Let's Talk At Length

I was first introduced to Cats  in my sixth grade music class.  Which, trust me, is the last thing you want to watch while in the same room as a herd of twelve-year-old boys.  People in strange wigs and skintight suits gyrating their hips and rubbing their heads against other people's crotches.  I was horrified and I wanted to go home. In trying to convince myself how much I hated it, I found the film uploaded in segments to YouTube, and as it turns out, without the outside influence, I fell in love with it. I fell in love hard.   The music, the costumes, simply how different it was from any other musical I had seen in my life, the characters and the actors' different interpretations of them, and the energy of the fellow devoted fans - all of it was and continues to be pure magic. I'm sure most of you have at least heard of the phenomenon that is Cats,  but you may not be as familiar with it as you think.  Despite popular belief, it does ...

(Full disclosure, this post contains mild spoilers for discussion's sake.) So I am a big fan of the Delicious  series and the many spin-offs that have launched from its universe, now formally known as GameHouse Original Stories.  Yes, they sometimes seem like they're hyper-marketed at that Hallmark Channel crowd, but they are the cream of the crop of modern casual games, I promise.  That said, not every game that comes out of GameHouse Studios is a masterpiece.  But just because it's a masterpiece doesn't mean there isn't good to be found or fun to be had. Enter Mortimer Beckett and the Book of Gold,  released in 2017.  For those unaware, Mortimer Beckett was not originally a GameHouse IP, instead starring in his own series of hidden object games developed by Paprikari from 2007 to 2012.  I played the first in the series, Secrets of Spooky Manor,  and dabbled with others, but I am by no means an aficionado on Mortimer Beckett lore.  Ac...

In the early 2000s, quality options for casual games were limited.  You basically had Cubis, Bejeweled, Jewel Quest, and a few thousand Mahjong games. But in 2004...or 2005, depending on which Wikipedia article you're looking at (I was quite young at the time, I can't remember), a little company known as PlayFirst Inc. published Diner Dash,  effectively changing the world of casual gaming as we know it. The original Diner Dash  was actually developed by Gamelab, who before then had only done a lot of online LEGO games from the look of it, but PlayFirst quickly acquired the rights to the game after they realized they had the golden goose sitting right in their lap. The story of Diner Dash  begins with Flo, a young woman who is fed up with corporate bureaucracy and strikes out on her own to run a restaurant.  Which ends up as a whole chain of restaurants, each with a different theme.  Now, I use the term "story" loosely because all that real...