Merry

Review: Puzzler World 2013 DS Game

March 2, 2013 by Merry 1 Comment

This review is brought to you by Maddy.

Puzzler world 2013 is unlike professor Layton and those kind of games, the puzzles in this game are things like sudoku and word searches and spot-the-difference. So it’s what you need if you’re, say, in front of the telly but would really rather do some brain challenging puzzles.

In the main menu there are three files (so the game can be shared by three different people), when you create a file to mark it as your own you can write your initials or draw a little patten like I did, then it’s time to start puzzling!

Once your on your file there are five opinions, puzzle mode (where you can do puzzles), challenge mode (where you do the same puzzles but much, much harder!), the trophy room (well, I hope you can guess that one), saved puzzles (where you can put puzzles you saved in the middle of doing the so you can finish them later) and the fruit machine (where you can try to win coins).

In puzzle mode there are 560 puzzles! There is Sudoku, Spot the Difference, Hangman, Wordsearches, Chain Letters, silhouette games, maze and linking games to name a few. I really liked Wordsearch and Sudoku. It makes a great set of games for the car and to help you make your brain work faster.

The only down side I find in it is that there are only brief instructions so its hard to understand some of it but apart from that its a great game! 8.5/10!

Review: Maddy tries out the ZU3D Animation Pack

January 7, 2013 by Merry 1 Comment

You may remember that Maddy loves to model and animate. A while back she created her first Lego animation using my iphone and windows movie maker. That prompted us to buy her a camera and small tripod but she’s a bit of a perfectionist and could never get it as accurate as she wanted it to be. Then she saw an animation pack she quite liked at a friends and was desperate for something similar. SO when ZU3D asked us try out their pack, which includes webcam, software which editing and tutorials, plasticine, a jungle scene and a green screen, I had a feeling she was going to love it. Read on to hear what Maddy thought as this is her review.

What Maddy Did – dictated by Maddy herself.

When I first got the software set up, I thought it looked so easy to use that I wouldn’t need to use the tutorial videos so I made a smurf video. It’s a smurf rock band performing. I didn’t know how to use the green screen because I hadn’t watched the tutorials so I just used it as a background. The models are plastic models. It was easy to work out how to take the pictures and I moved each model a bit at a time. I hadn’t done the sound tutorial so I didn’t add music. After I had done this one I wanted to use the tutorials to find out how to do the things I didn’t know how to do.

So I watched the green screen tutorial and decided to make the pokemon plasticine video; this was an idea from something I did with a cousin a while back. With this software you can use any cloth as a background in any colour; this was a good thing because my model had some of the bright green colour in it and it would have made part of it disappear! Once you’ve shot the screen you can edit the ‘green screen’ and rub out some of the effect. You can even rub some of your disappeared picture back in! Then you can add any background you want.

With the green Pokemon I reused quite a few frames; this is really easy to do in the software. With this software if you break or knock over your model you can use a ghost of the previous frame so you can get everything back into the right place.This was easy to do. I had to use something to hold up the red Pokemon on his hind legs but I could rub that out afterwards. I also edited a leg back in, using a lump of plasticine as one of his legs didn’t show up right!

On to the Lego animation. I came up with the idea for this after watching the sound recording tutorial and after watching a couple of other videos. Previous movies have been hard to keep still and get the lighting right but the camera in this pack makes it easy to keep things still and the lighting works really well. The ghosting helps lots but I also stuck everything, including the camera, down with sellotape. There are several hundred frames in the film and it was much quicker and more effective than anything I have done before. You can overlap sounds and record into the software and I did my own sound effects with thew piano and recorded all the voices.

Also, my actual Lego room was very small, but I made it look much bigger by moving the camera angle around!

Maddy gives the ZU3D 9/10 and it’s only not 10/10 because she hasn’t done all the tutorials yet. There is loads to learn, the tutorials are really clear and inspired her lots. We are really grateful to them and I think a new career is on it’s way! We think the ZU3D (that’s an affiliate link) is well worth the £59.99 but you know, don’t buy it through the affiliate link unless you have to, go direct to their own shop and save them the 3rd party fees and the country the corporation tax 😉

Disclosure: we were sent this software free for review but opinions are our own. Maddy, who is 12, used the software and hardware entirely on her own and my help was confined only to helping her activate the external webcam on the computer. The words above are her dictated own, typed by me and with a bit of editing for written word help.

Review: Mini Club Baby Clothes from Boots

November 25, 2012 by Merry 3 Comments

Last time I had small children, the Mini Club range from Boots had not really begun; it came in just as they were all getting older and had turned feral, making only cheap and cheerful throwaway clothes worth while. I’ve been eyeing up some of the outfits recently and so I was thrilled that Bene was offered some outfits to try out. He’s not often over dressed but I have enjoyed indulging up him occasionally.

