games

Skelly Archer is a new Windows Phone game that has made it to the Windows Phone Store's "New and Rising" ranks. It is an adventure game where you play the role of Skelly the skeleton, a fallen archer, set on conquering a wide assortment of monsters and discovering magical jewels.

Skelly Archer has two game modes and twenty-six levels spread out across six different lands/scenes. It's a decent game for your Windows Phone that is full of challenges and not a shabby way to pass the time with.

AlterEgo: DreamWalker is the sequel to the Windows Phone game AlterEgo. DreamWalker shares the retro appearance of the original and is a challenging puzzle oriented platform game.

DreamWalker has you navigating through a series of platform levels full of obstacles and monsters to collect pixels. You have a ghost image that mirrors your movements that you can swap places with to get through the levels.

Game play is simple, yet challenging and the retro graphics reminds me of the old Atari or Commodore 64 days. AlterEgo: DreamWalker is a nice continuation of the original game.

SkateDog is a jumper styled game for your Windows Phone much like Rainbow Rapture and Penguin. You just control a dog on a skateboard instead of a vengeful rainbow or hungry penguin.

With SkateDog you are racing Pluft ET (space alien) to a race for a hamburger. You guide your dog over hill and dale while Pluft races along in his space ship (doesn't seem very fair). Along the way you can collect glasses of soda for a boost of speed and dog treats for bonus points.

SkateDog is a fun game for your Windows Phone and challenging enough to keep you interested in things. I'm not sure it could hold up to marathon gaming sessions but it is a nice game to pass the time with.

Casual and hardcore (or ‘core’) games often appeal to one group of players while excluding the other. Aiming at just one slice of the gaming audience is well and good, but the holy grail of game development is bridging the gap by appealing to both audiences. Only one game developer has consistently managed to reach that lofty goal: PopCap. Now owned by EA, PopCap has finally returned to Windows Phone (7 and 8) with a port of its accessible yet challenging puzzle masterpiece Zuma’s Revenge.

As a Nokia exclusive, non-Nokia owners will have to wait six months to play Zuma’s Revenge. Read on to find out why it’s worth the wait.

Xbox Windows Phone has absolutely no shortage of puzzle games and physics puzzlers. These types of games are easy to create and easy to port, plus they work well in short play sessions on the go. I don’t blame avid mobile gamers for tiring of puzzlers as a whole, as our platform certainly needs a wider variety of games. Still, puzzle games inarguably have their place on smartphones, so we can’t expect them to stop coming along.

Of course KooZac is a puzzle game, but it’s noteworthy for several reasons. First, it comes Square Enix, the prolific Japanese developer responsible or Final Fantasy and many other mobile RPGs. Square-Enix’s continued support can only be good for Windows Phone. Two: KooZac might look like a standard falling block puzzle game, but it actually plays unlike its brethren thanks to the inclusion of my most bitter enemy: math. Also, Facebook integration!