Play the next part in the hit hidden object wedding series, Dream Day Wedding: Viva Las Vegas. As the hottest new wedding planner in the country, your reputation is taking you from the Big Apple to Sin City! A high rolling bride is placing all bets on you to prepare for her big day. The stakes are high as you manage important tasks while keeping the bride, groom, and mother of the bride happy in this opulent destination. Get ready to hit the jackpot!

• Try your luck in the casino to earn and spend points
• Adventure and escape puzzles
• Mini games and wedding crisis levels
• All-new “Choose a Story” – your decision could affect the path of the game

Try Dream Day Wedding: Viva Las Vegas.

PlayFirst announces the winners of its first ever PlayFirst Firsties. Of course, the games up for nomination are PlayFirst games. But we gotta admit they produce great games.

We love the following winners:

• Flo in Cooking Dash as Best Leading Lady. [Game review]
• Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan as Best Hidden Object. [Game review]
• Natalie Brooks: Secrets of Treasure House [Game review] and Dream Chronicles 2: The Eternal Maze [Game review] as first and second place winners in Best Adventure Game.
• Build-A-Lot 2: Town of the Year wins Best Simulation and Strategy Game. [Game review]
• Cooking Dash as Tastiest Food Game.
• Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet for Best Mystery Game. [Game review]

The Dream Day hidden objects game franchise returns with Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan, its fourth game in the series. Once again, the series introduces features that enhance the game. Sometimes a game in a series would receive new features that look like an ugly attempt to claim the game isn’t a rehash of the previous with a new storyline thrown in.

Oh, I’m not saying sequels can’t recapture their predecessor’s success with a new story, new sets, and new characters. Fans love getting more of the same. With casual games coming out with a new game on a daily basis, it takes no time for a game to look dated. In fact, I’m judging handheld games — the same category I did last year — and these categories have no new games. The games look and feel dated.

Back to New York. Dream Day First Home introduces the two story route. Dream Day Wedding applies this feature by giving us two couples from which to choose. Play one first and then play the other couple next time around. I run into a technical problem (fixed) with the first couple after almost finishing the game play, so rather replaying them — I switch to the other couple for a change of pace.

Dream Day games come with a Choose a Story, which lets players decide where the story takes them next by picking one of three options. At the end of a Choose a Story, players earn a Time Booster item. Remember the item as it won’t appear on the list of things to find and gain one minute when you find it.

Bluebirds also appear in every scene save for Wedding Crises scenes. For every five bluebirds found, you win an extra hint. The scenes — prior to a mini-game or Choose a Story — come with three hints plus whatever you earn in finding bluebirds.

Mini-games fit the game’s wedding planning theme perfectly. After finding all the objects for a level, you’ll get the wedding registry scene where you pick a gift to open that leads to either the Choc-O-Matic Fountain or Party Puzzle (seating chart) mini-game. Players need to turn metal tubes in Choc-O-Matic Fountain to ensure the chocolate can flow from start to end in every pipe or else guests won’t get their chocolate in the wedding. Not a good thing!

Party Puzzle brings something I haven’t seen appear as a mini-game. Each placecard contains a guest with one or two colors on the sides. The colors on the sides of the placecards must line up with like colors. One joker is available to help you out of a rough spot.

After completing one of the two mini-games, you play the apartment puzzle. The bride gives you, the wedding planner, a key to her apartment where you hunt down the list of things she needs. That list takes you through the next few scenes.

The apartment puzzle has no time limits, so explore the scene and figure out what to do. While you can press “Solve” if you get stuck, these don’t take a lot of work to figure out. Just look for clickable items or watch for the sparkles giving you a hint of where to look. Some items will go into your inventory so you can use them with other objects to make something happen.

Now that you have the list, move on to the next scenes to find them. Sometimes the bride will ring you up and announce she doesn’t need an item on her list anymore — saving you one item to find… IF you find your cell phone before it stops ringing. Clever! A surprise waits in some scenes. You find an item only to discover you’re stuck in a room and you must quickly find your way out in the Escape Puzzle.

The Wedding Crisis has appeared in the previous Dream Day games. In these scenes, players have less time and must dig through the messier and busier scenes to overcome a crisis whether the roses the bride wanted sell out or the bakery can’t do the wedding cake. Once the crisis passes, you design an item that will appear in the wedding and its album.

The scenes repeat often and the objects rarely change locations. The only things that change are the Apartment Puzzles and Wedding Crisis. However, if you play the game again to try taking a different route in the Choose a Story, you’ll have to work through the same scenes again. Considering I play one couple twice due the technical problem, it’s a pain as I feel like I’m repeating everything I had done the first time.

