Giveaway of the Day - Glamour Puzzle

Glamour Puzzle:

Introduction:

A jig saw is a jigsaw, though some jigsaw programs are better than others. We were given a brilliant jigsaw puzzle early in 2008 called the Infinite Jigsaw puzzle that enabled you to upload any image you wanted and it would create jigsaws of varying complexity from very simple 8 piece jigsaws to ones with over a thousand pieces in them, as well as change the shape of the interlocking pieces.

Today’s isn’t quite up to the standard of that particular jigsaw puzzle, but it works well and does have a few options to extend the life of the game. The following is the developers (Fly Games) introduction to the game:

This game features 3 difficulty levels, a soothing music soundtrack and over 100 puzzles! Features images of scenic destinations, interesting people, and animals, plants and more. With over 100 unique puzzles to solve, this game will keep you entertained for a very long time.

Reference accessed HERE on 26th Dec 09

The Game:

You get 126 images to choose from, some of which I’ve posted here in this comment; with themes ranging from cute and exotic animals, architecture such as skyscrapers and Tower Bridge, classical paintings and castles to name just a few of the images to be found in the games image library. You have to scroll through the images to select what you want. There is no facility to add new images and it seems like you can’t add images manually as all the images found in the games installed folder are of a format I’ve never heard of before (Box). Once you’ve chosen the image you wish to create a puzzle with you select the difficulty level. There are three of those; Easy, Medium and Hard. The easy puzzles can probably be completed in 10 to 20 minutes, or even faster if you utilise the ghost image which is an exact fit to the puzzle image (see the second image of Tower Bridge below). You can further increase the difficulty by allowing all pieces to rotate. Once this is done you can start solving the puzzle. There are several buttons that allow you to perform certain functions such as creating a ghost image within the puzzle area that gives you a framework to build your jigsaw; this can be made to look more solid or virtually disappear altogether, depending upon how easy you want to make the puzzle. There’s also a preview button that brings up an image to the top left of the playing area. This has three settings, the first being a small thumbnail and the final setting (number 3) fills about a third of the screen. You can show hints which will drag a piece of jigsaw to the correct location on the board, but then will spring back, so you have to watch where it is going otherwise you may lose the position, especially on the more difficult settings. There is a counter to tell you how many hints you’ve taken. There’s also a B key that makes the central pieces disappear so that all you can see are the border pieces.

If you want to leave a puzzle part done and start a new one you can do so and then return to the partially finished puzzle at a later date. Apart from the in game buttons there are several keyboard shortcuts which I’ve detailed below.

Useful keyboard keys:

F10…………………………Boss Key
Ctrl + A………………….Select All pieces
Ctrl + S………………….Select All Border
Ctrl + D………………….Select All unsolved
Esc………………………….Back to game menu

Features:

• 126 puzzles

• 3 difficulty levels: easy, medium, hard

• Optionally rotated pieces

• Special visual effects

Images:

You can see a slideshow of images from the game by following the link below:

http://s571.photobucket.com/albums/ss160/Whiterabbit04/?albumview=slideshow

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista
500 Mhz processor
64 Mb RAM
25 Mb hard drive space
3D video with 8 Mb VRAM

Music:

If you don’t like the intro or in game music you can easily change it for any of your MP3 collection. There is no file conversion needed because the files used by the developer are MP3 also.

If you’ve installed the game to its default location you should find the music files by following the path:

C:\Program Files\Glamour Puzzle\MUSIC

The two files you need to change are named mnu0001 and mnu0002. It may be a good idea to bck the two files up before you overwrite them.

Conclusion:

Today’s game giveaway is a functional jigsaw puzzle with enough decent images to keep you going for a couple of months or longer, depending upon which difficulty level you play on. There’s going to be something for everyone with this game with respect to image tastes. The main disappointments with this game was the inability to add additional images to the stock already there, the lack of any alternative jigsaw shapes and the ability to change the number of pieces from very few, which would be ideal for children to thousands. Despite these omissions I still think the game is worth 7 out of 10.

Thank you to Fly games (not seen you in quite some time) and the game giveaway team.

I’ve just checked up on who gave us The Infinite Jigsaw puzzle back in Feb 2008 and it turns out to be the same developer. That was definitely a much better puzzle.

Problems with the game?:

If you have trouble getting the game to work try downloading the demo from the developers site. The activate file will register that demo as well as the set up file we get. The advantage of using the demo from Fly games is you get a desktop and Start Menu/Programs shortcut plus an uninstaller as well. That should solve the problems some are having being able to find the executable once installed.

You can download the demo from the following link:

http://fly-games.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=30

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Alternative Games:

There are hundreds of jigsaw puzzles available for free via the internet. This
link to Caimans leads you to just over a hundred different Jigsaw puzzle games all of which are free.

Great game for the price, but I might suggest the developers work with the locking feature a bit more. That I saw, you could lock the border ‘in place’ so the user cannot move it, but additional pieces still do jar the border around. It would be nice if the lock kept the border in place, period.