I did it. At 3:50 pm on November 30, I reached 50,000 words on my novel for National Novel Writing Month. I was at a coffee shop then; when I broke the 50K mark, I got a big smile on my face, and wanted to jump up and cheer (but that might have freaked the [...]

This is the time to panic. According to the National Novel Writing Month website, 2,489 authors have successfully reached 50,000 words - they’re listed in the Winners page. Meanwhile, the rest of us are desperately scrambling not to be on the Losers page (there is no such page, of course - but we’re scrambling anyway).

As of this writing, I am at 18,387 words! Yes! Though, today being November 15, exactly mid-month, I should be at 25,000! No! However, I am not so worried. Because, win or lose, I discovered a lot of things this week.

It’s November 7, the end of the first week of National Novel Writing Month. If I were a good girl, I should have 11,667 words clocked in by today, to reach the 50,000 mark by the end of the month. Instead, I have 6,518.

Every year, once a year, writers from around the world participate in an event called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The rules of the event are simple: Writers start writing a novel on November 1, and must finish at least 50,000 words by midnight of November 30. You must start from scratch - no advance [...]

Chris Natsuume, creative director and co-founder of Boomzap Entertainment, is our guest writer this week. You may or may not know it, but Boomzap is the sponsor of Casual Review; the company has been making casual games for three years and Chris for much longer than that (though we will not tell you exactly how [...]

We’ve featured casual game developers from all over the globe, and it’s about time we turned our eyes to Asia. Flipside is a small but busy studio in the Philippines; they’ve worked with established foreign studios on such titles as Hoyle Enchanted Puzzles. We cornered their CEO, Gabby Dizon, to share with us what game [...]

Hi there, I’m Christopher Natsuume, Creative Director of Boomzap. As you may or may not know, the Casual Review site is hosted at Boomzap, and some of the writers are Boomzap designers. Lately, Boomzap has completed another game, Zen Fashion, and we’re very proud of it. It should be showing up on a lot of [...]

We Casual Review folks love casual games, and this is because we don’t just work at reviewing games, we also make them. I’ve been away from this site for the past few months for certain game-related reasons. I’d humbly like to show you one of these reasons:
Hoyle Enchanted Puzzles!

So. You’ve played all the adventure games. You’ve played all the match three games. You’ve seen all there is to see and every time you pick up a new casual game you think, “Oh, this is just like [generic game x]”. Well dust off your mouse and buckle up, because Boomzap’s new game “Jewels of [...]