Apparently, each year the average American consumes 4 pounds of potato chips, 30 pounds of cheese, 56 gallons of soda pop, 75 pounds of sugar, and 221 pounds of meat. Yikes! Anyone getting indigestion? Around 2.4 million people are employed the grocery stores that provide this food, and supermarket cashiers earn a about $7.90 per hour on average. It might not be the best paying career on the planet, but hey, it's a living.

In Supermarket Mania, it's time to earn your salt. The big conglomerate Torg Corporation is everywhere, and so you hesitantly decide to get a job working in the Torg Supermarket as a stock girl. You thought you did so well! Well, Mr, Torg did not agree. After being retrenched and replaced by a team of robots, you are lucky enough to find work for the tiny, run-down grocery store owned by Mr. Clarence. The question is, can you help him defeat his old nemesis and run the best supermarket in town?

Throughout the game, your primary goal is to keep the shelves of the supermarket stocked, so that customers can gather all of the items they require without losing patience. As the customers buy items, the shelves deplete, and need to be restocked. Stocking the shelves is done by clicking on them. A shelf does not need to be completely empty in order to be restocked, so it pays to keep up.

You can fill up five stalls with a full food cart (seven with an upgrade). Once empty, you need to refill your cart. To fill your cart, click on the stockroom and wait until the gauge is full. The cart's stock is shown by a gauge on the lower right side of the screen.

In addition to stocking shelves, you must clean up any trash that might trip your customers, and drop it in the recycle bin. If you want a boost of energy, a cup of coffee will really boost your speed...

WHEW!!! Whether you're a food service employee, a grocery chain manager or simply a person who goes shopping, Supermarket Mania from Alawar Entertainment and G5 Entertainment is the time management game for you!! After playing it all the way through (several times), I discovered that there were a lot of things I didn't know about my neighborhood grocery store -- and Supermarket Mania lets you manage ALL of them!

Are you eager to do well on your first day of work? Work as fast as you can and you'll be rewarded! Are you looking for more responsibility? Maybe you want to generate more sales? Work a little harder (and smarter) and you'll be rewarded! Do you want to make your store the best store and take pride in your work? Keep at it -- all the way to the end!!! Just try to get an excellent on all of the levels. (It's not easy!)...

With the price of groceries going up by the minute, Supermarket Mania offers a great deal in keeping you busy for hours avoiding a trip to the grocery store. Like the coffee shop on every corner, Torg has supermarkets all over town giving Nikki little choice but to go work there as a stocker.

Nikki doesn’t like the looks of Torg when scary-looking robots greet her on her first day of work. After four days of excellent work, Mr. Torg fires her and her cashier friend. He activates the robots to run his stores. The girls find a better place in a run down pop store (well, there’s no mom as far as we can see) run by Mr. Clarence. He trusts the girls to run the store alone.

The girls deal with different types of customers who have different styles of shopping. Granny takes her time and has plenty of patience while teens have zero patience and move quickly. Kids tear up the place until you have your security guard friend, Mr. Barefist (I wonder how they came up with that), blow the whistle to stop their antics. Barefist also comes in handy in stopping brazen thieves.

You have two ways to catch a thief. Notify Barefist while the thief has a circle over his head to stop the thief who moves on to the next attempt or leaves the store. Or be patient and let the circle over the thief’s head fill and shake — alert Barefist at that time and you earn a cash bonus. However, the shaky thing doesn’t happen every time so waiting for a full circle could lead to thief getting away with … well, theft.

Upgrades are present ranging from better products that sell for more money and a gumball machine for more tips to a faster loading stockroom and the most expensive one, a bigger cart. As you advance levels more upgrades show up to help keep customer patience from spiraling when so many require your time in stocking the shelves...

Never ever think of managing a supermarket. Its unbelievably hard! And to understand this, you have to try it by yourself in the brand new time management game Supermarket Mania.

You might already know, that in time management games you have to serve customers. But in the Supermarket Mania they can serve themselves pretty well. Well enough to make you busy.

In this game, customers just come to your supermarket and take what they need from showcases. And your job is to keep the showcases full of goods. Because if customers can’t find what they want for a long time, they just leave and you lost the money.

