Game Mini-Reviews Continued (Part 6!)

River Raid - A clone of the classic shooting game, this game won the Scion driving creativity contest, even though it was basically completely lacking in creativity. It has some nice additional features like an internal achievement system of sorts, but other than that it's just some poor gameplay with very little going for it compared to the other games which won prizes.

Dreams - It's funny I would reach this going back through the reports just now. I just recently replayed Dreams for the card and achievement that were added to it. Dreams is a find the difference game with a very striking art style, and dynamic differences. In essence in every stage of Dreams there is a base image and a number of overlay images which can be added to each picture, or not. Therefore any given stage will often have new differences from the last time you saw it. Common differences are tatoos, freckles and such on people, as well as necklaces, and bracelets. Motion lines, other detail lines or shapes; random scrawling on things like walls, furniture, or notebooks; color changes, and the addition of small elements like cats, birds, mushrooms, whatever.

It's interesting that even if there are only 10 binary choices for the base picture, (2^10) and then from that base picture, 10 choose 6 (210) possible difference pictures, each level would have over 200,000 different ways of displaying, and I expect there are well over 10 choices on some levels... In practice though, after playing through a few times you're likely to have seen all the differences you're shown, even if the pictures themselves aren't exactly the same. I believe the game called 6 differences or something did this too, but maybe to a lesser extent.