Shivah is an unapologetic old school point and click adventure game. With pixellated graphics, dialogue tree gameplay and big exaggerated animations, it is definitely going to immediately appeal to people who are familiar with the classic point and clicks of the past.

At the same time the graphics might well put some off, and it’s worth noting up front that this is a decidedly retro game, visually. That said, when run in a window the graphics looked fine, and most of the animation has an cartoony element consistent with the feel of the game.

You play a disgruntled Rabbi named Russel Stone, who becomes embroiled in the death of a former member of his synagogue. The gameplay is very much classic LucasArts adventure, though with very few items – mostly you collect clues which can be used to ask questions of other characters. There’s even a nod towards the old Monkey Island insult fighting, though the fight felt a touch long winded in game$, possibly due to it being a bit late by the time I got to it!

Rabbi Stone always has a slightly snide comment or wisecrack to deploy as you go through the various locations in the game, and the interactions with the other characters are often entertaining in themselves, usually including a “Rabbinical Response”, that answers with a question – leading to an amusing rabbi-off in another synagogue at one point in the game.

On top of the usual ingredients there are several sections in the game where you have to use a computer, with a nice integration of a puzzle for working out logins. A search engine on the computer is used for some puzzle solving, as is an email interface. Also available is a button that outputs a variety of amusing jewish jokes, which is never a bad thing. I’ve long believed I’m missing out through not having a wisecracking jewish friend from New York, and the Shivah certainly helps fill that gap.

There are some extras thrown in, including a “kibbitzing” mode, which I haven’t yet tried but promises to offer directors commentary like interjections from the developer. There’s also a fun bonus when you complete the game, which I wont spoil.

Given the length and price of the game, the closest competition would probably be something like Gumshoe Online, though I think the voice acting and style of Shivah gives it the one up over Gumshoe, I’d say that the average GSO mystery is probably little more of a challenge.

There are some poor decisions in The Shivah though, mostly relating to the interface. For example, the clues can be combined by dragging one onto the other, but there is only point in the game where you actually have to do that, and it’s entirely possible to go through the game without realising you can right click to describe an object. Not knowing that wouldn’t stop you from completing the game, but you would miss some of the jokes, and I think would have justified a brief instruction screen at the start of the game.

In the end, the decision comes down to whether you want to pay a few quid for a short game, and I would encourage anyone to say yes. I found the story and characters engaging, and while it’s not the most polished game in the world, The Shivah captures a lot of what is good about adventure titles – humour, plot and fun.

Who doesn’t like coffee? Based on a quick, informal survey of the people around me: No one. I’m sure the dreams of many of the coffee craving population include running a hip coffee shop of their own, where kooky people could sit around, drink coffee and talk about their lives. Luckily for us, we can all live the dream thanks to Coffee Tycoon, but will it turn into a popular classic, like Friends, or a horrible nightmare, like Becker?

After persuading the game to run (almost) in a window by alt tabbing, I quickly grew to love the lack of a menu option to turn off the jazz music that infested the opening screens. Inspired by the uplifting sounds, I decided to name my caffeine emporium the “Pit of Despair”, and choose a “wacky” style for the new shop’s fittings. The last step was to choose a location from a range of US cities, including NY, Miami, and of course Seattle. I plumped for Miami, just on the off chance someone would mug the jazz band on their way there.

As an intelligent and experienced gamer, I decided to skip the tutorial and jump straight in. Because Anarchy Entertainment, the developer, clearly hate humanity there was still no way to turn off the god-awful music, and I noticed that you can only save one game at a time. There’s no autosave, but considering you only get to store the one game that might be something more of a blessing.

So, I’d got a shiny new store, and I needed to spend some money! Unfortunately, I only started with $100, which would just about allow me to buy in some decaf from the menu section. There were upgrades hiding in another tab but I couldn’t even afford to look at them, let alone buy them. I went with the default staff selection, a mix of mostly baristas, with 15% managers, and 5% executives.

The day started, as would many after it, with me looking into to my not very busy shop. The ironic events department informed me that the customers were satisfied due to the “soothing music”. I managed to spend $5 and make $5, leaving me with a net profit of… nothing! I decided to fire the management. The next day, I went $4 into profit, and the day after $5! This was working, and soon I’d be able to afford a cup of coffee in my own shop.