Different customers have different preferences on food. For example, grannies just love sausages. Especially with a milk. Teens are usually don’t get too much. They prefer soda, cakes and the ice-cream. Ladies are buying many different groceries, but just a few from each of them. And gentlemen are always love to buy a lot from almost every showcase...

Never in the history of game shows have you had to work so hard to earn that blender or barbecue than in The Hidden Object Show. With 30 hidden object scenes and more than 100 rounds peppered with 10 different random mini-games, reaching the final prize is a test of endurance that is guaranteed - at the very least - to leave you feeling that you've gotten your money's worth.

The premise of The Hidden Object Show is exactly how it sounds: you're a contestant on a game show where in order to advance you must clear a series of cluttered rooms within the given time limits by finding all of the specific items on your list in each location.

You can use hints to reveal an item's location if you get stuck, and can collect more hints by clicking on special question-mark icons hidden in the scenes, for a maximum of five. Getting stuck should rarely be a problem since the seek-and-find gameplay isn't overly difficult, however items do have an occasional tendency of lurking near the edges of the screen where they're impossible to identify. For example, I had to use a hint to reveal the location of a rabbit that I had been searching high and low for, only to find that it was shoved up into the ceiling with only the bottom part showing - not showing were the tail, ears, or anything else to identify the shape as that of a rabbit.

You'll earn cash based on how quickly you clear the scene, and every few rounds you'll also get a prize. These start small (think typical game show staples like kitchen appliances), but turn into bigger ticket items the further along you advance.

There's ample opportunity to rack up more cash during the frequent bonus rounds that are played between hidden object scenes. You'll start out by playing two bonus rounds per level, and the number of rounds increases in later levels...

The Hidden Object Show, from Gogii Games, is a game show themed hidden object game. If you've played all the other hidden object games released in the past year (I think maybe a billion have come out since last May, but I haven't made an exact count) then you'll probably excel at this game and win lots and lots of virtual cash and prizes. As usual, gameplay involves searching through rooms cluttered with all manner of junk for specific items. Find an object, click on it, and you'll scratch it off your list. Find them all and you move on to the next scene, which is just as cluttered. Or more!

The show is hosted by a black and white vampire, a cross between Gomez Addams and Corny Collins. But don't worry, the actual scenes you hunt through are not black and white or vampires.

The Hidden Object Show gives you, as a contestant, a chance to win 5 million dollars. That's enough money to buy 1.4 millon boxes of instant breakfast oatmeal. Each round, the vampire shows you the silhouette of a prize you'll win if you can complete the round. (It's often cash.) You start out with a normal hidden object scene. Find all the objects and you'll move on to one of two special bonus games. Complete each of these bonus games and the prize is yours! From toasters to cars to big haystack-sized piles of cash, the prizes keep coming and keep getting bigger.

There are ten bonus games in total. Which two you end up playing in each round depends on which get selected when you "spin" the bonus game wheel. (Every game show has to have a wheel to spin so I commend Gogii Games on their research.) If you get sick of playing the same bonus games again and again, you can select certain games to skip by using skip chips. These chips are extremely hard to get. You can either find them in the hidden object game scenes, stop the fluxuating bonus game wheel spin power strength indicator in exactly the right spot, or find an Aladdin's lamp and wish for more. The bonus games allow you to revisit scenes and repeat them with a different dynamic. For example, in "Find 10" you'll have to find ten objects of the same kind, or in "Spot the Differences" you spot ten differences between two versions of the same room...

While the casual game market is flooded with hidden-object games, very few actually tie in an intriguing story, memorable characters and relevant items to find. While not a flawless adventure, The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes does a terrific job with delivering a cohesive interactive detective experience worth investigating.

You get to work with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous (and believe it or not, fictitious) Victorian detectives in London, Sherlock Holmes and his trusted colleague, Dr. Watson, to unravel 16 intriguing mysteries; these well-written individual missions have such titles as The Vanishing Actress, The Death Card Devil and The Maestro's Violin, but one of my favorites is The Assassinated Aerialist, where murder strikes the circus at 1,000 feet in the air. It seems a hot air balloonist is murdered and suspects include the strongman, clown, apprentice, contortionist, knife thrower and fortune teller. Can you figure out who the killer is by solving puzzles?

