Another thing that's interesting is that there doesn't seem to be any bad-mouthing of Gamezebo although that site has virtually abandoned even even memtioning the type of games sold on BF. 

There's a review of Awakening Kingdoms (which was TGT on December 19).  There's a mention (no review) of Christmas Stories: A Christmas Carol Collector's Edition (TGT on Dec 5).  There'a a review of Mystery Case Files: Fate's Carnival Collector's Edition (TGT on Nov 26).  That's it.

I just finished Strange Discoveries: Aurora Peak.  It was an okay game but I thought the ending was stupid.  I never really like games from Vast.  Graphics are nice though.  Not a long game which is why I could finish it so quickly.

Next up will be the new Christmas Stories: A Christmas Carol which I will get tomorrow on BPM.  Thought I might as well play it since it's a Christmas game.

TiramaSue wrote:

Another thing that's interesting is that there doesn't seem to be any bad-mouthing of Gamezebo although that site has virtually abandoned even even memtioning the type of games sold on BF. 

There's a review of Awakening Kingdoms (which was TGT on December 19).  There's a mention (no review) of Christmas Stories: A Christmas Carol Collector's Edition (TGT on Dec 5).  There'a a review of Mystery Case Files: Fate's Carnival Collector's Edition (TGT on Nov 26).  That's it.

Here's the conclusion to GameZebo's review of Awakening Kingdoms.  I only post it here, rather than in the Group Play thread for the game, as it's the first sentence that doesn't make me very happy (my underline). 

GameZebo's Review wrote:

Clearly, with Awakening Kingdoms Big Fish Games is looking for a way to extend the life of the waning hidden-object genre upon which it built its billion dollar business. In this it's at least partially successful. While Kingdoms doesn'thave many eureka moments, it does manage to arrive at an interesting new combination of some overused elements. It also manages to avoid making its social aspects (friend prompts, microtransactions, etc.) too strident. Even with these positives, however, more design time could have been spent minimizing the game's more repetitive areas and arriving at a truly revolutionary free-to-play formula.

Just got my Christmas Carol, too, Barre, enjoy

When I have been playing games over the past few months, I've actually been playing really different types of games than usual. I'll post about those soon. For now I'll mention the 2 BF games I'm playing now: Weather Lord and Fort Defense. When I stopped playing much a while back I'd been in the middle of a number of games I wasn't that excited with. So now that I'm playing again I figured I'd just start fresh and play whichever games struck my interest.

Weather Lord is basically like games in the road builder genre (like MKFTP) but instead of sending workers out to fix things, you have to manipulate the weather to reach your goals (like combine two clouds to make rain and place it on the corn crop). I like the builder genre a lot, but do get bored when they all seem too similar. So I really appreciate this twist, which made the game really enjoyable for me.
It's a pretty short game and I'm close to done already. Oh, and there is a timer, but you can still finish the level after time runs out.

I've mentioned Fort Defense before, but now I'm playing it now in earnest (at least until it gets too hard for me to continue). For now, I'm a decent ways into it and I'm still able to beat most rounds within a few tries. I love tower defense games (though I find them to be hard, generally) and this seems like a good one. There are some good attack spells that need to be used strategically, which I've found fun.