One more disappointing element — other than in the name and the logo, you wouldn’t know you’re in New York. It’s a wonderful city with beautiful architecture and great scenes — why bother adding “Manhattan,” if you’re not going to showcase the Big Apple?

Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan takes a few pages out of its previous games and adds a few original ideas (Escape Puzzle, bride calling you, and Party Puzzle) while also copying similar features found in other games first (Apartment Puzzle) and finding a bunch of one item in scenes (eggs, arrows, etc.). Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan still provides a pleasurable adventure for fans of the series. It’s also a good one for those new to hidden object games and may not challenge the seasoned players.

Download Dream Day Wedding: Married in Manhattan from your favorite game site:

• Big Fish Games
• Amazon

Jenny and Robert of Dream Day Wedding return and invite us (or maybe not and we’re G-rated peeping Toms) on their honeymoon in the second Dream Day hidden object game. Well, maybe they didn’t invite us, but we get to follow them again. Whether you’ve played Dream Day Wedding or not, both stand-alone and aren’t dependent on each other.

Dream Day Honeymoon successfully recaptures the beautiful scenes with hidden items that blend smoothly so the scenes don’t look funky. The hidden items meld with the background so well that when I let Cupid’s arrow help me find the item, I still couldn’t see its shape. The skilled hidden objects game player will appreciate the challenge.

Birds of Paradise also hide in every scene. After finding five of them, you earn a bonus hint. However, you can’t earn more than four. So use the hints rather than save them for the end of the level, which is what I do in hidden objects games. I prefer to use the hints on the few remaining objects that I can’t find.

Each level except for the first has three scenes with an assigned number of souvenirs (objects). The game doesn’t expect you to find every souvenirs, but most of them. For example, one room has 10 souvenirs and room two has 10 souvenirs totaling 20 objects you can find. But you only need to find 18.

Upon finding the required amount of souvenirs, you play Perfect Match. It’s a memory card-like game where you find matching pairs until the tiles are gone. You play Perfect Match nine times, the number of levels it takes you to reach “Cloud Nine” for the Bonus Level.

The game has three honeymoon crises and three Choose A Story scenes. A honeymoon crisis occurs when something goes wrong and you return to a previously visited scene that has changed because of the crises. You also have less time on the clock to find them, unless you play relaxed mode. For Choose A Story, you pick one of three options and the story proceeds based on your choice.

The Dream Day series run shorter than some popular hidden objects games. While that sounds like a drawback, it isn’t. Many fans of casual games don’t necessarily have the luxury of completing a game quickly. Like most hidden objects games, you can stop playing for a while and pick up where you left off. The story in Dream Day Honeymoon is easy to follow, so it shouldn’t be a problem to take a break for a few days or weeks.

Dream Day Honeymoon weaves together a nice theme that flows from start to finish. Hidden object gamers will enjoy this one. It isn’t the biggest or most fancy game out there, but it gratifies.

System Requirements: Windows

• Windows ME/2000/XP/Vista
• 600 MHz or faster processor
• 128MB RAM

I’m an old married woman, but playing Dream Day Wedding had me reflecting back on my own wedding day, grateful there were no crises. Dream Day Wedding combines I Spy-style puzzles with Choose-A-Story and the match card game.

Search for things the bride, Jenny, needs in the usual settings from the florist and the bakery to the dress shop and the honeymoon suite. When I found enough items on her to do list, the game rewarded me with a Choose-A-Story so I could learn how she and Robert met, fell in love and got engaged. The story can change every time you play, so like those Choose Your Own Adventure books, you get a variety of wedding stories.

Dream Day Wedding kept things interesting by having mini-games. For example, while I sought items from Jenny’s list, I kept my eyes open for bluebirds of happiness until I found enough to reach the golden anniversary (50 bluebirds). In between levels, I played memory match where you find pairs of cards until you clear the board and receive a reward of a needed item for the honeymoon.

The music put me in a wedding and love state of mind while I sought out cleverly hidden items in the various rooms and stores. Sometimes a level stumped me so that I needed to rely on Cupid to give me a hint. The game doesn’t take long to complete and is a great way to escape reality without much concentration. Some games frustrate a player, but this one rarely does, which is a nice change of pace especially when you’re fighting the flu as I was.

Mystery Case Files fans will like this one, but don’t expect as many features and puzzles as those found in Ravenhearst. Consider this one a lighter and shorter version. Puzzle lovers of all ages will enjoy this lovely graphics-based adventure. The game took only a few hours to complete, so those with little time to play will find this one doable.

Download the game from your favorite site:

• Amazon
• Big Fish Games