While there are many variations of the core gameplay, you'll spend a lot of time searching for items on the screen in The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes. As with many other hidden-object games, you're presented with a busy scene, and you're asked to find a handful of items listed on the left side of the screen. In The Assassinated Aerialist mission, for example, items you'll be asked to find include voodoo dolls (from the fortune teller), short swords (from the knife thrower), dumbbells (from the strongman), and so on. This is refreshing as most hidden-object games ask you to find unrelated items like a wheelbarrow in a restaurant.

Click on incorrect items too many times and some time will be shaved off the clock. At times, Holmes or Watson might pop up to give additional info on the characters or events that took place, such as the clown having an argument with the victim, and so on.

This game also features many different kinds of mini-games to keep the play fresh and fun, whether it's clicking to find differences between two similar scenes, arranging items in a box so that none of them touch one another (think Tetris shapes), putting together jewelry from scattered pieces, turning dials in a correct order, Concentration-like memory activities, sliding tile puzzles, and other head-scratchers all related to each individual mission...

The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes contains 16 cases and each case is comprised of a series of puzzles. Sadly, the majority of these puzzles are the same from one case to the next. First, you must look at two photos of the crime scene and find things that are different between the two photos. This might seem like a piece of cake, but the scenes are designed such that it's never a trivial task. You are aided by a magnifying glass which allows you to find details in the darker and busier areas of a photo. And if you get stuck, you can collect and use Holmes' pipes to reveal a clue with a puff of smoke.

The next game type is simply to find a laundry list of items in a given scene. It doesn't feel very different from the first type of puzzle as you're using your magnifying glass again to comb a photo for clues. As you make your way through the first two puzzle types, a list of suspects is built from the evidence that you find. And in each of these pieces of evidence is the potential to find a locked or scrambled clue which branches the play off into a new minigame. These minigames offered the most variety overall.

Finally after assembling your case with evidence and motives, you travel back to 221B Baker Street where you play a game of photo sudoku, arranging photos of suspects into specific columns of character detail (i.e. wearing glasses or wearing a tie). Once the sudoku round is complete, a game of memory ensues where each suspect is paired with a piece of evidence. The screen is blanked momentarily and one at a time, the pieces of evidence are altered and characters are eliminated from the suspect list until the culprit is discovered...

The storyline here is actually pretty solid: you are presented with sixteen “lost” cases of Sherlock Holmes (a man who has, at this point, solved so many of the dang things that one has to believe that there was, maybe, one Tuesday sometime in 1891 where he actually got to sit down and not do anything at all… which probably drove him nuts), fifteen of which are presented as their own entity, with the sixteenth case neatly referring back to eight of the prior cases… for a specific reason, of course. Generally speaking, the overall writing of the game is quite faithful to the Sherlock Holmes character and universe; Watson is generally Holmes’ sounding board but occasionally shows that he is also a brilliant medical doctor in his own right, the various other characters from the Holmes universe who pop up are generally written either as their characters dictate (Mycroft, for instance, is shown to be incredibly well informed and basically full of every single piece of knowledge one could think of, and of course one of Holmes’ old “friends” shows up later and is written as expected) or as people of the time period would act and talk, and Holmes himself is of course deductively brilliant and completely sure of himself, especially when advising people that he cannot take on cases because Watson has insisted he go on vacation, even though Watson is wrong (and, of course, STANDING RIGHT THERE) or, in one instance, when he completely unravels a client’s case before her eyes, proves that she is the actual criminal, and follows up by advising her that the authorities are on their way, so “You can start confessing now.”

Sherlock Holmes is the biggest prat on Earth, and it is absolutely awesome.

The individual cases, while they don’t generally lend themselves to being followed (since one is most often occupied with the puzzles moreso than deductive reasoning) do seem to make perfect sense upon completion, though a few (most notably the one about the disappearing actress) seem a bit contrived at their completion, and the last case, well, isn’t really much of a case at all as much as one big game of cat and mouse… though it is pretty engaging. All in all, the writing is fun, accurate to the characters, and enjoyable, which is more than was expected from a budget game, so thumbs up to the folks at Legacy for doing their homework...

