Horrible Histories: Ruthless Romans Game premieres

I see Slitherine, the company that brought us "Legions", is releasing a new game based on the popular children's history series "Horrible Histories: Ruthless Romans". It's described as a party/puzzle game (whatever that means). I sometimes find playing less intense children's games more relaxing if I'm tired and stressed out. This particular title is promoted as fun for the whole family so it must be set at a level even adults would at least find interesting. It's available for the Wii, PC and NDS in five languages. It will be available June 12.

Horrible Histories™ Ruthless Romans is a fun packed party game where the plot that follows the struggle of young Rassimus to achieve glory as a gladiator and obtain his freedom. Rassimus, a slave and an ambitious gladiator-in-training, has been raised as a foundling by the great gladiator trainer Lucius Gladius, and spent nearly 12 years in his service. Lucius has now given him a chance to begin his training, and Rassimus hopes that he will be successful and one day become a citizen of Rome.

• Over 30 mad mini-games
• Fight deadly duels against your friends in the arena
• Discover how ruthless Romans lived
• 4 player multiplayer

Horrible Histories™ Ruthless Romans is a great game for all the family.

Cleopatra Riddle Of The Tomb

By: John Breeden

Game Industry News Editor

There has recently been quite a few puzzle adventure type games that start out in Europe and eventually get ported over to the U.S. market. Cleopatra Riddle Of The Tomb is one of them. However, unlike most of these efforts, this title actually does not do anything wrong. It offers about ten hours of mostly enjoyable gameplay.

The game is set in Ancient Egypt and surprisingly, is historically accurate. Most games figure everything set in Egypt should have hieroglyphics when in fact at the time of Cleopatra, Egypt had long-since been conquered by Alexander The Great. As such, puzzles here use the Greek alphabet. This little twist, positioned right near the start of the game, lets players who know figure out that Cleopatra is going for realism as well as enjoyment.

You play an astrologer working under a master named Akkad, who in turn works directly for Cleopatra. You also happen to be in love with Akkad’s daughter Iris. The game begins when you show up for work and both Akkad and Iris are missing. Given that Cleopatra has launched a civil war against her brother/husband Ptolemy which is tearing up Alexandria at the moment, this is not too surprising. (Although I did not know that Ptolemy was both brother and husband to that crazy Cleo, so that was a bit of a shock.)

At its heart, Riddle Of The Tomb is a puzzle game, more so than an adventure game. You basically can walk around with impunity (in other words not worrying about getting killed) until you hit a puzzle that needs to be solved. Unlike a really difficult puzzle game where you have to figure out what a puzzle is, here it’s pretty easy. When you hit a wall, sometimes literally, you have found a puzzle.

The game does a good job of easing you into the whole puzzle solving adventure. The first puzzles involve trying to find out where you master and girlfriend have gone (or were taken).

The puzzles themselves are fairly diverse and range from combining objects in your inventory to conducting basic research on Egyptian culture to discover, for example, what order to place statues for the ceremony to weigh the soul of a dead person. Almost all the puzzles are connected to Egyptian lore in some way, which adds a nice touch to the atmosphere.