Giveaway of the Day - The Flying Dutchman

I’m unable to access my photobucket account at the moment so the slideshow link below isn’t working at the moment. i’ll sort it out later today. There’s ample images posted for you to get a good impression of the game. (Probably too many),

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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Installation:

The Flying Dutchman downloads to a 46.6MB 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\TheFlyingDutchman\TheFlyingDutchman.exe

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. The installed game is 73.4MB. You can change the in game music by replacing the appropriate ogg tracks with renamed tracks from your own music collection, though you will have to convert them to ogg vorbis audio files. Also the sound effects are mixed up with the music so you’ll have to search through the files for the music files. Some media players will play ogg files so you may be able to find the music tracks by clicking on each file.

Introduction:

For ages sea voyages have threatened of dangers. The sea always has its tribute from vanished ships making all the traces of wrecks inaccessible in its depths. But sailors still believe in their last chance for salvation. The legend says that if you underwent a shipwreck with no hopes for reprieve, you must jingle coins. And then you will behold the Flying Dutchman – the Ghost Ship. Its crew will take you wherever you want to go in the world. But for each day you will pay gold. If there is no gold left, you have to play a game with the crew of Flying Dutchman – the game with your life at stake. Victory will assure enough gold till the end of the day. But defeat will make you prisoner of the Flying Dutchman…forever!

Reference accessed HERE Nov 27th 2011

The Game
The Flying Dutchman is a basic match three with decent graphics. It’s not Treasures of Montezuma, Atlantis rising, 4 elements or Fishdom, but it’s decent enough for me to keep it in my games library. When I read the reviews over on Big fish I got the overriding impression that most negative comments were towards the ‘drabness’ of the graphics. That said I actually found the graphics were decent and well done. It’s not brightly lit up like some match threes, more like subtle shades of brown, but it fits in with the theme of the game.

From the options menu you can select from three different difficulty settings Easy, Normal and Hard as well as adjust the screen resolution from between 640 x 480 through to 1600 x 1200. There’s the usual sound and music sliders. You can create multiple profiles. Once you’ve created your first profile you can then choose between two different modes of play, Quest, which is time limited and Relaxed which isn’t.

There is a help section that tells you how to play the game. Briefly, in timed mode you have to collect all the gold coins hidden under the dark colored decking of the Flying Dutchman by creating matches of three or more blocks. We all know how to play match three’s so I won’t bore you with the mechanics of the game. Clearing away matches of three or more is akin to scrubbing the floor of the decks. Once you’ve cleared the deck of all coins in timed mode or scrubbed the deck in untimed mode the level is complete. As you progress through the levels you will meet ghosts. If you create a match next to a ghost the match will be cursed and frozen or locked (depending on whether it wears a red or blue headband for a certain amount of time, but if you can create matches of three ghosts you can destroy them. Destroying these ghosts earns you very generous bonuses (500 points). You’ll find four different power ups, the bomb that destroys all nearby objects, holy water which removes curses, holy fire destroys all the ghosts of pirates and lightning that destroys all objects in the line that it is activated into. To activate a power up you just have to move it to the next tile. Everytime you activate a new power up a note on it’s function will pop up. You can turn off these messages if you wish by unchecking the box at the lower left of the message.
Completion of each level earns you a part of a treasure map that is divided into 42 pieces. Once you’ve collected all 42 pieces you then get to do the treasure hunt, which I’ve not played through to, so can’t tell you what it is. I presume more levels. You can follow your progress on the levels map. At the end of each level you get a report of how many gold coins you’ve collected, the number of bonus points, collapsed objects and ghosts. To proceed to th next level just click on OK.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows XP/Vista though it also works on Win 7
DirectX: 8.0
CPU: 1.0 GHz
Memory: 128
Hard Drive Space: 79

Reviews, Video and Images

You can find videos of game play HERE, HERE and HERE and a slideshow of around 20 images showing the menus and first stages in the game HERE. You find several short user reviews from BigFish HERE

