Passport To Perfume takes you around the world as Sophia, a young adventure-seeker, perfume maker and shop owner in the 1940s. You’ll manage a perfume shop, create scents, select from elegant perfume bottle inventory and sell your creations to customers. There are 48 ingredients to mix and match, 5 exotic hidden object locations to explore and 16 perfume bottles.

Sounds like Chocolatier does perfume. I’m gonna give it a look.

Playfirst is having a special. You can buy Passport to Perfume with PlayPass and receive The Great Chocolate Chase FREE!

Make yummy chocolates during Valentine’s Day with Chocolatier on mobile! Verizon customers Text CHOCO to GAME (4263) to play Chocolatier anytime, anywhere on your cell phone.

Text CHOCO to 4263.

Man, it’s a shame I don’t have Verizon mobile. I’d love to see how this looks and plays on the small screen. If you know — please share.

You have to hand it to PlayFirst for the company’s impeccable timing in releasing the third Chocolatier right before Valentine’s Day. Yes, you heard right — third. It doesn’t count as a fourth because The Great Chocolate Chase is a time management game, not a traditional Chocolatier one. The three games fall into the simulation category, and it’s still delicious.

Whether the game brings new things or not, I’m happy to see it back in the fold knowing it’ll have a new story, characters, ingredients, and products. Those will always occur with every new release. Nonetheless, new features shake up a game to give it a fresh look. As expected, Chocolatier Decadence by Design adds all of these, coffee products and a new ingredient mini-game for coffee products.

You work with the Baumeister family as with all the previous editions. This time it’s after WWII and the story includes love, drama, competition. All the factors that go into an engaging story with a variety of characters. Some characters won’t stand out and others will. You travel the world to find the finest ingredients — to manufacture bars, truffles, infusions, exotics and more — as Baumeister expects nothing less. Thank goodness, this one contains no bugs as ingredients.

Still, you discover fruits such as mangoes and strawberries, spices like saffron and peppers, dairy, nuts and much more. I appreciate the game makes it take a long time to discover all the ports and ingredients so something new comes along almost the whole way through the game.

The ingredient mini-game remains the same for the various candy products. The ingredients flow through the machines and you shoot them into moving containers that must match the primary container. For instance, a truffle requires two cacaos, truffle powder, flavor, and spice. Make sure each container has these five ingredients.

To make it harder, containers can be red or blue. You get more servings when you put all red ingredients in red and blue in blue. If you mix red and blue, you’ll only get one serving for putting all the ingredients in the container. The factory adds a recycling bin so you can move ingredients you don’t need in there instead of wasting them. But not all factories have the bin and it’s tough to get it in there when you have a red container getting in the way of a blue ingredient.

The additions of colors and a recycling bin aren’t enough to shake up this mini-game. The coffee mini-game, on the other hand, brings something new. You still shoot ingredients, but this time you need to make matches of three or more to get a serving. Make a match of four or more and your servings increase. I’m glad the game doesn’t use this one in all of the factories, but it would be nice to see something different.

The world map shows locked ports that you won’t open until later in the game when you meet the right people. Not all ports will have shops. Several ports only sell one ingredient and there’s nothing else to do there. These places have exotic items. Of course, you’ll have to get special cacao from specific locales and the same goes for coffee. It’ll involve a lot of traveling. Chocolatier Decadence by Design prepares players for the frequent and longer trips by providing more transportation upgrades.

I appreciate the game tracks all the agreements I make because I get carried away at times. The screen that tracks all the things you need to do is a vast improvement with a larger and clearer screen. A couple of font choices, however, need improvement as they’re barely readable.

Chocolatier Decadence by Design introduces the ability to develop and name your own creations in the test kitchens in Iceland. Another superb idea for enhancing the game. The product creation screen graphics quality remains subpar and clunky. After you make your new product in the kitchen, you move into marketing where you select the looks, colors, design, and name. Well, this screen gives you no reminder of what ingredients you have added to your new product to help you come up with a name. The game won’t let you back up.