Unfortunately, the profits leveled out, and I noticed that despite my having fired them the manager and executive still seemed to be hanging around at the back of the store. To reach the next level on the ladder of corporate coffee success I needed to reach the lofty goal of 25 customers, of which I was seven short so I decided to fire all the baristas. By the end of the day I’d lost $10, taking me down to a dollar below my starting cash, but I was at 23 customers. I gave the managers another day and they blasted the target, earning me a $50 bonus and five new customers. The next target was 50 customers, but I was losing money per day. I decided to hire some baristas back, as like the managers before them they’d simply hung around despite the lack of pay. I noticed the executive had not left either, presumably because he had no where else to go since his wife left him due to his slow descent into drink, drugs and gold faucets in bathrooms (they seem to get through them). On the plus side the jazz music suddenly stopped for no apparent reason.

I tried hiring more baristas, in an effort to actually sell some coffee, but the general tide of the business was towards a loss. However, I was making money overall thanks to the random events that popped up throughout each day. Once I hit level 3, I was rewarded with yet more money and customers. Clearly what I needed was more stores, so I rehired my unshaven bum of an executive, and put him to work on expanding my empire. I also fired downsized some more baristas.

By this point, I had come to be fully aware of the utter pointlessness of the in game screen. Unlike, say, Lemonade Tycoon there is no way to skip a day, so you have to let each one run its course, and there’s no real information that you can use to steer your upgrades choices . Though different customers did appear as your empire grew it had approximately no impact on anything, except slowing down the game. The random events were, well, random, and they didn’t appear to be related to anything actually going on in my coffee corporation.

To illustrate, just before reaching the 100 customers mark I was informed that “a new company jet hurts profits”. Right, so I have $300, 2 stores, and a company jet that hurts profits to the lofty tune of $15. Obviously company jet should read “that homeless guy” and hurts company profits should read “looked like he could use a meal”.

Anyway, by this point I had enough in the bank to upgrade my coffeeteria, so I nipped into the upgrades screen. For a mere $500 I could give my employees a wide ranging set of benefits, when I wasn’t firing them all, netting me an extra 3 customers a day, thanks, presumably, to karma. Can’t say fairer than that.

I also noticed that the events started including interesting coffee facts, such as “In greece and turkey the oldest person is almost always served their coffee first”. I have no idea if this is true, but it did seem to turn up on an awful lot of lists of “interesting coffee facts” lists on google.

Out of boredom I experimented in only having executives for a while. This seemed to work, though I quickly went into debt, paying out money I didn’t have. Luckily, I noticed that this debt was not stored anywhere, so when I did make money, I never had to pay any back, clearly just screwing my employees and suppliers. Karmically, my accountant embezzeled $5. I let him off. The next day he embezzeled $20.

Most of the following days were a blur of clicking “End Day”, “Start Day”, “End Day”, “Start Day” until I approached a trance like state of clicking (while playing the same Plaid song again and again and again). After realising I was generating enough customers through the random events and the free daily extras from new menu items I pretty much gave up on the management. Unfortunately they started a union, losing me also twenty customers. Because unions do that. Ahem.

Luckily, the random events kept me interested, with off the wall combinations such as “Hot weather slows sales today” immediately followed by “Cold weather boosts sales today!”. That wacky Miami weather. I also got a warning that “my company was going broke”, a warning that was strangely lacking when it did, in fact, go broke.

At around level 10, the stupidity kicked in with a vengeance. I made enough to perform a corporate take over that gave me 250 new stores. Every day. This meant I never had to worry about dealing with stores ever again, and they became irrelevant to my future dealings. Of course, I still got messages saying “You don’t have enough stores, get to work” or “You need to expand, build more stores!”, but lets not let that get in the way of my masterplan. I had purchased pretty much every upgrade and menu item I could at that level, bar the public stock offering, which nets you ten times your current cash. While I did have over 4000 stores, I decided to wait till my customer base was a bit larger before IPOing.

It also became clear that all the positive and negative random events are scaled to how much money you have, which makes them fluctuate with your success. Whether you’ve got money in the tens of thousands, or the millions, it moves in roughly the same way due to the bonus system, which makes them not only annoying, but discouraging. The happy equilibrium point when you’re making money and gaining customers at a decent rate just doesn’t exist. You can get to a point when you’re doing both, but it’s interminably slow. Some events just don’t make sense, such as executives installing a jacuzzi that causes you to gain several thousand dollars, and some contain errors (right instead of write, and so on). Many of the events are just random snippits from customers, telling you how they will use the coffee to help them lift weights, or that they have a gold cup holder in their car. Since these are repeated so often they fail to add any life or character to the customers, and just clutter up the screen.

