Prime Suspects: Hidden in plain sight

The MCF flash game Prime Suspects available from Microsoft Live Search Club is a twist on the popular "Where's Waldo" picture games. The player is given 5 different "picture" buildings to explore and approximately 150 different puzzles to solve amongst them. Each puzzle consists of six clues, and the answer to each clue is an object in the picture that is hidden in plain sight.

These are tough clues that even an adult would have trouble solving, and a child would just be frustrated by this game. By clicking "Get a Hint", a Live search will be performed that is somehow related to the answer to the clue. If you're still stumped, clicking "Solve" will solve the clue for the player so that the object can be searched for within the picture. Click on the object in the picture to remove it from the list of six objects that you need to find. Each puzzle takes about two to five minutes to complete. Upon successfully completing a puzzle in 5 minutes or less, up to 20 tickets may be earned for that puzzle. The tickets can be traded in for various prizes available from Microsoft Live Search Club.

Prime Suspects is a little buggy. In a few areas, even when I typed the correct object name into the box, it wouldn't accept the object name as a valid answer, and I had to click "Solve" so that I could continue playing the puzzle, even though it cost me two tickets from my final score to do that. In other areas, clicking "Get a Hint" only resulted in an error message from the Live search engine, but typing in the same hint manually resulted in the clues that I needed to solve the puzzle.

The graphics of this game are excellent. Many of the objects blend in so well with their surroundings that they can be easy to miss if you're not using a critical eye to find them. The background music is suitable for the ambience of the game, but it gets repetitive to listen to after awhile. In all, this was a fun flash game that I wish wasn't limited in its gameplay value.