Giveaway of the Day - Time to Hurry: Nicole’s Story

Sorry for the late moderation. I’ve not been able to access te admin panel all morning:

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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Problems installing, activating and running today’s game:

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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Time to Hurry: Nicole’s Story:

Installation:

Time to Hurry: Nicole’s Story downloads to an 81.1MB zip file that unpacks to a read me that details the terms and conditions and a dual set up and activation module. To those that are new to the giveaway project that means once the game has been installed it automatically registers the game so there’s no registration code required. The game instals to the following path:

C:\Program files (x86)\Town Shops\exe\en\Town Shops.exe

or

C:\Games\Town Shops\exe\en\Town Shops.exe

There is no shortcut installed so you need to make a note of where it’s installed to so that you can create your own. The game works on XP, Vista and Win 7.

Introduction:

Get stunning success, helping Nicole to climb up the corporate ladder! You have to carry along with Nicole and more new job shop owners, as well as to solve various puzzles and riddles! Forward to success! Time to hurry!

Reference Accessed HERE 19th Nov 2011

An exciting success game where you have to help Nicole to climb the corporate ladder, working in various shops of the city. Execution of interesting jobs, as well as a variety of different puzzles will not let you get bored! The history of Nicole, a young girl who recently graduated from college, started in the garden products shop of her grandmother. Helping her grandmother, Nicole has made stunning success! Garden shop flourished and the winds of change spun Nicole up the career ladder! But Nicole does not also ignore privacy, outlook and Sports. During the success game you are with Nicole to perform more and more shop owner’s job, as well as to solve various puzzles and riddles! Forward to success!

Reference accessed HERE 19th Nov 2011

The Game:

Time to Hurry: Nicole’s Story takes a page from games like Shop-n-Spree to mix hidden object and time management genres in a way that is simple enough for all skill levels, but also offers a real level of challenge for those looking for one.

The story follows Nicole, a college graduate who has spent a year at a job that she thought she would love, but leaves her feeling unfulfilled. When she learns that her grandmother’s gardening store will be sold due to lost funds, she quits her job, flies home and takes on the task of single-handedly resorting the family business to its former glory.

Gameplay is level-based, and sees you serving customers as they walk into the store. Customers are presented along the left side of the screen, with all of the objects that a customer could potentially ask to purchase being presented in a cluttered hidden object scene that takes up the rest of the screen. Each customer has a list of two or three objects that they’d like to purchase, and you must find and click on them in the store.

While that easily explains the hidden object portion, the time management aspect is tackled in a few ways. First and foremost, customers have a series of “patience” hearts associated with them. The longer they wait to be served, the more hearts they lose over time, and if they lose all three of their hearts before you can find all of their wanted items, they will leave the store unsatisfied. Once a customer leaves, another takes its place, and so on, until you have met the quota of customers for that level.

You’ll spend eight levels helping your Grandmother restore her shop, at which point you’ll be asked to move to another store and help one of your grandmother’s friends do the same. This continues until you have unlocked all six stores that are available in the game, like an Antique Store or Japanese gifts store.

To keep the variety and challenge high, the locations of objects in each store change every level. Each time you start at a new store, you are presented with just a portion of the items that will eventually become available, as the selection increases on subsequent levels until the store’s shelves, and even the floor are literally packed with dozens of items.

In this is where the game hits its one major flaw, with that being some of the oddly named objects. When seeing the words “glass handle” on a customer’s wishlist, for instance, you would likely look for a clear glass handle, on the door of a cabinet or drawer. It would be highly unlikely that you would look for a blue beer flask, which is actually what the “glass handle” here equates to.

Luckily, you can use hints that allow you to instantly find one item on the current customer’s shopping list, and after you’ve learned what phrases or terms go with which items, the issue dissipates, which is true for the overall challenge in the game as well, as you’ll become more and more comfortable with the shop’s layout, and where items are normally placed as you go along.

The money you earn in each level can be spent in between levels in a fairly interesting way. Rather than upgrading your shops, you’re allowed to upgrade Nicole herself in four areas: Fitness, Career, Personal, and Outlook. Since Nicole was so unsatisfied at her former job, you’re now allowed to purchase items to help her open her mind and heart to new activities, take new classes, meet new friends, and overall become a more well-rounded and happy individual. This helps you in gameplay as well, as your Fitness level allows you to hold more bonus power-ups (like the hints I mentioned, and those that restore customer patience), and your Career level simply slows the overall diminishing of customer patience.

There are also a few basic puzzle levels that appear during the game’s progression. These come in the form of jigsaw puzzles, tile sliding puzzles, spot the difference and so on. The gameplay doesn’t suffer for their inclusion, but they do feel unnecessary.

All told, Time to Hurry: Nicole’s Story takes a road less travelled approach to the hidden object genre. While the gameplay does become repetitive over time, the simple fact that the store items change places keeps you on your toes in a way that most other games simply can’t provide. Time to Hurry: Nicole’s Story is a frenzied, yet definitely entertaining experience that is perfect for those looking for a little something a little different.

I was too busy last night to consolidate the 8 pages of A5 notes that I’d taken on the game. To be honest, the game has several aspects to it that would have taken me the whole day to write up in a logical order and succinctly so decided to post a copy of Gamezebo’s review which you can find HERE

Features:

• 6 different salons

• 20 minigames

• 20 and more tasks to complete

• Exciting gameplay – (haha)

• Fascinating story – (hoho)

Images and Video:

You can see a slide show of about 50 images showing the various levels, hints, tutorial screens and mini games HERE and videos of game play HERE, HERE and HERE

System Requirements:
1,2 Ghz Pentium or equivalent
Windows 98, ME, 2K, XP, Vista, 7
512 MB RAM
DirectX 7.0 or better
90 Mb free hard drive space

Conclusion:

The game looks like a typical time management game with some basic Hidden Object s sprinkled in to give the game a little zest. Everything’s bright and colourful, though I would say it would be nice if you could connect to your media player for the music directly through the game rather than having to turn it off via the options menu.

The game has enough variety and the HOG simple enough not to het too stressed when completing the time management parts of the game. Theirs is a wide variety of mini games that complement the game as well loads of tasks to complete that are linked to the rest of the game because to complete the tasks you need to earn cash from the other parts of the game to be able to carry out those tasks.

Overall, (even though I don’t particularly enjoy TM games) I actually enjoyed playing this game while preparing the notes for the review (took me over four hours), and just for game play it’s well worth a good 8 out of 10, though when I take into account other factors this reduces to 6.5.

Scoring:

Game play – 8
Graphics – 6.5
Audio – 5
Re-playability – 6
Originality – 7

Total out of 10 = 6.5

Today’s game giveaway is available at some free games sites for example Gametop and the one I’m no longer mentioning due to it’s practice of adding toolbars without permission. Lol:

Great game!!!
More of those please!!!