HD minis remake, Cubixx HD is headed to the Playstation Network on August 17th. The remake is being done by Laughing Jackal and it is confirmed for the European Store only.  We still don’t know when it will launch in the American PSN Store. Playstation members get a 20% discount on $9.99.

Cubixx HD is a remake of an old classic Qix. The HD version features a lot of improvements like additional levels, challenges and leaderboards, along with seven multiplayer modes.

Frima Studio has declared that today is officially the start of an “awesome” summer by announcing the “AWESOME Summer Minis Bundle,” a collection of Frima’s five best-selling PlayStation mini titles, now available for a bundled price of $4.99 USD on the PlayStation Store. The sale price is almost 70% off the regular combined price of these five titles. Through the epic realm of mythical Norse gods or the darkest corners of the galaxy, these five assorted games are sure to satisfy your never-ending taste for adventure. This one-of-a-kind-video-game-buffet includes premium titles like A Space Shooter for 2 Bucks,Young Thor, Widgets Odyssey 1 and 2, and Zombie Tycoon, all for a 70% discount off the combined retail price.

The AWESOME Summer Minis Bundle features:
– A Space Shooter for 2 Bucks!
– Young Thor
– Widgets Odyssey
– Widgets Odyssey 2
– Zombie Tycoon

Stay tuned to GamingBolt.com for more news and updates.

You better get used to this interface as you’ll be seeing a lot of it in Jane’s Hotel

The game sees you tending to various guests that stay at your hotel, by satisfying their various needs (no innuendo implied). It literally is a case though of seeing the symbol that appears above their heads and responding to it, whether it be cleaning their room, bringing them coffee or handing out room keys. You do this by scrolling through each aspect of the hotel on screen and selecting them in the correct order. The controls feel generally quite intuitive, with sensible short-cut keys that will see you zipping across the hotel like a pro. It can all feel surprisingly satisfying after a while as you successfully chain together a string of satisfied customers.

A decent amount of levels for sure, but it’s a shame they’re all so similar

Despite an initial satisfaction from playing the game in short bursts, it must be said that the game is very repetitive. There is a nice sense of progression between levels as you use hotel earnings to pay for new decorations and hotel features that boost your establishment’s popularity, yet every level still feels the same in spite of this. The character sprites and level designs, as cheery and bright as they are, don’t change often enough to remain interesting. Likewise, the chirpy and joyous tunes just repeat and are recycled level after level. Even the tasks you must complete for the guests begin to grind after a while. Why on earth can’t you get your own coffee? It’s not that hard!

The sprites and textures may change, but the levels stay the same

Jane’s Hotel is a reasonable little hotel sim that’s available for a very reasonable price for your PSP and PS3. There are a vast quantity of levels that should make Jane’s Hotel good value for money, but the repetitive nature of the gameplay prevent it from being a particularly worthwhile purchase. The main problem with parting money for Jane’s Hotel is in how many other games there are available that do a similar thing. Aside from the hotel setting there are a vast array of similar titles that will be available for free online at any one time. Jane’s Hotel is still a nice little distraction but, if you do part ways with your cash for it, you must be aware that this is all it can be.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 3.

Carnivores: Dinosaur Hunter

Let’s start with Carnivores: Dinosaur Hunter as you quite obviously hunt for dinosaurs.  Now I might have been a little harsh on how bad the graphics are in the intro, but they are nothing to brag about as there are TONS of games for the PSP that have graphics that blow both of these games away.  Now hunting dinosaurs sounds fun as you can use a pistol, crossbow, sniper rifle and more but it just doesn’t quite get you into it.  After a few minutes of searching for a dinosaur that you specifically pick to hunt before the level starts, you start to get bored really quick as you can’t find the dinosaur you need to kill.  Then you forget which dinosaur you were supposed to be hunting and start killing everything.  Your then out of bullets and couldn’t kill the dino you needed to even if you found it.  Maybe I am just putting a scenario up here but I would expect a lot more from the PSP. You start off a beginner hunting easier pray like herbivores and the then make your way up to the more dangerous carnivores. These meat eaters can smell you a mile away, but in windy areas you can’t take advantage. Shooting my guns sounded like a BB gun and it takes some getting used to aiming.

Moving on the Normal Tanks, where it is a top view game while you control a tank.. and I don’t know what is so normal about it. I mean you do get missiles and a machine gun but the title still boggles my mind. The game is very complex, you see, you must blow up everything in your path with out getting hit. It might take a genius to understand it. Normal Tanks was actually released for the PC a while back, and I mean a while. The heavy metal midi soundtrack for the game brought me back to the days of Doom which was cool.

Normal Tanks

All in all we here at GamingBolt don’t usually review games like this so the bottom line is that it far from being up to par with any type of game on any console in this generation, but the size and ability to download the game for cheap is a plus. Carnivores: Dinosaur Hunter costs $3.99 while Normal Tanks costs $2.99. Now the size of these game are so small that if that is a problem for you, then these games might be worth it for you as these games are never over 100MB. If your not worried about memory space, I would spend your money on something else.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 3.

BreakQuest is a Breakout style game that has been available on pc for some time, but this review covers a recent port that has seen the game being released on the PSN’s minis service. The game falls into the bat and ball genre in the same vein as Breakout, requiring you to control a paddle that hits a ball across the screen in an attempt to smash all the blocks on the level.

Some of the level designs are a class act.

Where BreakQuest separates itself from the rest of the riff raff is through a variety of gameplay improvements. You have the standard array of powerups that alter your paddle or the ball in some way, but there are also several projectile and gravity altering add ons that help you eliminate that last frustrating block should the need arise. What also gives BreakQuest a bit of added freshness is the use of a realistic 2D physics engine. Rather than a series of square blocks that disappear on contact, the levels in BreakQuest contain a variety of differently shaped objects and strung together obstacles that alter the gameplay dynamics in new and surprising ways. It also opens up the opportunity for some fantastic level designs that add a needed variety to the proceedings. I say variety but, whilst the game isn’t necessarily a monotonous title, there is only so far the standard bat and ball formula can go.