The new features and additions enhance to the game, but I would like to see a couple of more new features especially for the ingredient mini-games. Nonetheless, Chocolatier Decadence by Design occupied an entire weekend including a couple of late nights — something I don’t do often. I look forward to the next adventure. Until we meet again, Baumeisters.

Download Chocolatier Decadence by Design.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Meryl Evans

Remember the deal is good on Game du Jour for one day only.

11 February: Risk II 40% off

12 February: KingMania 60% off

13 February: Chocolatier (Yummy and original game. Check out the sequel.) 50% off

14 February: Scrambled 60% off

15 February: Lost in the Labyrinth 60% off

16 February: Democracy 50% off

17 February: Spheres Master 50% off

Thank goodness this doesn’t come with smells like the upcoming My Name Is Earl smell-o-vision episode then it would be impossible to play without craving chocolate. You may want to play Chocolatier on a full stomach with the graphics clearly showing every delicious ingredient in the 60 different kinds of bars, squares, infusions and truffles.

The game comes with Story and Freeplay modes with over 130 quests taking place in 14 cities. Working through the tutorial, the game looked complicated. But it wasn’t. Give it time and it will become as addicting as chocolate. Thankfully, unlike chocolate, this didn’t hurt my waistline — maybe my bottom from sitting on it for hours in eager anticipation to progress in the game.

Not only do players buy ingredients, make new products, sell chocolates, buy factories and stores, and travel the world; but they also try to get the story behind a family squabble. Since we only use the finest ingredients, we must travel to cities around the world for specific ingredients. The two U.S. cities didn’t carry cacao. In fact, they carried the least amount of ingredients in the whole world.

Expensive products sell at higher rates because they contained ingredients specific to a region like the Sulawesi Macadamia Cacao Infusions, which contain one ingredient from Sulawesi. When you don’t have a lot of dough, you want to travel to the locales that pay more for the chocolates you have available.

Upgrading a factory from bars to truffles doesn’t simply involve changing the ingredients, but also buying new equipment. Those cost you a pretty pound. As soon as you assign a new recipe to a factory and have its ingredients, it turns into a race. You have to make as many as you can of the candy following the recipe within a set time. Unfortunately, this made me dizzy considering my susceptibility to things moving in circles. The amount of chocolates made during that time is the amount the factory can produce in a week. The bars are easiest to make since they contain two or three ingredients while the truffles can contain six unique ingredients.

Every city contains a store that buys chocolate, a market that sells ingredients, a special crop for the hard to get ingredients, and one or two local hangouts for talking with people to get the scoop on the business and the family. Some hangouts also give you a chance to gamble and double your money or lose it.

The game screen has a message section. This section lets you know about any problems in your business — such as degrading food supplies — along with any action items you promised to take and tasks you’ve done. This message section is small, hard to read and slow in scrolling. Sometimes I had more than one action item and it was a chore to find them in the message section when they didn’t appear at the top as current tasks did.

I loved the diversity in this game. There was no right or wrong, or a set path you must take. You could make whichever recipe, and travel to the destinations of your choosing unless you needed to find an ingredient only available in one place. You could help people along the way and haggle prices. The game slowed when I had tons of money, but still needed more recipes and couldn’t accomplish things until I found the right person. During that time, I traveled from port to port trying to find someone to help.

When I finally got a hit, the game picked up again and kept me hopping for the rest of it. I never thought I could manage six factories — the thought of that sounded like too much multi-tasking, but it wasn’t. In fact, I wish I had more places to visit. Chocolatier didn’t attempt to copy any of the “run a business” style games. Rather, its creator developed it from scratch as the game package turned out beautifully as the chocolates.

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP/Vista
• 700MHz or faster Processor
• 128MB RAM
• 800×600 minimum screen resolution
• Sound Card recommended
• DirectX 7.0 or later
• 30MB+ available drive space

System Requirements: Mac

• Mac OS X 10.3.9 or newer
• G4 800 Mhz or faster or G5 or Intel processor
• 800×600 minimum screen resolution
• 21MB+ available drive space