Easy to play and full of problem solving opportunities, this collection of 33 beautifully illustrated I SPY riddles continues the I SPY tradition, in a lush carnival setting. The design is very similar to past I SPY computer games.
In order to win carnival tickets to the fun house, you must find hidden objects. Clues are given in the form of a rhyme. Finding the hidden balloon or the three elephants requires a lot of careful hunting; a great exercise in both visual discrimination and persistence. The added bonus of the riddles makes this a nice language experience.
Content includes 33 I SPY riddles, 11 I SPY picture screens, four games, and a carnival scavenger hunt. A sign-in system saves your progress. The timed games provide a slightly different twist to the visual discrimination. For example, in Hot Hoops, children drag and drop items onto a Venn diagram, paying careful attention to attributes like shape, size and color. All in all, this is another outstanding learning opportunity for children or adults. Designed by Artech Studios for Scholastic.
Details: Scholastic. Game for kids 6 yrs and up. Platform: Windows, Mac OSX.

Link to buy I Spy Fun House game

Reading through the November issue made me realize just how late I entered PC gaming. It’s true that this is a matter of when I was born, but seldom has the true weight of what i’ve missed out on landed so heavily. I was born a console child alongside the straightforward hardware conventions of Power. Reset, and the A and B buttons. It was accessibility at its best, especially for someone who used to considered a monitor a “computer.”

Summer blockbusters wax and wane, yet we still find solace and questioning in Lawrence of Arabia.

New York Times best-sellers sweep the nation, and still Hugo’s hunchback climbs those lonely towers. For all of today’s glitter, 1 can’t help but think of the gold I have yet to discover, even though computer gaming may not have quite the same established history.

If nothing else, the final issue of Computer Gaming World inspired me to want to dig deeper than I have before and try in earnest to slow down my twitch-happy mouse finger. There’s a substantial portion of strategy to be planned, foreign seas to explore, and mile-high soaring to be done, and I want to try and taste it before I grow old and sore and start distressing how we’ve lost those good old Battlefield 2 days.

Your 7-out-of-lO score for Medal of Horror: Airborne was nothing less than a gift, I have played all the MOH games, and this is by far the worst in the series. Saving in this game is a waste of time; you end up back in an airdrop no matter what you da, I was anticipating the release of this game for quite a while, but after playing through the first two parts of the campaign, I quit in frustration. It seemed that the developers forgot what made the series so much fun; I can only hope whoever was responsible for the changes will find a new place to work. I fully realize many will like the new direction, but do not.

Kudos on your “Love + Hate” article. Usually, we only hear from developers when they’re hawking their latest wares, so it was interesting to hear them discuss their broader views on the art and industry of gaming. Some thoughtprovoking stuff.

On the other hand, the “Confessions of an Electronic Hit Man” article was a surprising deviation from the usual high standards of CGW/GFW. Why devote two whole pages to the unsubstantiated and, by your own admission, dubious - claims of some anonymous gamer? I realize you’re a trade magazine and not Newsweek, but please stick with the verifiable facts and leave any rumors, myths, and tall tales to Internet forums.

I am compelled to write this because I have a feeling Variguard: Saga of Heroes is going to receive an unfair review and be rated much lower than it should. Especially after I read some shortsighted reviews and saw that V:SOH got the “Ugly” in your April 2007 issue’s “Good, Bad, and Ugly”, Ironically V:SOH was never really meant as a WOW killer as WOW players were not its target market. The only bad thing about the timing was that it was difficult to get ad space with all the WOW stuff up advertising The Burning Crusade.

Now I’m no “Vanboi,” but I do insist that when someone reviews a game they play it thoroughly and give it a fair shake. Nobody can deny that the game is riddled with bugs and that is unforgivable, but you also have to see what the active piayers see…the future. If you look past the bugs, the actual game itself is really fun.

I can only hope that if it does get a bad review the reviewer points out that it would have received a much higher score if it wasn’t so buggy. There is so much great stuff in the game from character creation, diplomacy, breathtaking graphics, boats, flying mounts, and so on.

It would be a shame that some people may not even give it a chance. Once the game is mostly bug-free (which they are diligently working on fixing with weekly patches) it will truly be a game I will enjoy playing for a long time. I hope that maybe people will check the game out in the future and not dismiss the game forever [because of] bad reviews based mostly on bugs that will be fixed. It is actually much better today than it was at launch.

I’m certainly not just interested in the latest triple-A MMO/FPS/RTS/RPG, and I know plenty of other gamers with broad interests.

You could have assumed, for instance, that I’d never care for a casual game, but without your unexpected coverage of Bonnie’s Bookstore - one of your games of the year - I might have missed that fun title, (think you’re projecting your own interests on others by assuming that hardcore gamers don’t care much about ‘baby games,” Christian games, casual games, indie games, sims, war games, and other genres you tend to downplay or cover only in passing with postcard-sized columns or tiny reviews. And after all, maybe more gamers would be into these things if more gamers heard about them and you showed more enthusiasm for them with equal coverage.

Isn’t part of your job to expose us to new games and genres and trends, whatever they might be?

By ati means, help us decide what’s worth our time or not, but please, don’t just decide in advance to keep silent about something. We might never even hear of it.

Regarding article “Play for Pay”: I spent many an hour in glorious rapture playing several MMORPGs over three to five years where I made a boatload of cash selling valuable items and gold on eBay. In my estimation, I would say that I raked in a total of about $50,000 over three years of playing Ultima Online. Asheron’s Call, and Dark Age of Camelot Most of that came from selling blocks of gold coins via sales from strategically placed houses in Ultima Online. Other “opportunities” arose with loose-mouthed developers divulging certain items that were about to be “nerfed,” allowing for opportunistic gaming capitalists like myself to load up ahead of time and slowly dole out the sales for months afterward. The occasional exploit that popped up also provided more stuffins for my coin purse. It was a great ride, but life interposed in the form of kids and a loving wife, so those days are long gone. Not to mention the Chinese gold farmers that spew megaspam during WOW game sessions for pennies-an-hour wages.

When I saw the magazine on the newsstand, I was amazed…especially when I noticed it was the first issue promoting PC games with the “Games for Windows” logo. I have only one concern, though. Recently, I have only seen a few games bearing the “Games for Windows” logo (mostly Microsoft Game Studios titles arid a few other third-party games). Why is this? Are other publishers against the idea?

I feel very stressed out right now. Why? All right, here are a few reasons:
1. My Geography Coursework (which counts for 70% of my total grade which goes on my university transcript) First Draft is due Next Thursday and I haven’t started it at all.
2. There’s a History Assignment that I know nothing about due on the exact same day.
3. I have a Chemistry Test tomorrow.
4. I have a Math Test soon and Math is by far my worst subject.
5. I’m still on the Internet.
All of the above and the daily pile of homework = a very stressed out teenager. And guess what? My History teacher wouldn’t give me an extension. Ugh. I can not resist the urge to call him… a butthead! (I’m allowed to, it’s a privilege of the juvenile idiots.)
A very bad sign indeed….

Lately, I’ve been receiving a lot of strange emails. I deleted them straight away. Why? Because I’ve been hit by a virus before, and so this is a safety precaution. If you have or are planning to mail me, please leave a comment that tells me so, because I will not respond to emails from people I don’t know. If I haven’t responded to your mail, it’s not that I’m trying to be snobbish, but I’ve taken them as spam/virus containing emails.