Giveaway of the Day - Beach Party Craze

A MERRY CHRISTMAS to all.

I won’t be able to moderate until this evening because I am going out to family for the day, however a friend may be able to stand in for me while I’m away. I’m not sure whether he can access my account yet. In any event I will endeavor to moderate as soon as I get back (around 10pm GMT – 14 hours after the giveaway started).

Please continue to post feedback etc. I will answer any queries when I can. If its something really urgent try posting over in the game discussion forums.

Regards

Whiterabbit aka Stephen

p.s. the main part of todays review was taken from Gamezebo.

In Brief:

Its been said by some game designers that the first 15 minutes of a game is critical to win over the player. But this wasn’t the case with Beach Party Craze, Alawar Entertainment’s latest business sim, as it starts off underwhelming but gains momentum as you progress through the 50 levels.

Patient gamers willing to give this game a chance will find it a deep and rewarding – but not perfect – piece of interactive entertainment.

Installation:

Beach Party Craze downloads to a 48.8 MB zip file that unpacks to a read me and dual activation module, which for the newcomers to the game giveaway project means that once you’ve installed the game it automatically registers, that is, there’s no registration code to input. The game installs to the following path:

C:\Games\Game_BeachPartyCraze

There is no shortcut installed so you’ll have to follow the above path to create your own shortcut. To uninstall the game just delete the installed folder (there is no uninstaller). The game works on Win 98, XP, Vista and Win 7.

Introduction:

Reference accessed HERE Dec 24th 2012

The Game:

As with many other time management games, Beach Party Craze begins with a comic book-like narrative about a friend who needs you to run her beachfront business while she whisks off to see her family. You’ll also learn of a spiteful ex and vow to take him on in a business competition to become part of a huge resort.

You play as Maria, and begin each level on the beach, awaiting new customers who saunter up for a little sun and relaxation. Your first task is to ensure they have a spot to lie down by clicking on each new customer, which assigns them a spot near the water. Within a few seconds the customer will sprout a thought bubble indicating what they want.

If it’s a drink, you’ll see a glass over their head and you must click it in a timely manner or else they grow impatient. Doing so opens the first of a bunch of mini-games — this one shows a glass with water flowing up and down. You must click where the water level should stop, and the closer to the rim of the glass the more cash you’ll get.

You’ll notice a small water station near the top of the beach an you’ll have to keep an eye on as it’ll run dry, and you must click to replenish it.

Other requests the customers want will likely require you to first construct a building – if you have enough money, of course. For example, customers will ask for food, rental water equipment (such as floats), rides (including banana boats) and souvenirs.

Not all buildings spawn a mini-game, but examples include building a burger by clicking on the ingredients the customer requests (such as meat, lettuce, cheese, bacon and, er, french fries) and the souvenir shop that asks players to pick up the unique gift from a table of five (two pairs of the same item, such as a seahorse and seashell, and one unique item, such as a ship’s wheel).

Throughout each of these levels – divided into “days” – you’ll have a number of tasks to complete, all listed in the top right corner of the screen. This might be to sell 10 tickets to a banana boat ride, make 3 hamburgers, serve 12 drinks of water and increase your popularity by taking good care of customers (including giving them umbrellas when they sit down and cleaning up their mess when they leave their spot). Bonus points are awarded for doing two of the same tasks in a row.

Your water station isn’t the only building that needs refilling – you’ll eventually run out of food and souvenirs and such, and must send someone to the mainland quickly and return so you can restock each building quickly.

At the end of each day you’ll earn you money for 50 different kinds of upgrades, which might be to hire additional help (such as a waiter or worker), a faster rider to replenish out-of-stock items or more buildings to open. You can also choose to spend money on advertising when business is slow in one area (such as food).

Beach Party Craze offers a lot of gameplay – and no, we won’t give away story twists and the locations you’ll progress through – but there are some issues that marred the overall experience. For one, you can’t speed up the gameplay, which means you’ll be sitting around waiting for your customers to ask for specific things to complete your mandatory tasks. Yes, you can advertize to try and kick start a store, but you have no control over what your customers want.