We had to wait for him to grow into the out split I optimistically sized him up as needing and then had to wait for 2 lots of sneezy, snotty, squirty germs to pass. But here he is, sporting his jeans and top.

He doesn’t get to wear shoes often and was slightly bemused by these, though he thought trying to get them off again an excellent game 😉 (not the entirely intentional, well placed, product brand placement in the photo there, I took ages setting that up. Ahem.)

The shoes have a semi solid sole and a fluffy insides, easy to adjust hook and loop closing s and a lovely checked lumberjack design. They go with this hat (which is £7).

He did not approve of the hat. I liked it but as Bene has the family ‘enormous bonce’ he may get away without wearing it for long. It’s quite snug, so if your children are similarly big headed, you should go for a size up too 🙂

The jeans are great, fit a cloth bum under them and stay up through much climbing, clambering, crawling and wriggling. I had an overwhelming moment of melt at the dinosaur top too, which is just very sweet. The fabric is lovely quality and well stitched and at £6, a quality world away from similarly priced supermarket clothing.

We were also sent this lovely dungarees set for when he’s bigger. It’s similarly great quality, with lovely detail and a sturdy feel to the fabric. We will need to find a posh date to go on to wear it.

I have to say, the boys in this family get the best review products… I think it is time the girls had some fun 🙂

Disclosure: we were sent these items for review. All opinions are my own, as is the very nice box they came in. The girls stole the pretty ribbon it was tied up with.

Hotel Chocolat competition and review

November 22, 2012 by Merry

Last week we were very excited by the arrival of a review product from Hotel Chocolat. We don’t often get food goodies and this was very, very big news in the house.

We had to have an unboxing 😉

We were sent a Rather Large Cracker which had a variety of entertaining things in it; excellent quality hats for one…

And some really terrible jokes too.

Most of all though, it had little packets of extremely lovely chocolates. I hadn’t had their chops before; the girls blagged samples while in Cambridge the week before but it was new to me. Ooooh so yummy. Mulled wine chocs! Eton Mess chocs! Heaven! Champagne chocs! Delicious! And there was a penguin shaped one… We gave it to Josie. Of course.

Errr… Yes, I liked them very much. I let the children have some too. And then sent them to bed. Ahem.

This cracker is, of course, designed to be a party piece. It really does go bang (we did comedy cracker pulling) and it was the source of much merriment. It would look amazing on a big table for a family christmas and the chocolate is good enough to bring ooooh and aaaaahs. If you do big parties, I definitely recommend it 🙂

If you would like to win one, Hotel Chocolat have offered a second cracker to one of my readers. Leave a comment on this post and I will pick one winner randomly on the 28th November. You can leave a fresh comment for every social media share you do via Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest. Comp will close at midnight on the 27th Novemember. Hotel Chocolat are responsible for providing the prize. UK entries only.

We had a lot of family fun with this. Thank you to Hotel Chocolat for the free sample and for providing a competition prize. All views are my own. I did not miscounted any chocolates and give my children less than they deserved. Definitely.

DVD Review: Monster High, Ghouls Rule.

November 9, 2012 by Merry 1 Comment

We were recently sent Monster High on DVD to review. I thought the girls might quite like something halloween ish that I probably wouldn't approve of for a change. It quite amuses them to be able to torture me with films and programmes that makes me go aaaarrrrgh…. But that's another story.

Monster High (I'm told, I was too busy screaming in the corner and buying up vast quantities of costume making netting on eBay) is the story of two sections of a community in a fictional town in America, the Normies and the Monsters. I gather from Maddy that they live quite separate lives with their own schools etc but on Halloween, the Normies are particularly mean to the Monsters.

Interesting premise.

My ears were waggling in the background and I have to say I didn't actually pick up on anything about this story line that had me screaming in despair. It's the kind of thing that could easily be horribly moralistic but it seems to have provoked quite a bit of conversation in the house, with a surprising amount of extrapolating from the younger ones about what it was really illustrating. The themes of bullying, face value judgements and segregation were obvious but they didn't outweigh the storyline. It got watched a few times and while its not a style of animation I'm especially drawn to (drawn.. See what I did there?) I found myself drawn in a few times.

Eventually friendship and do-the-right-thing-manship overwhelms the town divide and they mix and collaborate. Apparently two of them snog from opposite sides of the species fence. I'd left the room by that point. Probably a good thing. Maddy hates it if I see her watching anything with teenager/romantic themes. I think she thinks I was never a teenager.

In conclusion, a fun, older kid halloween cartoon that would be okay the rest of the year too.

Bad Stuff: (according to Maddy) there is kissing and they all have boyfriends.

Good things: (according to Amelie) it came with free nail varnish attached!

Disclaimer: we were sent this free for the purposes of review. All opinions are our own. As you can probably tell. No mothers were harmed in the writing of this review. Nail varnish has been put away till they are 18. My daughters will never snog monsters. Or anyone. Ever.