The upgrade system is equally pointless. Unlike in most tycoon games where the upgrades play differently, and so must be considered against each other, everything in Coffee Tycoon either gives you extra money, extra customers or extra stores. There is no real diference between employee benefits and a new type of coffee, or newspaper ads and a new espresso machine. On top of that, it really doesn’t take long to get everything you can get on each level, then it’s slogging though the customers until you can reach the next one. The real crime is that not only is it dull, but it’s easy. You can gain customers and money if you’re willing to spend a lot of time clicking the same two buttons, with only the reward of one of the two remaining coffee flavours to keep you going.

The Pit of Despair grew and grew, but the end of the game was a long way away. To finish it you need 1,000,000 customers, which by my estimates would involve playing the game for waaaay too long. I tried so hard to get to the end, but I just didn’t have the mental staminar. I left my coffee empire tired and empty, crushed by the weight of long, boring hours of work that really didn’t achieve anything whatsoever.

Recently, I watched an episode of 24 in which a character was subjected to a kind of torture that involved playing him a series of odd, irregular noises for several hours over headphones. Personally, I think the early stages of Coffee Tycoon works on a similar basis, and would have broken him a lot sooner. Perhaps this is an accurate simulation of the tedious world of coffee franchise ownership, where executives are utterly useless and the customers clich?d, annoying, coffee obsessed freaks, but I still don’t want to play it. This is the kind of product that should never be tested on humans, animals, or even single celled organisms.

• Elsewhere Online

• Grrl Gamer Review

Two games, One Slot

A great many of the independent games released are “inspired” by others. Often these are retro classics, or possibly mainstream console or PC titles, but fairly regularly the original game is an indie itself, as can be seen from the number of Bejeweled-esque games available.

Gamelab’s Diner Dash has a marked similarity to Mystery Studio’s Betty’s Beer Bar, which came out some time before it. Both tell the stories of plucky young women who have decided to follow their hearts by entering the service industry. Betty is a farm girl with dreams of tropical islands, who has decided to work her way there from behind a bar. Diner Dash’s Flo is a refugee from the corporate world, who is doing it for herself by opening a restaurant.

In each of the games, customers arrive and order a drink/meal, which you have to then serve to them. Betty must ensure her clientele have clean glasses full of beer, and the occasional coffee when they get too blitzed, while Flo needs to take orders to the kitchen, serve the food, and bus the tables after the customers have left.

This is all accomplished with the mouse, by clicking on the product (beer, food) and then the customer to serve them. The challenge comes from the rush of customers, and juggling the various resources available (cups for betty, tables for flo), in order to make enough off orders and tips to move up the Ladder Of Success. For the player the bill comes in at $19.95 for each of them, so which one should we be tipping?

Gameplay

The gameplay really is very, very similar. Diner Dash does have a little more depth, with the management of the queue being a big issue. It is much easier to wait on a restaurant full of people who are basically eating at the same time than it is to have people in different stages of the ordering process on different tables, so judging the time taken, and how likely the queuing customers are to leave is essential, since should someone leave you suffer a penalty. Betty’s Beer Bar has a similar issue with the beer glasses, but since the number of customers has a limit by the size of the bar, it doesn’t seem quite as significant as in Diner Dash.

Diner Dash was also significantly less repetitive than Betty’s Beer Bar, which required you to go through the same level multiple times until you earned enough to move to the next bar. When you’ve almost go enough to move it’s very easy to miss your sales goal and get fired because you just want to get through the last tedious shift. Real waiters and waitresses may sympathise.

Graphics

Despite being a the older of the pair, Betty’s probably the better looking. Though it’s true that she does resemble a lonely gentleman’s inflatable companion, Flo is equally damned by looking like a character from the desperately unfunny Nemi cartoon (found in quality free London paper The Metro). However, Betty’s big, cartoony customers have a wealth of detail and character, while Flo’s regulars tend to look exactly the same, differing only by colour and age, with a couple of specials thrown in. Betty’s bar is richer and more detailed than Flo’s various restraunts as well, though the short animation of the cooking chef is an excellent touch. This is not to say that the Diner Dash graphics are bad – the different faces of the customers as they get more annoyed and Flo’s own expressions of boredom or happiness are effective, and add to the game.

