The Spiderwick chronicles - and old school adventure game on your mobile

First of all - I haven't watched the Spiderwick movie yet, and I don't know if I ever will - I'm a little out of the age group it's targeted at. So I'm going to tell you about the game as such, not as a work based on the movie.
It seems that after point and click adventure games almost died out on PC, they've found a new life on mobile phones. After the BEAUTIFUL Leisure suit Larry: Love for sail game, that I probably won't get to review because it's almost an year old now, here comes Spiderwick.
The game is an old school adventure where you can change between the three characters you control (Anyone remember Day of the tentacle? Probably not), combine items and do puzzles. It has a half decent graphics and sound (some elements are great but some are not even near it) and is basically aimed for the younger audience as is the movie.
Since it is an adventure game it has a lot of dialogues and that makes it something you probably don't want to play while you're on the bus. It's good for more reader-friendly environments though and you'll probably enjoy it while sitting on the sofa at home if you like this type of games.
The main problem of this title is it's fairly scripted and not always in the good way. Sometimes you feel like playing a hardcore game from the not so distant past, and then suddenly you get a hint, ruining all the suspense. I understand that the younger audience should get some help since they probably weren't even born when this type of games were HOT on PC, but the hint thing... come on, couldn't you just put an option to turn it off in the menu? Other developers got to that idea years ago...
This being said, the game is still a pretty nice adventure, especially if you're a kid, or you just don't like thinking too hard on the puzzles.

Graphic and sound 7/10
Gameplay      6/10
Value for money   6/10
Novelty          8/10
Total          7/10

The bottom line - good for the kids and people that hate thinking too much.

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KO legends - the real Sci-fi boxing simulator?

Do you remember the time you started doing something sure it's not worth it, and a few minutes into the process you thought you were wrong only to find out you WEREN'T wrong after all... This is how I felt with Gameloft's KO Legends(also known as KO fighters)
When I started the game I was under impression it will be another audio/visually dominating but somewhat unoriginal game, because let's face it - Gameloft have a serious problem with original content these days. And I was right - the game has "borrowed" half of the content from one of the last Rocky games (I believe the name was Rocky Legacy). I was happy with it for a time though because the Gameloft game had some additional depth to the mechanics and the customization options almost made me feel like I'm playing something different than heavily scripted, arcade beat 'em up game. Everything was fine until I actually won the world title and the bonus content become available. Then I was all: "WTF GAMELOFT?! WTF!!!" I don't want to insult anyone but the idea of fighting in ALIEN tournaments after that is so stupid it's braindead. It actually threw away all the psychological attachment created with personification options and all the serious stuff in the game. Or maybe the problem is in me, I don't know but in my book world title boxing and aliens don't mix.

Graphic and sound 9/10
Gameplay      9/10
Value for money   5/10*
Novelty          5/10
Total          7/10*

The bottom line - The alien stuff in a boxing game made me feel like I've had one too many hit in the head. If you have no problem with it put +3 on value/ +2 Total

If you're still interested you can check out the video I've found on Youtube:

It is widescreen but it will give you an idea of the game.

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Opera mini- the best mobile browser out there

Last week I've reviewed for you the best instant message app for your mobile phone. That's right- Jimm.

This week I'm giving you a short review of the second best application in my opinion - Opera mini.

All mobile phones have some form of rudimentary Internet browser with functionality limited to the utmost necessities. To say it another way- the preinstalled browsers suck! So here comes the Opera mini - the near perfect reincarnation of the desktop Opera browser for your mobile.

Why nearly perfect? Well, mostly because browsing on a 2" display and without a QWERTY keyboard sucks big time.

The browser however is as good as possible . It has the ability to sync with your PC,view pages in landscape mode,and auto resize the Internet pages for your meager mobile screen which makes it not only blazingly fast, but also compresses the pages, resulting in less traffic through your overprized GPRS. It also has power scrolling shortcuts and the possibility to create custom shortcuts , plus a dynamic resize function giving you the chance to zoom in and out flawlessly to see only the details you care about...

If you're not impressed by all this perhaps you can try the last beta version 4.1 which gives you a load of new, useful features to help you browse even faster, upload and download files, search on page and so on. I can write a lot about it, but it's much easier to redirect you to the site where you can download it and read some more on the topic...

So check out http://www.operamini.com/ for the browser overview, http://www.operamini.com/download/ for the browser download and http://www.operamini.com/beta/ for the latest Beta. You won't regret it :)
The bottom line is: Opera mini is the preferred mobile browser of this game designer and I personally recommend it to anyone who has the intention to use his phone for Internet browsing!

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The Simpsons: Minutes to meltdown - 30 minutes to disaster

I love the Simpsons. So when few months ago I saw that EA have a game with my favorite cartoon characters I couldn't skip the opportunity to play the game and review it. The hardest thing about it was objectivity - let's face it: every true fan will love the game just for the opportunity to play with Homer and hear his "Doh" a couple of times...
So the story is simple - our all favorite idiot will have to stop an explosion at the nuclear powerplant he is working at  and save all the little houses and people in virtual Springfield from total annihilation. The only problem is that Homer has to get to the powerplant first...
The audio/visual level of the game is good - you won't see anything spectacular, but the characters are nice and true to the original... I really like the idea of the picture dialogues and we have Spiderpig which is always a plus in my book.
Sadly, the gameplay is quite unremarkable - it has traveled in time and stopped somewhere in the era of the 8 bit computers. Not only that but the concept of a real time game - both in real life and in game you have 30 minutes to prevent disaster - although somewhat original, sucks! No replay value is something I can live with but half an hour of gameplay (and the game can be completed for half of that) is not my idea of a good bang for the bucks.

Graphic and sound 7/10
Gameplay      5/10
Value for money   1/10
Novelty          5/10
Total          5/10

The bottom line - Disastrously short . If you're a fan of the series though you might find an excuse to buy this game.

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Jimm

Ok I will be brief with this. If you can have just one java application on your mobile it's probably Jimm.  You might have heard about this nice little app but if you're still reading about it, chances are you haven't, so I'm gonna tell you what it is- it is a java instant messenger mobile or simply put ICQ on your mobile phone. So why would you want to have ICQ on your phone? I dunno. Maybe you've always wanted a smartphone, but you don't have it for some reason. Maybe you want a cheap messaging service or maybe you just love to chat with your pals. Whatever the reason Jimm is a nice ICQ client that uses your GPRS or UTMS connection (although I've tested only the GPRS). If you have a MIDP 2.0 phone (which is most phones out there nowadays) you get status icons, smileys, history, the chance to send and receive files,  monitor your traffic and use proxy servers. Not bad for a free product. Did I mention it has a multilingual support? Well it does!
The official version on the site is a little out of date but if you look closely you can find a new build on one of the other pages on that address. To save you the trouble- The address with the last official version is http://www.Jimm.org and the last build can be found on http://www.jimm.org/nightly.php .Either this or you could download it using WAP http://wap.jimm.org/.

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