Speaking of customers, there doesn’t appear to be any personality differences between the ten or so men and women; the animation is cute, such as musclemen who do sit-ups on the spot, but it would be another strategic layer if each type of customers were different enough for you to alter your game-play decisions. Third, some of the wording is a bit awkward, such as sending someone to “secure provisions.” Huh? Ok, I realized it meant to get supplies for the various stores but some gamers might find this oddly worded.

Overall, though, the game is quite fun and increasingly challenging. At the very least fans of these time management games should download and try Beach Party Craze and give it the full 60 minutes before deciding if you’d like to go into business or not.

Reference http://www.gamezebo.com/games/beach-party-craze/review accessed 24th Dec 2012

System Requirements:

Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7
Processor speed: 600 MHz
System RAM: 64 MB
Graphics RAM 16 MBGraphics Card with 3D
DirectX: minimum 8.1

Video

You can find videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE

Conclusion:

I beta tested this one and can say as far as Time Management games go its standard fare, but btter than a lot of TM games I’ve seen. it’s well constructed and has decent graphics. It should certainly keep you occupied for a few days at the very least

Scoring

Gameplay – 7.5
Graphics – 7.5
Audio – 7
Re-playability – 7
Originality – 6

Total = 7.0

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Games, Games, and yet more Games plus Download, Installation & Game play Problems:

If you have any problems installing today’s game please go HERE for help.

If you’re looking for something other than today’s game check the didimatic site via THIS link for some brilliant deals.

There are several other deals available from Steam as well as many more from Gamersgate, Gamestop, Greenman Gaming and GOG; all of which you can find via the Didimatic site, which I’ve linked to above (apart from Greenman gaming.

Steam have a great sale on at the moment with prices slashed on hundreds of games.

The usual monthly free game from Alawars game box is still Finding Doggy. (You need to install the free Gamebox from Alawar to access the free games, which for newcomers change approximately every month). If that’s not enough, check out the Game Discussion forums HERE for details of other games either free or on deals.

There is yet more indie game bundles with the latest Humble Bundle released a few days ago. You’ll find details over in the Game discussion forums HERE

If you want more Match three games there’s around a hunded free ones available from myPlayCity.

http://www.myplaycity.com/

Do be aware that MyPlayCity have reintroduced toolbars and home page hijacks to their games, but these can be avoided by un-checking the appropriate boxes during installation, however everytime you open up the game you will need to un-check the boxes again as they are presented at every game start-up. Also when you close any of their games down, your browser is opened and directed to MyPlayCity’s home page. This is innocuous so don’t worry. Closing the page ends any connection and nothing is downloaded.

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A Request for help:

Developers rely on good feedback to improve their games. If you download this game please take some time once you’ve played it a while to leave some constructive feedback either positive or negative. The more constructive feedback we get, the more likely developers are going to give more games away. The giveaway site already has a very good standing with the search engines. Developers want their products out there on the WWW, this site has the potential to do that. The game giveaway project gives away on average between 9 to 17 thousand downloads for each game depending upon what genre and how obscure the game is. That’s a lot of homes these games are being downloaded into and a lot of ‘potential’ cash that’s being lost by the developers. If we get better games because of better feedback, the community are likely to continue to benefit from the generosity of the developers. Satisfied community members are then more likely to visit the home sites of those developers and purchase games that they may not have bothered with before they discovered the developer via the game giveaway site, thus giving the developers more incentives to give away even more decent games.

Please leave some feedback once you’ve checked the game out. It can be positive or negative, but please explain what your reasons were for the feedback you post. You could also leave suggestions for improving the game, for example, this game could do with more block types for the levels editor, add more power-ups, describing the ones you think would be suitable, add some mini games (which seem all the rage in some arcade games now) or enable the user to be able to change the in game music easily.

Thank you in advance to all those who take the time to post a constructive comment.

Regards

Whiterabbit aka Stephen

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I’ve yet to meet a Time Management game I liked, so I’ll pass on this one. It has been fun having games 4 days in a row, tho, and seeing what’s new each day. Thanks to all, and Happy Holidays. I’m glad you’re taking a well-deserved break, Rabbit.

……………………Moderator Comment……………..

Thanks Delilah