Entertainment

It is rare for a week to go by without another new title appearing from Alawar. This time it is a retro-style cartoon adventure.

Watching a DVD movie on your laptop may be fine for a single person but when more are involved you need a larger display. A new product from CablesToGo offers to help in this respect.

Following her introduction in The Mystery of Meane Manor, Becky Brogan returns in The Institute. As with the first title, The Institute is a Hidden Object game with some puzzles thrown in for good measure.

For those who have laptops with an HDMI out then I guess this will be of little interest. However for those with a Desktop who want a second display then this little piece of kit from HIS, this could well be what you are looking for.

While Christmas is of course the biggest selling time for games, presents for other things such as Birthdays come at any time of year, two very different offerings here a box game of Angry Birds and a board game His and Hers.

With innovative scrolling and zooming scenes for searching, The Clockwork Man 2 is now available with a bonus game.

With a title that begins with the words “Elementary my dear”, you might think that Sherlock Holmes was involved in some way. However with Elementary My Dear Majesty, this is not the case. Instead the game has more of a fairy tale feel to it as it arrives with the claim of being the first 3D Hidden Object Adventure game.

My doctor suggests I should exercise and move about more. So I put his advice to good use as I checked out a set of Sennheiser headphones.

Have you noticed that when a game starts with a raven taking off in flight or a car pulling up at iron gates then spirits and evil forces will not be too far behind? If you have managed to avoid this type of situation then this next game will remedy the omission. In fact you get both the car pulling up and the raven taking flight.

Two more offerings from Hedkandi, first a set of Headphones and amazingly they are blue and not pink. Second a small and compact travel speaker ideal for those occasions when you want to share your music with others.

Regarded by some as the City ofLove,Parisis the setting for a game involving people aging rapidly to the sound of haunting music.

This has been around for a while, but for one reason or another I never got to look at one. This device can take a signal from Freeview, Freesat, DVD, Blu-ray and most other things and send it by your router to almost anywhere.

Adding Wi-Fi connectivity and the Android operating system to a portable media player is the design concept behind the Archos Home Connect device.

A match-3 game takes you on a journey from a house through an enchanted cavern to your destination.

No sooner do I complete my review of the Eminent EM7280 hdMEDIA RT3 product than the next version of this high definition multimedia player arrives for testing. This new member of the hdMEDIA RT3 family is the limited edition EM7285 HD media player which offers a range of additional features over the previous model.

Rather than a single title, this next offering from the Focus Multimedia’s game catalogue combines two Mystic Diary games. The first game in this Hidden Object Adventure series is subtitled Lost Brother while the follow up game is subtitledHauntedIsland. Each of these two games has its own separate installation routine and adds its own icon to your desktop.

If it is not vampires providing the threat in computer games then it is zombies who take centre stage as being creatures to avoid. However in this next case both branches of the living dead fraternity take the leading role in a new game developed by Five.bn and published by Alawar. The game, appropriate enough, is entitled Vampires vs. Zombies.

My 32inch TV is light in compassion to my previous offering, at 28inches this is only slightly smaller but is so much lighter again. Going back still further my TV before was also 32inch but a CRT and this far heavier again.

This box connects to your TV via an HDMI lead. Then the box connects to your network. The box itself can also have a hard disc or just stream content. It can also attach other hard discs with content or USB sticks to play music or video.

Time to put on your planner’s hat as Alawar offers you the opportunity to visit the American Old West and build a township.

While better known for its DAB radio products, PURE offers an Internet-based service called the Lounge that you can inspect.

As its full title indicates, Lonely Dream is the third offering in the Specialbit Studio’s Haunted Hotel series. I missed out on the first two episodes and so came to Lonely Dream without any preconceptions as to what to expect from this Hidden Object Adventure game originally published by Big Fish Games and now part of the Focus Multimedia catalogue.

Helping bring together your collection of digital photos, music tracks and album plus videos so that they can be directed towards an appropriate output medium, such as a television, is the role ideally suited for a multimedia player. These types of devices tend to come in a range of shapes and sizes with some variety in their feature set. The latest such device to make its presence felt on my desktop is the ACME Portable Media Centre (MPO1).

More Adventure than Hidden Object style of play, a new game from Alawar takes you to an abandoned amusement part to solve a mystery.

Bringing together video, music and pictures is the role of a media player such as the hdMEDIA RT3

All you can see is not all that is available in a game that has you looking up and down as well as left and right in search of hidden objects.

Two items that I saw recently at a press event called Digital Winter, other requested items from various other manufacturers have yet to arrive so these two stocking fillers get pride of place as their PR person is on the ball.

First a mono noise cancelling offering from Jabra. Then what Plantronics call a ‘smart headset for your smartphone. Both these Bluetooth offerings fit into the ear and are secured over the ear to allow all-day comfort.

Why stick with one body when reincarnation can switch you between characters in a Collector’s Edition game?

A recent visit to a trade show re-introduced me to a company that produced some of the early audio tapes I used for recording my favourite music from the radio. Those were the days. Now I have the opportunity to test another of the company’s products, this time for listening to my current favourite music.