Adventure Bay is a surprisingly addictive, yet at times frustratingly slow, world building game with a bit of a twist to try and keep it interesting…

When you first start out you have a small island with a building (your keep or cabin) in the middle. As with all world building games you buy and build various things which improve in ‘payback’ as you level up. You can start by building plantations for crops and shacks for your residents, and these provide you with gold and exp. As you level up, more buildings and crops become available, which in turn provide you with larger amounts of gold and exp.

The added twist to this game is that you also start off with a boat which allows you to head off and explore the seven seas. Your captain is the first character who can head out, and he has 8 missions of varying lengths which all take you to islands for you to explore and gather booty, gold and exp. As you level up you can improve your ship, and even purchase 2 more, allowing you to send out three inhabitants at once to find you more goodies and help you level up (which becomes a very slow process once you pass level 20). The booty you find goes into your treasure chest, and once you have the right number and combination of items, you get free stuff! Free stuff good!! Particularly because this free stuff can generate yet more gold and exp to help with the levelling up process – have I mentioned it’s pretty slow yet…?

So the good things about this game – it’s cute, and they release regular updates to stop it from getting stale. There are also a lot of different options for how to lay out and build up your island, so people who are into world-building games can really make their island unique. There are lots of opportunities to increase your gold and exp, including trading with other people in the game, and getting them to provide you with the necessary booty for your next freebie from the treasure chest.

The bad – the exp provided is too small for the levelling up requirements, and once you’ve built all you can at level 32, you’re weeks before hitting level 35 where the next new item is available. If you don’t gather in your crops or send your inhabitants onto their island after sending them out to explore the seas, they ‘go off’ or become too depressed to explore, so you get nothing, and there’s no ‘holiday’ setting, so if you can’t log on every day, expect to come back to a lot of sad faces. There aren’t enough island space upgrades, so it becomes very crowded as you try to build what you need for leveling up. Sometimes it’s impossible to get what you need for treasure collections. If you are scrolling through the building menu, but not actually building anything, it closes the menu after a minute and you have to start again from the top.

Overall, if you’re into this sort of game and are willing to put in the time and build relationships with other people on other islands, this is fun. The exploring adds a new twist to the traditional world-building genre which stops it from getting too stale too quickly, but it still requires a level of dedication that I’m just not sure I’m willing to give it for much longer…

Shazam is, as I have suggested, an app that identifies music that is playing using the mic on your phone.  You simply open up the application, hit the screen (there’s a handy “Touch to Shazam” instruction on the screen in case you’re not sure), let the app listen to about 30 seconds of the song and then, if it’s in the Shazam library, it’ll tell you what the song is and even give you the opportunity to link through and buy the song on iTunes if you’d like.  It’s very handy, and even identifies songs playing in the background of TV shows (yes, I have tested this).  It also saves the list of the songs you’ve tagged (or shazammed) so that you can look up the artists/albums at a later date, or go back and buy later if you don’t necessarily want to purchase the song right away.  You can use it in a shop or elsewhere in public – you don’t need to wave it around in the air, or point it towards the speakers or anything else that’ll make you feel (and look) daft, just hold your phone casually in your hand and let Shazam do its thing.

It’s perhaps not for everyone, some people just have those sorts of minds that will remember every song they’ve ever heard so they’ll have no need for this, but for the rest of us it’s on the very handy side of handy.  The only downside is that it’s sometimes a little slow opening up, and if you’re near the end of the song, or it’s only a snippet on tv, you might well miss your chance to tag enough of the song for Shazam to recognise it, but as flaws go, that one’s pretty unavoidable and doesn’t detract enough from the app to stop me loving it!  Best of all – it’s free!

This is yet another game I found while perusing the offerings of the Xbox Live marketplace.  I wanted a new RPG so I thought I’d give the demo a go, and before I knew it I was ordering the game for next day delivery.  I looked up the reviews and saw that it largely seemed to be the overlooked RPG of 2009, a victim of bad timing as much as anything, so I thought I’d give Divinity 2: Ego Draconis the benefit of the doubt, and to be honest, I’m glad I did.You begin the game as a newly trained Dragon Slayer, and have to visit the town of Farglow to, among other things, choose your initial specialisation.  You can play as a warrior, ranger or mage, though you have the opportunity to learn all 3 as soon as you leave Farglow.  The purpose of choosing is to give you a basic mana skill straight off the bat.  Although there are lots of different ways to play the game, and I’m not a massive fan of telling people what to do in such an open ended game, I’d strongly recommend you start the game as a ranger.  The magic attacks are too weak to be of any use to you after you leave the town, and you are too weak to withstand much in melee combat as a warrior until you level up a bit.  Ranged attacks give you an advantage early on that the others don’t.  I tried all 3 in the demo and mistakenly went for warrior on my first real playthrough, and it makes the early stages really tough.  This is partly because the enemies don’t level with you, they are what they are, which meant that at level 1 I was facing level 4 or even level 7 enemies and having to get right up close to them before I could even begin to do them any damage.  This is a bad plan.  However, this also works the other way round – at L34 you take out whole groups of L26 enemies with a single exploding arrow – on the upside, I die far less, on the downside, you get about 100 exp per group of enemies and it takes about 60,000 exp to move between the higher levels

The levelling up works the same as in any other game – the more exp you get, the higher your level; you get exp from completing side quests and killing enemies.  The upside of the higher level enemies is that you do get more exp for each kill, but there was an awful lot of reloading from the last save when I died…  There is one small hitch when it comes to gathering exp however, though it is one that the game, in fairness, warns you about every time.  You can mind read as a Dragon Slayer, which can open up new quests, lower traders prices, give you bonus stat or skill points, but each time it costs you exp.  This is part of why I was stuck at level 1 for so long – there I was mind reading everyone who came along and sure enough, I was never levelling up!  This is another bad plan.  The developers had said they did not intend the game to be easy, and in that, they succeeded!

