japan will be getting the Wii hardware at a reduced price, while the UK have recently upped their retail prices due to escalating exchange rate.

The package, which has still not been confirmed, is expected to go on release at the beginning of October, but for all those of you only interested in the Wii Sports software, Toys R Us have this offer.

Monopoly

Today, a whole new way to play Monopoly has been launched online, using Google maps as the game board.  Players are given three million dollars to build their virtual empire, with every street on Google maps up for purchase.

As in the board game, once a player has ownership of the street, they can charge rent or trade/sell to another player.  Slightly more realistic than the original game, players can collect ‘chance cards’ which allows them to sabotage other players property by building prisons, rubbish dumps or wind farms, reducing the rent value of the street.  Players can also use a bulldozer to remove the offending building but again, only with the ‘chance card’.

The game has been developed by Hasbro, due to be launched today and to run for the next four-months, ending on the 31 January 2010.

As reported above, this game is supposed to be launched today but at the time of writing this the site has not gone live.  Here is a link to Monopoly City Streets, but we are still trying to get onto the site.

mercury

Ignition Entertainment Ltd., a UTV Enterprise – a worldwide publisher and developer of videogames is pleased to announce the release of Archer Mclean’s Mercury which is now available for download from the PlayStation®Network for the PSP™ (PlayStation®Portable) in the PAL territories.

Mercury, the original and now iconic puzzle game, where the simple but challenging task is to manoeuvre the blobs of ‘mercury’ to a set goal will have gamers engrossed for hours on end.

The cleverly designed levels are full of variety, with switches, platforms, obstacles and hazards barring your goal to level completion. Having an understanding of the laws of physics, which are reversed in some instances, will help you in your tasks.

Mercury with its ingenious physics routines and large 3D levels often requires skill, fortitude and maybe even a little luck to complete and will have you coming back for more in order to beat the fastest times and unlock the games many secrets!

Game features:

• Six fantastic game worlds with 72 levels of fantastic liquid mayhem!

• Over 30 interactive objects, enemies and level solving devices, including Teleporter, Spinners, bridges and flux transmitters

• Combo, Boss and lots of secret levels to unlock

• Unlock able levels per world for hi-scorers and a bonus 7th world to discover!

• Training camp for beginners for to practice blob control and colour manipulation

• Ultra realistic liquid mercury effects never before seen in a game

• Addictive pick up and play gameplay

Mercury serves up the ultimate puzzle game for players of all ages. Once you start playing it will be impossible to put down!

Download Mercury now from  Playstation UK

For those who don’t know (which would have included me until roughly 24 hours ago), Battleforge is online RTS that is doing some interesting things in the genre. Taking inspiration from MMOs as well as other fantasy, RPG and RTS titles, the game is not going to have a monthly subscription of any kind, but will support micro transactions to give you more variety in the units you can deploy. There are to be 200 ‘digital cards’ that can be played, and users can purchase additional packs, as well as buy and sell unwanted ones on the built in auction site.

Concerned that this would lead to some balancing issues, I was quickly informed that EA would not sell individual cards, and that no matter how many you have available, you will only be able to take 20 into any given battle. The extensive open beta has allowed for some fine tuning with regard to making sure that there aren’t any over-powered creatures, and it should present a fairly balanced experience.

Another area it seems to be innovating in is the pacing. Because there’s very little resource management, and you don’t have to build up bases before deploying your cards, matches are pretty action packed and over quite quickly. Depending on who I asked, I got different answers over the standard length of game with the marketing guy claiming that if matches are longer than 3-15 minutes then “someone’s doing something wrong”, while the lead developer was keen to stress that for well matched players, the game would present a significantly longer playtime, which should be a relief to old school strategy fans.

And those are exactly the types who they should be targeting. The game does not look like its aiming at the casual demographic at all, with a typically ‘dungeons and dragons’ vibe to the fantasy setting, which unfortunately borders on clichéd judging from some of the folklore created for the universe. It’s also going to be PC only because, like many serious gamers, the developers believe that consoles are not at a stage where they can do the genre justice.

Graphically, it’s looking rather nice as these screenshots attest. Apparently it will work on a pretty wide range of PCs, as well as being optimised for the newest version of Direct X. The PCs we were using weren’t the fastest around, but it played smoothly and looked nice enough, with some especially nice effects on the spells and bigger monsters.

Now, for full disclosure’s sake I should point out that I’m not a hardcore strategy gamer, so some of these potential pitfalls may be completely irrelevant to you. Nonetheless, I do have a couple of concerns about the game. Firstly its hardcore fantasy setting doesn’t feel particularly welcoming to an outsider of the genre, and despite the new gameplay dynamics the whole thing doesn’t feel particularly far removed from genre mates such as Warcraft 3 and the Age of Empires series. There’s clearly some very clever unit balancing at work (and a very neat training area where you can test your newly acquired cards against any range of enemies for tactical fine-tuning), but for the casual player it’s likely to be just too much effort to get a good experience out of it.

For the hardcore, despite the designer’s comments, I’m concerned that reducing so much of the build up play that’s always been so important to the genre might cause a little frustration. It seems entirely possible that by trying to appease both the opposing hardcore and casual markets, Battleforge may end up appealing to neither and ending up as a limited niche title.

But from my brief playtime (the former World Champion Red Alert player was there – I didn’t want to embarrass myself!), it’s clearly too early to say whether or not these concerns are founded or not.

It’s out in the UK in 8 days time and I’ve been promised a review copy, so assuming it works on my slightly-long-in-the-tooth PC, I should have my more considered thoughts on the title at a later date.

In this mobile version of the Destroy All Humans game, you play as Crypto, a ruthless, savage alien hell-bent on destruction and killing humans.

The alien has to collect humans and human DNA for his home planet while running around zapping locals, tourists and cops with a range of sci-fi awesome weapons.

Blast your way through many different levels completing missions and most importantly destroying humans. You must complete each level before you can continue with your game.  But be careful not to touch the humans or get shot.  Either way, you die.

Available Weapons

Zap-o-Matic: The most used weapon in the game. This weapon charges up electricity and releases it in one blast zapping humans

Gloom Gun: A weapon used to stun humans leaving them standing there ready to be sucked up into space by Crypto’s spaceship

Disintergrator: As the name suggests it burns there target, disintegrating them instantly.

Crypto’s Temporal Fist: Crypto used his massive mind power to manipulate and destroy everything on the screen including humans and enemies but not buildings.

I’d recommend this game to anyone who enjoys the Destroy All Humans series, though I do have a couple of grumbles.

Destroy All Humans: Crypto Does Vegas is a great game for passing the time and a fun stress reliever (blowing up humans is fun to me). Though, unfortunately, driving the spaceship wasn’t in this Destroy All Humans which upset me, and the graphics of the game let it down slightly.

You couldn’t use super destructive weapons on houses and cars either, but nevertheless I still recommend this game to all mobile gamers especially those who enjoy killing and blowing up all humans.

Buzzin Games Rating: 75%