Sara Earl writes:
''Toy Shop is a new strategy/RPG type game, heavier on the strategy. Here, the strategy is to run a toy shop that your two characters have inherited from their Grandfather. You have three years in which to make it profitable, or you will lose the shop forever.
The graphics in Toy Shop are very simple. They are bright and very well done. It's easy to see what everything is, so you don't have any trouble telling what you need. Except for the characters that you interact with, the rest of the people are pretty generic. There are 12 different people that you can talk to that say anything other than how the weather is. They all have their own look and personalities, some of which are quite characters!
There isn't much in the way of sound. The background music is generic, but pleasant to listen to and non-obtrusive. None of the characters actually talk, you just read their words. You do get sounds that help you to know when everything happens. There's a cash register jingle when you make a sale, a bell when the door opens, and different sounds when you succeed or fail in making the toys.''
BCG writes: "When you play a video game, what is your main objective? Usually to have fun, right? What else? Would you like to run a small business? Would you like to spend all your free time either greeting customers or building things? Would you like to turn that small shop into an empire? So would I. Unfortunately, you don't get to do any of these things in Majesco Entertainment's Toy Shop for the Nintendo DS."
From N-Europe.com:
"N-Europe: What do you think of the Portuguese game development scene right now and how do you see it in the near future?
Seed Studios: Compared to 7 or 8 years ago, things are better, there are more game companies and more professionals, which is certainly good. The future is looking bright for companies that stick to developing small and medium games, but unfortunately for those who want to tackle bigger projects, they'll need to hire people from abroad or train people within the company, which in both cases is very time consuming and expensive.
It's urgent that young people start getting education in specific areas; courses that "teach how to make games" won't solve anything, we need specialization in 3D modelling, AI, etc..."
Continental European countries are quickly ramping up game development - perhaps nowhere more surprisingly that in Portugal, where there was basically no game development at all a few years ago.
Thus - if you didn't know there's a Portuguese games industry, you'd better learn, says Paulo Gomes, founder and CEO of upstart Portuguese publisher GameInvest.
Recently publishing its first title in the US, Toy Shop, with the help of Majesco (and developer Seed Studios), Gomes discusses GameInvest's unique "clustering" approach to publisher-developer relations.