Conclusion:

The Flying Dutchman is a reasonable match threeThere’s nothing outstanding about the game, but IMO it’s worth keeping, especially if you are into the match three genre. If not, there are far better free match three’s available from various sources. I’ve linked to game top below. (There are over 50 match three’s available from MyPlaycity, but I’m no longer sure of downloading from them due to problems with toolbars etc, which I detail below. You’ll find some of the best match threes over at MPC though but Gametop also has a few as well. The addition of the ghosts adds an extra challenge to the game and can often confound your quest to complete the level. I was stuck on one level for ages due to the ghosts, lol. They add a difficulty that’s not always present in some match three games. I scored the game a 6.4 using the parameters below.

Scoring

Gameplay – 7
Graphics – 7
Audio – 7
Re-playability – 6
Originality – 5

Total = 6.4

Suggestions to the Developer:

• Add more power ups

• Include some mini games

• Improve the story

• Add a ghostly screensaver that you can earn by completing the game

• Create more contrast between the tiles

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Problems installing, activating and running giveaway games:

If you have difficulty downloading or activating the game you can try again later or do one of the following – for example once downloaded when you click on the dual activation and set up file you may get the message “Failed to connect. Please try again later” Check to see if your internet explorer isn’t offline (thanks to MrSnoozles/Mike and GMMan for that fix). If the previous suggestion doesn’t work go check out previous comments from the last several weeks and look for comments from GMMan and Mike. They have also posted their possible fixes for this problem.

Mike suggests that you check to see if Internet Explorer is offline (even if you use Firefox). If it is make sure that it’s online then try again. I’ve always tried re-booting my modem and/or router with some success, though Mike has said that doing that does nothing. Still, it’s worth a try if all else fails.

If you are getting the black screen problem right click on the games executable and select properties then click on the compatibility mode and select the disable visual themes. This should fix the problem, if not try disabling the display scaling on higher dpi settings and disabling the desktop composition.

Other fixes include changing your screen resolution, installing the latest direct X (remember that XP uses DX 9 or earlier only, Vista uses DX 10 or before and Win 7 DX11 or before). Also try updating your graphics drivers. The main two chip manufacturers are NVIDIA and ATI both of which offer driver downloads for free. Just go to the respective manufactures home page and you’ll find a link to the driver download page. To find out which graphic card or graphics chip your computer uses type in Dxdiag in the search field (Vista or Win 7) or the run command (XP); this opens up the DirectX diagnostics panel. click on the display tab and look to the left panel. You should easily see what graphics card or chip you are using. (This is required information when selecting the correct download from the developers site).

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Other Games:

You will find loads of free match three games over at Gametop and other free games sites. Most of you are aware of the pitfalls of downloading from such sites. Of the ones I know MyPlayCity used to be the best place to download, but recently they have changed their practices to include forced toolbar installations and home page hijacks. I downloaded and installed a MyPlayCity game several weeks ago and despite unchecking the boxes for these to stop them installing I still got a MyPlayCity toolbar and whenever I opened my browser a pop up would appear asking me if I wanted to change my home page to MyPlayCity plus a second browser would open to Ask.com. I did manage to get rid of those by deleting the appropriate folders, editing my registry and reconfiguring my browser. Gametop still come with toolbars and home page hijacks, but you can de-select them during the installation process.

You can find several free match three games over on Gametops site HERE

Nice little game

I would however recommend ready the help section first, otherwise you will not have to much of a clue as to what is going on! There is in game help that does pop up, but it is not very clear!

The graphics and music are okay, suitable for this game.

I see that “Star Ashes” are the ones that did “Egyptoid 1 and Egyptoid 2, would love to see another run of those two, as when my hard drive fried, so did they!

Hi Whabbit, and have a good day all, will be going back into play some more…

Suki

………………..Moderator comment……………….

Hi Suki, nice to see you popping in. Thanks for the feed back. Overslept this morning, so my review is late.