Sponsored Item: Melonchi Minecarts
 

Melonchi Minecarts is our brand new high quality Arcade Puzzle game for Windows Mobile Pocket PC devices. Journey back to Arvale to solve the mysteries of the Melonchi Mines with your favorite characters: Duncan, John DeMenchev, and Grwyth the Dwarf. Enjoy a unique and extremely addicting puzzle game including Gems, Minecarts, and Exploding Tracks while enjoying the visuals and ambience of the Arvale world! Play with three different characters in three separate hilarious stories from the same wacky writers of the Arvale series. Melonchi MineCarts is intuitively designed to be enjoyable for anyone to pick up and play. Beginners and die-hard puzzle fans alike will be riding Minecarts in no time! Melonchi Minecarts features fantastic graphics and art, whimsical music and audio, intuitive controls, and of course, Melonchi, Gems, and Arvale! Features Immersive Graphics Intuitive controls Choose from 3 Unique Characters High Quality Music and Sound Effects Separate Difficulty Levels Extra Arcade mode Different Play Styles Auto-save

Based on the PocketHAL engine, Danger Dan is a bit of an oddity. The backstory is that you're a stuntman auditioning for an action movie, and you have to prove yourself by navigating through a tricky obstacle course in a tiny car. But Danger Dan isn't a racing game—it's more like a platform scroller based on carefully navigating your way around obstacles. It's a bit like a platform scroller, only with a linear level layout: you start at the platform at the top of the screen and work your way down through each subsequent "platform" by driving and jumping. Your car behaves nothing like a car and really doesn't behave any differently than a running and jumping character.

Such a strange setup! But it actually works pretty well.  Rowanvale did a good job of designing the levels (you get 30 in the registered version), and the game avoids mindlessly repetitive running (er, driving) and jumping by forcing you to time each jump very carefully and by cleverly placing obstacles. So if you crank up your speed and just try to fly through everything, you'll end up dying pretty quickly, and since you don't get that many lives in the game, you'll have to really focus on the jump you need to make after the next in order to make it to the end of the level. An interesting feature is the ability to buy power-ups (including fuel, which you'll need to keep stocked up on) between levels, which can be especially helpful once you've already played a level and know what you'll need to complete it.

The graphics are a bit better than average: not poor by any means, but not exceptional, either. Danger Dan isn't quite like any other platform game I've played, and it's an interesting challenge.

Title: Danger Dan	Developer: Rowanvale Software
Genre: Platform scroller	Demo: Y
Platform: Pocket PC 2002+	Price: $7.95
Discuss this game	Rating (of 4): 3.3