Review - uVme Players Lounge

From WIN-ipedia - information and strategies about winning

My first look at the new uVme Players Lounge online games site.

While not open to the public until Monday 28th January - insiders have let me have a sneak preview of the games.

My verdict, the games are well designed with clear interfaces and purposeful instructions. They offer just the right level of difficulty to motivate players to stay with the site for some time. However, so far, of the 10 games available to review, few of them were totally radical or ground breaking. The most popular Fruit Frenzy is an updated version of Bejewelled. Admittedly, this is a very well designed update, with crazy, addictive music and enticing gameplay. My personal favourite, however, is a shooting gallery game called Arcade Ducks Many games are free, and you can play all of them alone or against someone else. This is the element of the uVme strategy that really works well, the inclusion of dedicated Instant Messaging technology. Players can use IM to challenge anyone in the world to play a game. Both players can play for free, or opt to pay anything from 50p to £2. This gives all of the games an edge. The winner takes home the lion’s share of the stake money!

When you are registered, you can play any games for free for two weeks. After that, you can upload £5. That’s not as bad as it sounds, since you can continue to play for free for as long as you want. However, you now have some available credit should you decide to play a paid game. If you win a game, the prize is automatically added to your credit. You can have your credit paid back into your account at any time, even if you never play a paid game!

uVme Players Lounge will also offer all the benefits of Blog pages and additional social networking tools. At present, the Beta site does not offer all of these features.

Verdict:

Well worth the wait (even though its still not quite finished). I’m sure some small country could have put a man on the moon in the time it has taken to get the uVme site ready. However, re-read my first four words of this verdict. This really is one ‘cracking’ idea, well implemented. And I for one will be back there frequently, challenging my mates or checking out the new games as they are developed. First rate – If stars were available here it would have 9 out of 10.

How not to lose

With hundreds of different uVme site owners out there you need to be certain you are hooking up with the best. For my view, the Players Lounge seems to offer the best of all worlds:

• it’s totally focussed on Players, not marketing the uVme games sites themselves (although this option is available – its not constantly in your face).
• it’s the only site with a built in fee-to-prize ratio promise. Put simply, this means that anyone who registers through the Players Lounge, and enters a tournament the site will offer the highest prizes for the lowest entry fees.
• it’s the only site with a charitable heart. Any proceeds from game fees will be paid to the Cancer Research fund on a monthly basis

Finally, how do you win the games? The current best strategy seems to be to play as many free games as you can to steadily increase your skill level. Then, when you feel confident, challenge someone for 50p or £1. As you begin to win more and more games, you might think about joining a tournament – that’s where the bigger prizes are to be found: £1000s and upwards!

Richard Davies