Escape the Museum 1 & 2

The best way to pick games on the site I belong to is to keep your eyes peeled for bundles.  Bundles include 2-3 games for the same price as one.  I recently purchased "Escape the Museum 1&2" as a bundle, and must say it was worth every penny.  In fact, the first of the pair was so good that it would have been worth $7 alone.  The second was also great, with better graphics, but less of a challenge.

In the first game, you play as a mother-daughter team stuck in a San Francisco museum following a terrible earthquake.  The point of the game is to get out of the museum alive, while saving as many artifacts as possible along the way.  You do this in usual hidden-picture fashion, by finding them!  Like all of my favorite games, both "Escape the Museums" allow you to use the objects you find to solve puzzles.  From firing a Civil-War era cannon, to melting a frozen ice man, the first game used tons of creative ideas so that each new room had not only a new feel, but a unique challenge.  I loved the bonus find 10 and hidden object options as well.  I would give "Escape the Museum 1" a 10 out of 10 rating!  I loved it and will surely play it again someday.

"Escape the Museum 2" was also great.  This time, you play as the dad trying to reach the mother-daughter team.  I thought it was cool how the writers made it so that the story line from both games took place during the same tragedy, just from different perspectives.  The hidden objects scenes themselves were also more polished, and much, much easier.  The homeless helper was a nice touch, too.  However, all of these positives were overridden by the ease with which I beat the game.  I personally prefer the "sketchy" drawings to the clean, computer-aided graphics.  Still, the game was decent and deserves a 7.2 out of 10, in my opinion.  The extra .2 was because I got to rescue so many pets, which is always a bonus in my book!