If this kind of game doesn’t appear instantly familliar to you, then go stand in a corner. Now stay there. Forever.

Aesthetically, BreakQuest is a bit of a hit and miss affair. The sound is well implemented, with chirpy 8-bit melodies that play in time with the bricks breaking, in the style of Rez. Graphically there are flashes of brilliance, with some level designs that will bring a smile to your face. Yet, the graphics generally seem a little blurry and low resolution. Especially if you play the game on PS3, though a game of Breakout will always look like a game of Breakout.

The realistic physics engine lifts BreakQuest high above its competitors.

In terms of longevity it is difficult to entirely recommend BreakQuest, regardless of its low and reasonable retail price point. Though there are over one hundred levels and three difficulty settings to choose from, the lack of alternate modes make BreakQuest a potentially short lived experience. The story mode sees you complete the levels sequentially and the arcade mode plays through the levels randomly with occasionally altered rules and physics. That’s it and, even with the alternate rules of the arcade mode, what you see is what you get with BreakQuest. It is a reasonably well constructed game all around, with some intriguing and unique aesthetics and physics. That said, unless you are a true connoisseur of the Breakout game style, you are unlikely to find enough in a game like BreakQuest to justify the purchase.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation Portable.

Sony just recently confirmed that the iPod super-hit title, Angry Birds, will be making its way to the minis collection on PSN for the PSP and PS3, starting tomorrow in the US. It will be released in Europe the day after tomorrow, on Wednesday.

Angry Birds was super-successful on the iPod, having been donwloaded a whooping 50 million times.

XBLA and WiiWare versions of the game are also in the works.

Search for the clues… Of course you can just spam the X button and hope

The game sees you inhabiting the role of the young police lieutenant, Mac, as he attempts to re-open and solve the Jack the Ripper murders with his friend and colleague Sir Francis Galton. Yes that’s right, supposedly Francis Galton helped with the Jack the Ripper case. Generally the limited facts history tells us about the murders are factually represented but, as you can see, some liberties have been made while telling the tale. Any who have taken the time to investigate the Ripper murders will understand the fascinating mysteries surrounding them, and the bizarre psychology of their so-called mastermind, Jack the Ripper himself. Sadly this intriguing element doesn’t really come across in Actual Crimes and the plot generally feels like little more than a vehicle for its rather bland gameplay.

The gameplay mechanics generally revolve around you searching for clues at various crime scenes and suspicious locations. You get a list on the left hand side of objects you need to find, and you scan through the environment looking for them. Depending on the difficulty setting you selected at the beginning of the game, you may or may not have a time limit for these sections. If you chose the easy and non-timed mode these sections can prove oddly relaxing, but there is generally very little to them. For a start some of the objects you are required to find are entirely random and nonsensical. How will these three crows help with the murder investigation exactly? Many of the objects are also hidden away cheaply, either behind things where the poorly chosen viewpoint prevents you seeing them, or mixed in with the bland and breaded textures. I was also disappointed by the lack of actual deduction required once all the clues had been obtained. Considering the opening sequence blabbed on about Galton’s revolutionary forensic techniques, I was intensely let down by the way in which you don’t ever need to actually use your mind to put together the clues and make sense of them.

Search for the clues… Again

Here and there you are introduced to a mini-game that may actually qualify as a puzzle. There isn’t a huge variety within them, but they are still a very mixed bag ranging from rudimentary sliding picture puzzles to a random and infuriating key combination guessing game. Considering you may be granted only one of these real puzzles after clearing five or six tedious room searches, it doesn’t really seem to help vary up the formula all that much.

For a game that is so reliant on the player hunting and searching the surroundings, the graphics can only be described as unhelpful. For a start the bland and jagged textures often actually get in the way of your progress and prevent you from finding some obvious clues. Aside from irritations such as this, the style and technical capacity of the visuals are fairly respectable. One thing that did confuse me intensely was some of the surrealist aspects of the environments. It’ll tell you to look for a fork and there will be over-sized bits of cutlery stapled to the walls in an attempt to confuse you. It’s all just a bit odd and the unnatural look of things was rather distracting. It’s a shame they went for this type of aesthetic really as, otherwise, the game does a reasonable job of evoking a late 19^th century London.

The sound is slightly more accomplished and is actually pretty decent on the whole. The sound effects are fairly standard and the lack of voice acting is certainly a hidden blessing, but the music is where things start to shine. Sure it does get repetitive after a while, but the actual use of melody and texture was quite rousing. It’s just a shame that the dynamics of the incidental music were left on a loop, as the music would’ve been infinitely more provoking had it been made to match the action on screen.

Great Scott! Some real gameplay! Shame it won’t last long

So is Actual Crimes worth your hard earned dough? In a word, no. In two words, no way! When you consider that the game is so monotonous it almost doesn’t matter how long the main story is, as the enjoyment you get from the game will run out long before it’s over. With the price tag set as it is you’re much better downloading a classic PS1 title from the network store. At least those games were really great way back when, rather than just being mediocre now. If you really have a hankering to catch Jack the Ripper then get the Sherlock Holmes game of the same nature instead; It’s not perfect but it’s way better than this.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation Portable.

There are currently over 85 different Minis available for download, from over 50 developers.

The current best selling Minis title is Age of Zombies by Halfbrick Studis.

Sony said that more and more developers are joining the Minis program every day, so expect more titles that you will be able to download for your PSP and PS3.

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