So Modern Warfare 3 came out last week and OK, so I wouldn’t say that I’ve been hogging the TV for the last week or so… but apparently my roommates think so. Just because I’ve been playing a lot doesn’t mean that I’m addicted… but the girls have since banned me from the living room for the next few hours. They even made me shower, which I think is totally uncalled for. I showered! Saturday…. Or maybe Friday… ok maybe I’ve been a little obsessed, but I don’t want to get left behind and not have any good perks or weapons!
Ugggggg. The point is, I am banned for a little bit so now that I’m clean and all my homework is done, I needed to take my mind off of the fact that 13 year olds are going to have better weapons than me, so I decided to try a casual game. I wanted something that I could get into so I decided to try Time Mysteries: The Ancient Spectres… it seemed interesting enough, and I was willing to try anything. And I admit that I was pretty surprised at how good the game was.
It’s a hidden object adventure game based in the 1800s. The premise is that you discover you have this untold family history you knew nothing about, and you are asked by your aunt to investigate your past. You soon discover that your family is cursed somehow by an evil witch Viviana (I might have changed the name to evil witch Lucy and Anne) and that your family apparently owns a time machine… which you get to use in order to stop the witch and save your heritage.
The gameplay is pretty awesome and unique for a hidden object adventure game. First thing I loved was that you could skip the hidden object games and instead play a mini game if you wanted to… sorry, I just don’t have the patience with hidden object scenes. They frustrate me, and I can never find anything. Another feature that was great was the “sonar” feature in the hidden object scenes. It allowed you to put your mouse over an object and show you an image of what the object looked like. This helped a lot! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked for something in other games that I had no idea what to even look for. So this feature definitely scored bonus points with me.
Once you get into traveling through time, the game really takes off. You can instantly travel in time searching for these seals to hold the witch. And what’s cool is that if you change something in say the 1400s, things change in the other years you can travel to. For example, if you put out a fire in the 1400s, the home you visited in the 1500s that was destroyed is now a place you can explore… you do a lot of jumping around between years, fixing something in one year so you can do something in another. And they made it really easy to navigate between times and not get confused as to where you are.
So, all together a very cool concept that was really well executed… and made my banishment from the living room pretty tolerable… although I’d still rather be blowing things up… but that’s just me. I wonder how much longer this is going to last… they can’t possibly watch Eat, Pray, Love for the 10th time this week… can they? Can they?????
