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Macgamestore.com and Gogii Games have teamed up to announce the release of Escape The Museum, a new puzzle/hidden object game from the creators of Hidden Secrets: The Nightmare.

It¹s a warm day in the city and Susan Anderson has brought her daughter Caitlin to work for the day at the National Museum of History. What began as an exciting day for Caitlin and Susan ends in devastating suspense when, just after closing, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake rocks the city. After getting Caitlin to safety, Susan scours the museum for anyone left behind but is knocked unconscious by falling debris. When Susan awakes she finds the museum left in shambles. Barely able to move from room to room, you must help Susan navigate and work her way through the maze of the museum in a series of puzzles and frantic searching. Can you help Susan get back to Caitlin and escape the museum together?

Features:
• Incredible adventure to solve
• 25 Puzzles to solve
• Mini Games
• 60 Hidden Object levels
• Unlock the Antique Round

Buy Escape The Museum

The latest feature article from Apple Games focuses on The Sims Castaway Stories. The game features a story mode centering on the lives of castaways on an island and a freeplay mode for more traditional Sims play. Apple's article includes both a review of the game's features and a list of cheat codes.

You may be cut off from civilization, but Castaway Stories allows you to barter supplies for accessories ranging from a simplistic lean-to the Two Tickets to Paradise Canopied Bed. You can even trade for a vintage “Destruction Day” pinball machine, which was created by the people working in the secretive research lab you’ll learn more about during the story. As in other Sims Stories, you also unlock rewards by progressing through the story and by doing well in your career, which is limited to crafting, gathering, or hunting in this game.

Relationships in Castaway Stories include the non-human variety, as you’ll discover while searching the island. For example, you’ll need to make peace with a local group of orangutans if you want to take the idol sitting at the base of their tree. (Said idol functions much like the volleyball in the movie “Cast Away.”) And watch out for the hyenas, a temperamental group of canines who nevertheless make good pets, if you can figure out how to befriend them. Of course, you’ll eventually meet other Sims, both castaways and local natives. Together, you can build a new Sim community and take David and Jessica’s stories beyond their conclusions.

In free play mode, you can explore everything Castaway Stories has to offer; just make sure you unlock the rewards in story mode first. Use a pre-existing Sim or create a new one and explore Wannami Island, which features a Castaway-themed night club, a village, and even a market where you can trade resources for clothes, food, and stuff for your hut. Don’t forget that you can also download bonus items at the Castaway Stories Web site.

Apple Games: The Sims Castaway Stories

Aspyr Media

The Sims Castaway Stories

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IGN has posted a guide to the information currently known about the zerg race, one of three playable races in the upcoming StarCraft II. The site offers a name and description of each zerg building and unit, as well as gameplay descriptions and screenshots.

Instead of focusing on the Protoss and Terran, who have been reworked to a degree since we saw them at Blizzcon 2007, we'll talk about the newly revealed Zerg. These chitin-covered insect-like abominations start out like the other races, with a central hatchery near mineral outcroppings and a vespene gas deposit. With the handful of Drones you're given at the start, you assign some to gather minerals, another to drop an extractor on the gas to enable collection, and start saving resources for a spawning pool. Once the pool is up, Zerglings become available at the hatchery, and you can build a Queen, one of the more peculiar aspects of the Zerg's new arsenal.

Mostly, that's because the Queen builds all the base defenses. No longer will you be able to construct separate air and ground defense structures with drones. Instead, the Queen sets up little defensive nodes in your base's creep, can augment the nodes with another structure, and can heal buildings. With a fully upgraded queen, this means a lot more micromanagement on the Zerg player's part when trying to defend a base. Of course this will likely be no problem for the seasoned StarCraft fans out there who've been playing the game for 10 years, but the Zerg clearly are not intended as a starting race for someone trying to learn the ropes, perhaps more so than in the original.

IGN: StarCraft II Info Center

Blizzard Entertainment

StarCraft II: Wings Of Liberty

Buy StarCraft II: Wings Of Liberty

Recent announcements have revealed the iPhone gaming plans of two more companies. Gameloft has announced plans to release 15 games for the iPhone in 2008, while id Software's John Carmack mentioned his company's interest in the iPhone in a Slashdot posting.

From Slashdot:

We (Id) have put in our application like everyone else, so I don't have any inside information at this point. I think Steve is still pissed at me over some negative comments I made about iPod development tools a while ago. Just based on the blurbs, it looks very good -- a simulator plus debugging on the native device is the best of both worlds, and a 70% royalty deal for apps over iTunes is quite good.

The iTunes distribution channel is really a more important aspect than a lot of people understand. The ability to distribute larger applications than the over-the-air limits and effectively market your title with more than a dozen character deck name, combined with the reasonable income split make this look like a very interesting market. This type of developer / customer interaction is probably the wave of the future for mobile devices, it will be interesting to see how quickly the other players can react. Based on our experiences with the carriers, I am betting not very quickly.

Utilizing the SDK package, Gameloft development teams have started to create a strong line-up for 2008. As expected, iPhone proves to be a revolutionary gaming device, thanks in part to a 3.5-inch widescreen, the touch screen feature, a strong 3D processor and other exciting features such as the accelerometer.

"The iPhone gaming environment opens a new era in mobile gaming and is exactly what we've been waiting for" said Michel Guillemot, President of Gameloft. "The Apple iPhone has changed the way consumers perceive and interact with their mobile phones, and the release of the SDK is a tremendous opportunity for Gameloft to apply its creative and innovative approach to mobile gaming," said Guillemot. "Due to our investment in creating one of the most advanced and creative development studios to date, we are ideally positioned today to seamlessly integrate new opportunities and quickly produce games that are as evolutionary as they are enjoyable."

Slashdot: Carmack On iPhone Games

Gameloft To Bring Over 15 Games To iPhone In '08

id Software

Gameloft

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