Sound

The music at Betty’s place got on my nerves, while the tunes at Flo’s were just dull. I turned them both off, no score draw.

Interface

Betty’s farmgirl roots really show through here, as Diner Dash knocks the stuffing out of Betty’s Beer Bar. The menus throughout Diner Dash are cleaner, slicker and more professional, but that’s a fairly minor point as you’ll spend most of your time in the game. There again though, DD comes out ahead. The hit areas, especially for the customer just above the keg, are too small and easy to miss in BBB, and there is no chaining of clicks. What I mean by this is, if you are holding an empty mug, you click on the keg, then immediately on a customer, the last click overrides the second, and Betty walks up to customer with an empty glass. In Diner Dash, you can click on an order then immediately click on the customer and Flo takes the food, then goes to the customer. This sounds a little odd, but it just means you can play at your pace, and Flo catches up, and it makes a big difference.

Cheque Please

In the end Dinner Dash has a level of polish that isn’t quite there in Betty’s Beer Bar. I found myself returning to Diner Dash, even after hitting a couple of tough levels that took a few attempts to complete. Perhaps this was due to the fact that each level varied slightly, which was something BBB was sorely lacking. Of course, I would recommend trying both demos, but I suspect you’ll be going home with Flo.

(It’s worth noting that Mystery Studio do have another, more recent, game along the same lines called Wild West Wendy, which is purported to have many improvements over Betty’s, and may well be worth a look – though it does list “original country music” as a feature.)

A title like “Summer Schoolgirls” doesn’t sound like the best choice to start off a serious, sombre series of reviews, but heck, what are you going to do? As it happens the game doesn’t even involve tentacles, but it is in the style of the japanese dating sim, or ren’ai, a genre I have hitherto not experienced, mainly due to a command of the japanese language that is sufficent only for, well, games with tentacles.

The game starts you off with an application for the precollege program at Waterfall University. The form asks few character-type questions, including your name. After putting in “Ted” I quickly realised that my character would be female – the gender entry box being prefilled. So, I created a peppy young thing called “Spunky”, a studious but ditzy non-smoker, who considers herself more of an evening person. After a short internal monologue, Spunky found her room and looked for her roommate. I noticed there was just the one bed in the room, and revised my hentai estimations. My room mate turned out to be a sad looking girl called Sophie, who later informed me she wasn’t a hick and didn’t worship Satan. She would prefer to be alone. I guess I really should have showered before moving in. Mood: pensive.

I left Sophie to think about her woes and listen to Linkin Park, and headed back out to meet my “Dorm mother”, Jen-Jen (she’s so nice they named her twice). My hallmates include Amy, Beth, Molly, and Michelle (wearing a fetching off the shoulder dealio), all who did little more than introduce themselves. Jen-Jen outlined the next week’s schedule, and I was let free to roam.

It was at this point, thanks to the overhead map you use to wander around the campus, I discovered my beloved Spunky had green hair and what appeared to be one of those pointy bras from the ’50s. Discouraged by Spunky’s style choices, I decided to head to the cafeteria for some comfort food. Filled with tasty turkey, I clicked over to the auditorium to catch some entertainment. Jen-Jen and another authority figure, Lily, were in attendance already. It is worth noting that social status seemed to be denoted by shoulder width, as both Lily and Jen-Jen looked like they’d been working their delts. A short lecture on being a student ensued, including a note on sexual safety, and not drinking illegally (despite my being 18, I presume the legal age is higher wherever poor old Spunky lives). Unfortunately that was that, so I headed over to the other dorm to score some booze and weed.

At the other dorm I ran Gwen. Gwen, I think, had an eating disorder, in that she’d heard of it but wasn’t currently practicing. From her narrow shoulders I could tell she was another student, and so determined to try and slip her a cheese burger when she was distracted. Before I got a chance, Gwen was backed up by Mariko, and the clearly moronic Daisy. Mariko put it in no uncertain terms that the two dorms were in competition, though it didn’t seem to have anything to do with drinking, a boat race, or Jeremy Paxman, which puts it outside my experience of university competition.