For one, instead of looking for random objects, The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes involves the player to look for actual clues that are involved in Holme’s current investigation. For every clue that you find hidden on a cluttered area, a relationship is linked to that particular object with a likely suspect to the crime. In my opinion, this feature really intensifies the relation of the story to the overall game play. In fact, some of the clues even open up cut scenes for story development, and frankly, this made the game very entertaining for me.

The Lost Cases of Sherlock Holmes game also includes quite a number of additional puzzles acting as mini-games throughout the adventure. I’m very much amazed at how varied and unique these puzzles are, and many of them even involves quite a bit of brainwork to figure out. Finding evidences will sometimes trigger these puzzle sequences and solving them will bring forth another clue to aid Holme’s investigation. Basically, they are just fun and challenging to play, even adding flavor to the overall plot of the game...

It's not because I just returned from visiting Pixar Animation Studios that I find similarities in the story between the animated flick, Ratatouille, and Alawar's new hidden object game, Mystery Cookbook. After all, both follow a mouse/rat who wants to be a skilled chef. Um, sound familiar? While we won't dock points for story unoriginality, we must in the gameplay department, and for other issues, which we'll soon get to.

As a result, Mystery Cookbook is a fun but flawed game that might hold your interest for a while but don't expect much from this casual download.

Boot up this attractive hidden object game and you'll meet Mousy, a rodent who wants to master the fine art of professional cooking. To help him achieve this lofty goal, you'll meet many bizarre animal characters, visit nearly a dozen locations and search for hundreds of well-hidden items in order to find pages of a secret cookbook. If you don't like the humorous dialogue between Mousy and a cat, dog, fish, bird, hamster and so on, you can just click to fast-forward to the game-play.

If you're familiar with hidden object games, you'll have no trouble playing Mystery Cookbook: players are presented with a busy scene, such as a restaurant kitchen, and a number of items to find, such as a fork, wine glass, basket, apple or flowers. Sometimes you'll see the items listed as words, like "bread," while other levels will show you a silhouette of an item to find, such as an outline of a sugar bowl, and you'll need to look for it on the screen. You must find all the items within the allotted time or else you need to replay the level. Click on the wrong item a few times and 20 seconds will be removed from the clock as a penalty...

The first thing that is very attractive in the game is its graphics. It’s fun to get into the world of cartoon-styled animals that have some problems to solve. According to the story, you are to help Mousy become a skilled chef. The story reminds the Ratatouille cartoon, but it’s not the same anyway.

So you go to different locations in search of the pages of a secret cookbook. You’ll also meet cute funny animal characters on your way. They are going to help Mousy, but if you are not interested in their dialogues you can always skip them.

Get ready to have to find a lot of items in the hidden object levels. Some of them will be listed as words, some as silhouettes. There are hints to help you if you are stuck. You click on a cheese platter and you can replenish it by finding pieces of cheese on the screens...

In the Mystery Cookbook game from Shape Games, you play as a mouse (named Mousy) on a quest to become a great chef, perhaps amongst domesticated animal-kind. But in order for him to do just that, he must search for the missing pages of a certain cookbook first. The Mystery Cookbook left by a famous all-around chef, but now separated into several ways by his students. And so, armed with only his determination and vitamin-enriched eyes, he travels all across town to rebuild the lost cookbook and mark his place in culinary history forever.

Anyway, being a Hidden Object game, your main objective in Mystery Cookbook is to find all the objects given to you as a list or in the form of a white silhouette. There are also scenes where you’re to spot the difference between two panels too, but aside from these features and an occasional puzzle mini-game, there’s really nothing, in terms of game play, that sets Mystery Cookbook apart from other Hidden Object games. You just have to follow the linear flow of the game, try to finish a level within the time limit, and gather enough cheese to use for hints.

