Game Review: Grand Fantasia (in closed beta)

I got an email to join in on the closed beta for Grand Fantasia by Aeria Games. And, for a free game this blew me away. The graphics are pretty nice. Not what you would have expected, although it looks slightly childish, but really isn't when you get down into the nitty gritty of the game. Leveling is fun and easy to do. There is some confusion about where to go at times to find the best level monster since there is not notification of their levels. There is a color difference in their names such as yellow for equal to you and red is higher. The spirits are annoying little monsters that will make you want to pull your eyeballs out of the sockets. The darn critters keep crying on you if you do anything remotely wrong. Such as not spending time with them, getting them to work too hard, or just plain being mean :) The spirits are like your little assistants. You set them to go out and collect materials and build things for you such as armor and weapons. Community is small of course, but as I was playing there was no shortage of other members to play with and talk to. It's going to be worth the time to play!

Game Review of The Nightfall beta

Do you like to sit down and figure out puzzles, search mysterious haunted towns, and play "find" and seek? Well, you might be in luck soon enough. The Nightfall Mysteries: Curse of the Opera is in beta, but you can play the first chapter of the game. Nightfall is like playing Davinci Code in a way. The graphics are pretty decent. There is no community interaction seeing that it is not a multiplayer game. But, puzzles are great when you don't want to deal with people at all. The game starts out like a book using "Chapters" as your marking spots of where you are at in game process. Game is pretty dark and spooky even though it is in a 2d and non moving environment. It reminds me of the older versions of Myst in a way. The game of choice for the developers seems to be what I call "Find" and seek. It's the games where you see a picture that has hidden items all over the room and your objective is to find all the items in their list to get the special object to continue playing. You are able to click on people and listen to them talk. The characters have voices that speak, but I find myself turning the sound off and just reading since the voices can be very irritating and don't fit the character the way you would think of them talking. (ie... the opera singer sounds like a german and it freaked me out since she was obviously italian)