However, despite the challenges this game presents, for RPG fans this is a great way to spend many, many hours.  I have no idea how long I spent playing it, but it’s gotta be into the 90 hour range.  The opening, that is, Farglow, is brief, and then you make it to Broken Valley, where a dragon has been sighted.  Your task – reconnaissance while the more experienced members hunt for the dragon itself.  Whilst carrying out this reconnaissance you can complete various side quests, but I would advise that you leave things like the Captain’s board quests until you are a higher level – not because they are particularly hard, but because each one gives you a set amount of exp when you complete it which stays the same regardless of your level.  This is great if you’re Level 1 and trying to get to Level 2 quickly, but the higher your level the less exp you get for the other enemies, so kill them first, get the exp, then do the side quests and get the set amount of exp for those.  Make sense?  Yes?  Dandy.

The game is, as I mentioned, very long indeed if you play all the side quests, so I won’t go into much more detail on the story itself, but I will give away the fact that you do get to become a dragon, yes, you seemingly change sides.  I thought I’d gone horribly wrong when it happened to me, but then I realised that there is no way to avoid it, in fact it’s essential to progress the game, so just go with the flow…

Having completed the game I can categorically state that as RPGs go, this is a damn good one, but there is a big ‘but’…  I won’t give away the details, but frankly the ending sucks.  I can sort of understand that they did it in order to leave it open for a sequel, but at the same time I was left sitting there after nearly 100 hours of gameplay, building up the ultimate fighting machines (both human and dragon characters) staring at the screen, unbelieving of that being the ending.  I need there to be a sequel, I need there to be a way to change what happened, because regardless of the decisions you make how strong you are, what methods you use, the ending blows.  I did look at some online forums after I’d finished, to check and see if there was any way of avoiding this disappointment, or any definite plans for a sequel and sadly the answer to both is no, but it was reassuring to know I wasn’t the only disappointed fan out there.  I do hate to end on a downer, so I’ll wrap up by reminding you that prior to these few minutes of disappointment there had been countless hours of enjoyment and enthralling gameplay.  You can really develop your character, complete personal quests for your team in the Dragon Tower (your base which you can return to at any point using your Dragon Stone, even mid-fight if it all gets too much), and admire the, at times, really quite impressive artwork and scenery.  So if, like me, you’re looking for a new RPG to get lost in, then this could be exactly what you’re looking for.  With one small flaw this game has everything you could want in an RPG and will captivate you as you battle goblins, ghosts and skeletons, so don’t let it continue being overlooked, get out there and buy it, borrow it from a friend, rent it, whatever, just play it and enjoy it.  Oh, and don’t forget to kill the bunnies, just take it slow til you hit Level 20 – you’ll see why…

Each game only takes a few minutes to play, and when you ultimately lose (when the board fills up) it tells you whether your average score has gone up or down (there’s also a rather annoying “link to facebook” screen that pops up every few games, but we’ll gloss over that…).  There isn’t a great deal more to say about this, it really is a very simple wee game, but despite this 5 minute review only really being a 3 minute review, don’t let that put you off.  At $2.99, Drop 7 isn’t cheap as apps go, but this game is highly addictive and can sap hours of your time without you really noticing it, and that, as far as I’m concerned, is money well spent.

In a flurry of productivity here’s another potentially good buy for you this evening…  I was mistakenly guided here thinking this was an RPG, and hunting for something with dragons given my recent love affair with Dragon Age: Origins (review of the DLCs coming soon… ish…) and was, if I’m honest, disappointed on both counts, but fortunately I was pleasantly surprised with the reality of the game, so read on to see if it could be the pleasant surprise you’re hunting for too…

Dragon Slaughter is essentially a tower defence game, with a bit of a built in storyline.  You have to pass through the various levels, and defeat the variety of skeletons, zombies, dragons and spiders (yes, spiders, far too realistic for my liking – tower defence games are hard with your eyes closed) to progress and ultimately win the game.  As you might expect, you need to build towers in strategic locations which fire at the advancing enemy.  For each one you kill,  you get some money, money means more towers or, more importantly, tower upgrades – the more powerful your towers, the more damage they do.  However, Dragon Slaughter has the added bonus of being able to modify your towers to change the damage and/or rewards for each tower.  In order to do this you add magic stones of varying colours to each tower, up to 3 per tower, and the different combinations each have different effects, not to mention each enemy is affected to a greater or lesser degree by each colour of attack.

The first few levels are, if I’m honest, very very easy indeed, then all of a sudden, the 3rd last level is crazy hard!  The various ‘baddies’ come from 3 different entrances, and trying to fund enough towers to have them all covered is more than a little challenging.  I’m not ashamed to say it took me many many attempts to beat it, and yet, the final 2 levels were surprisingly easy…  Perhaps it was just by comparison, but I was readying myself for a massive challenge in the final level and that never really materialised which was an unfortunate end to an otherwise sound game.

There is no replayability to the game, once it’s beaten there’s little point in replaying, but part of me hopes that there will be some sort of add-on, alternative levels, more challenging foes, something of the type that Tower Madness released recently.  If my hopes come to nothing, then don’t despair, this game is enjoyable and suitably challenging, not a massive hit, not the best tower defence game out there, but fun and interesting nonetheless!