Not saying it’s all bad though, because the Mystery Cookbook game has its many good points too…

Mystery Cookbook is a delightful hidden object game that actually had me longing for more when the trial ended. First off, the storyline is simply adorable, as you play a "mousey" who dreams of becoming a gourmet chef. You must complete the quests of numerous animal friends in places ranging from kitchens to bakeries to dumpsters by locating missing items and torn cookbook pages...

I could never do an air traffic controller's job - imagine the stress of having to schedule the flight paths of hundreds of giant flying pieces of metal so that they don't crash into each other, run out of fuel, or get behind schedule. South Winds Games and Reflexive figured out the fact that all this coordinating and juggling could make a decent time management game, and as it turns out, they were right.

Airport Mania: First Flight offers a nice change of pace in that for once you aren't controlling a pretty young girl. Instead, gameplay takes place in eight different airports across 84 levels where you'll be directing planes as they land, unload and load passengers and take off again - as well as painting, refuelling or making repairs as needed.

These actions are accomplished through some deft mouse-clicking and planning ahead. As a plane circles the airport, you can get it to land by clicking on a free runway. Then, you must taxi the plane over to a gate to unload passengers and pick up new ones. If the plane needs refuelling or repairs (as indicated by the appropriate icon flashing overhead), then you can direct it to the appropriate garage area. When finished, click on another free runway to make the plane take off and collect the last of your cash.

If things get especially hectic you can direct a place into a layover area to wait until a runway or gate frees itself up. Like Diner Dash, where you get bonus points for matching customers of a certain color to tables of the same color, you get a bonus multiplier in Airport Mania if you match a plane with the same colored gate. In later levels you earn the ability to paint planes a different color to keep your multiplier going. You can also pull off combo landings and take-offs by doing more than one of them in rapid succession on the same runway.

In between levels you can buy upgrades for the airport such as new and improved gates, runways and layover spaces, the ability to play an in-flight movie to make all circling planes happier or to serve food to please all grounded aircraft, short- and long-range radar to see which color of planes are approaching, and a fan to blow fog away. Interestingly, you can also sell back anything you've purchased at any time if you realize you don't need it after all or want to try a new strategy.

Airport Mania from South Winds Games is a time management sim that drops all the trite settings and food-related themes we've grown tired of in the genre. Instead of serving cake or pizza or sandwiches, your job is to direct airplanes, load passengers, and make sure everything runs smoothly. All of this is accomplished with a simple interface and airplanes that are too cute for their own good. And unlike real airports, you can actually have flights arrive on time or even early!

Planes appear at the top of the screen, flying back and forth until you tell them which runway to land on. After touching down, direct planes to an empty gate where passengers are unloaded and new passengers boarded. Then it's back to the runway to take off once again. Sometimes a plane will need to re-fuel between groups of passengers, in which case you simply direct it to the repair station.

The basic structure of the game is simple and only a few events come along to change things around. Sometimes a plane will be carrying urgent cargo and must take priority over other flights, while other times weather conditions will alter your plans. Between each of the game's 84 levels you'll visit the store where you can buy new structures for your airport or upgrade existing ones to be faster/better.

You will get money rewards everytime you land a plane, and service it on time without any problems, which one can use to upgrade the airport with more runways, VIP areas, and passenger’s dispatch areas.

There is a lot of variation of planes which a user can get in the airspace of the airport which have individual patience level, if you leave airplanes in the flying on top of your airport or you leave them waiting for a long time in the airstrip, you will loose the sale which will stop you from reaching the daily quota.

LucidLAN recommends this game for the full fun and enjoyment that Reflexive Entertainment has put in Airport managment all packed in the upcoming Airport Mania. Airport Mania is schedule for release in April 2008

So, hopefully, you are ready to take up a job with a high responsibility level. You are going to be an air traffic controller. You'll work in 8 different airports that take over 80 levels of crazy and hectic dicision making.

Your job is to land the planes on free runways, that you get it to a gate to unload the passangers and pick up the new ones. The planes may sometimes need some repairs or refueling. In this case you take them to a special garage area.

I guess you understand that this all becomes very chaotic soon. It means that you are to plan ahead and make quick decisions. You can line up the actions by clicking on the appropriate items. Whenever you change your mind you can cancel the action any time.