I’d missed the campus shop’s opening hours so I headed to the gazebo, because, hey, gazebo. Having kicked Anna out of the picture, I realised there was, in fact, nothing to do at the gazebo. Next stop was the music school, where Mariko was hanging around. She explained that the doors were locked. You see “with all the pianos in there” the school wanted to make sure “nothing gets stolen”. Considering that 1) who the hell is going to wander in and pocket a piano and 2) Mariko must have tested the doors to find them locked (considering this is our first day) it becomes clear that “Mariko” is some kind of nefarious piano thief, and had been casing the joint. I immediately headed back to my dorm to relay my suspicions to anyone that would listen.

Unfortunately, only Sophie was around. She was disturbed at my presence, and decided to go somewhere else. In her nightie. To be fair, there is only one bed in the room. I tried to engage her in conversation, only to discover she did not like poetry. I went to sleep in disgust.

The alarm went off at 8am, because it clearly doesn’t understand students, so I immediately went to back to bed. By the time I awoke next I’d missed breakfast, and had to hurry off to class. The day went in a flash, after meating skinny tie’d teacher Derek, my only real decision was where to have lunch, which is accurate to modern working life at least.

AT THIS POINT I forgot to save the game. Developer pro-tip: users are idiots, and autosave is your friend. So, Spunky returns to the beginning. Luckily, as a consumate professional I managed to click back to where I was in about two minutes.

The next day passed without incident, as I began to learn not totally, but mostly, trivial facts about my school friends, apart from the fact Michelle called Wednesdays “Hump day”. Because it’s like the hump in the middle of the week. I also discovered that I really have no idea what the little interface meant, and lacking in tool tips I thought it safest not to click, lest I colour my hair mauve or similar. What I was hunting for was a way to return to the previous screen, which I found out, after consulting the brief manual, was the up key. I had pretty much been playing the game with the mouse, so I must admit I’d have prefered the option on the right click.

Hump day evening meant a trip to the near by waterfall, which Spunky admired by staring at the stars gormlessly. Luckily the 4th of July fireworks started, giving Sophie an excuse to be angsty. “Couldn’t those sparks start a fire?” asked one girl. “They die before they ever hit the ground” replied Sophie, and though it was in text I could practically here The Cure playing in the background.

Finally Jen-Jen left, and after a short interlude Beth produced a wine cooler. Never one to say no, I said yes. Sophie grabbed a drink as well, as did a few of the other girls. Amusingly, I woke up hung over the next morning. Seriously kids, make sure to drink some water before you go to bed, alcohol will dehydrate you, and that’s no good for getting in a good morning of, er, drinking.

I spent the day in bed, but unfortunately Beth deserted us, after Jen-Jen discovered the detritus of our wild night. On the up side, Sophie opened up to me, and admitted she “had connections”, which I presume means that she, or a close family member, was in a gang. She proceeded to doodle a little heart, which I presume is the gang sign. Waterfall Rolling Sixties? I went to sleep concerned.

The final day was a talent show to appease the prime elders of the girls. Each of the dorms had to put on a short entertainment, and the other lot went first. Gwen recited some poetry:

“Flowers”
“Death”
“Melts… on a scream!”

Though Spunky was confused, it is clear to me that this is a cry for help, in the form of a burger, or some pies, or a protein shake. Our dorm then provided a piano recital. We came second. Out of two*. And that was that just about that. I quickly found out, in definitive numerical form, that Ol’ Spunky just didn’t have any charm, as no one liked me. Well I’ll be damned if I’m going to be unpopular, so it was straight back in, this time as a party animal! But no booze. It’s not worth it kids, I missed out on the mall.

The strength of this game is how much there is going on that you can’t see, which makes replaying the week very much part of the gamplay. The shock of seeing Derek having inapproriate relations with one of his students is a significant one, let me tell you, though when you see him having inappropriate relations with a different student the next night, it’s a grudging respect. The linearity, or predictable nature of the game becomes a benefit, as you can experiment with different ways of making friends with the various girls, something which is disturbingly addictive, as you uncover little snippits of information on each character, and the fast-forward let you skip through the text sections you’ve read. True, this is a game most likely to be played by girls and sweaty otaku, but anyone that was willing to give it a try with an open mind will find exploring the world Hanako have created very entertaining.

• Elsewhere Online

• GameTunnel Review

* As a footnote, I should point out that on my second time through I came third. As far as I can tell, still out of 2.