Baby Blimp:

In Brief:
Baby Blimp is a colourful cartoon like time management game featuring the story of how babies are made in a factory then delivered by stork.

Use your mouse to play. Follow the initial tutorial carefully (make notes if necessary). Completing tasks successfully will earn you points towards higher ranks in the stork air force as well as receiving rewards and trophies

You can see a few videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.

Introduction:
The head Stork has just retired from the Baby Blimp factory. Left without guidance, the Stork Air Force needs your help to deliver babies to each loving home. Assign Storks to their everyday tasks and make sure these babies are delivered to meet expecting parent's wishes. Storks must first prepare the babies for the exciting journey by making them clean and neat. Once a baby is ready, a Stork will make its delivery with a very special wish. Help the Stork Air Force make many parents happy!
Review accessed HERE and reposted by Whiterabbit-uk on the 21st May 2021. Originally posted by GirlGames4u

The Game:

Mini Reviews:
You can see several short Big Fish community reviews HERE

Short Review:
There are tons of baby-related time management games out there. Baby Blimp makes a few changes to the typical "taking care of baby" type of game. You play a crew of storks who are preparing babies to be delivered to new parents. First, you decide the sex of the baby that will pop out of the machine. Then you have to give it a toy, feed it, clean it and put it down for a nap before it is ready for delivery. Once all of the babies are prepped for delivery, you go over to the blimp door. Each house below you will tell you what type of baby they want. It is your job, as the stork, to deliver the proper baby to each house. There are various types of storms that will get in your way so be careful!

Originally, I thought this was a cute idea. Once I started playing though, I realized that the gameplay is kind of broken. There are times that you will need to click on an object multiple times before the stork will do that action. Since the stork will only do one action at a time, it makes playing the game annoying. For example, once you change a baby's diaper, you need to throw the dirty diaper in the trash before you can do anything else. However, the game won't always register the trash can click. So your stork will just stand there stupidly until the game finally registers the trash can click. Of course, by this point babies are crying all over the place and you need to get them taken care of. The same thing happens in the delivery mode as well. So, while the game could have been really cute and fun, in the end, it's nothing but aggravating.

Review accessed HERE and reposted by Whiterabbit-uk on the 21st May 2021, originally posted by Cassandra Morgan on Sept 17th, 2008

Full Review
Contrary to popular belief, babies these days aren’t made with the help of the birds and the bees. They’re mass produced on a giant blimp which is managed by storks! At least that’s the premise of Youda Baby Blimp, a quirky time management game that puts a whole new spin on making babies.

As Chief Stork, you’re in charge of the Baby Blimp. To start, pull the level on the slot machine to select the correct gender. Failing to do this in time means one gender is randomly selected for you, causing you to risk losing serious points. Once a baby is created, it will slide out on the assembly line. Sometimes a baby will try unsuccessfully to stand up, so you’ll need to catch him. Next, he’ll be looking for a toy, and then a bottle (which you must make in advance). Without fail, the little guy will then “spit up” all over himself, and you’ll need to fetch a napkin and wipe his face, and toss it away.


The baby will sometimes want a bath, but other times will be ready for a nap. Once all of the baby’s needs are filled, he’s ready to be launched – yes, launched – and will be automatically loaded into the machine. Press the button in a timely fashion to send him on his way. An assortment of upgrades can be purchased to make your job easier.

Later in the game the chance to make twins or more will be unlocked, as shown by a small button on your slot machine. Clicking it at the right time will multiply the baby, and those special multiple births result in babies with no needs to fill! If only that were true in real life…

Once you’ve successfully made and packaged all the little bundles of joy, it’s time to deliver them to their proud expectant parents. Make sure to deliver the right gender to the right household, or else you’ll earn no points for the delivery. Storks can only carry one baby at a time, unless you’ve bought a strength upgrade which allows them to carry two or more. There are also speed upgrades to get the storks moving more quickly. Bigger houses and hospitals equal parents with less patience, so you’ll want to serve these folks first.

Delivery storks are affected by weather, like rain, snow, and lightening storms. You’ll need to dress them with the appropriate hat, or else the baby will be returned and the stork will need a few seconds to recover from the shock. Sometimes it’s hard to see what the weather is at a particular house if another house is in front of it, and this is extremely frustrating.

Just like in real life, some people simply don’t like kids. Look out for anti-stork neighbours who will try to toss things at your storks. A target will appear by a stork’s head, and you’ll need to click it to get your stork out of danger.

You’ll need upgraded storks in order to make and deliver twins, triplets, and quadruplets. Nobody specifically requests multiple births, so if you have twins to deliver, just drop off the right gender to any house requesting a baby.

In between each round, you’ll be taken to the trophy room to see any trophies you’ve earned, along with your score. Trophies are rewarded for making special combos and for flawless game play, and most of them are tough to achieve.

To give Youda Games credit, they certainly make an effort to provide interesting themes, and the developers that work with them aren’t afraid to take risks on new ideas and to think out of the box. Games about babies are nothing new, but I can’t recall every playing one about a stork delivery blimp before. It’s quirky, but it’s something different, and it’s nice to see new themes and twists on time management.

On the downside, you can only access the menu in certain screens (like the stork delivery screen), which is a pain if you’re ready to quit. There are occasional minor English errors as well. Unfortunately, considering that it’s a fairly complex time management game, there are very few instructions given, and those provided are vague. This can cause lots of frustration for newbies, and might turn off players who would otherwise enjoy the game.

You are never explicitly told how to create twins, or what the various upgraded assistants actually do in the game. This might make you think the controls are unresponsive, when in actuality you are simply missing a step needed to proceed. The game could really use a clear tutorial.

The baby graphics are exactly the same as another of Youda’s titles, Kindergarten, and the music is very similar too.

Despite some issues with the interface, Youda Baby Blimp is strangely addictive and grows on you the more you play. Once you’ve figured out the details and learned how to work most efficiently, it’s enjoyably challenging and fast-paced. The biggest issue is the learning curve, which will quite likely frustrate many users when first playing the trial. However, if you have the patience to stick with it, it’s a cute and original title that’s fun to play.

Conclusion
Positive things about this game include an unusual and funny theme as well as some unique time management tasks. with extended gameplay. Negative things about this game include vague instructions (unless you make a note of each step of the initial tutorial. Personally I found that clicking the areas you needed to action sometimes didn't take due to possibly a poor collision mesh), so I was missing actions that stacked up and stopped me from completing a level. This also leads to a frustrating learning curve and unclear graphics make some tasks artificially difficult.

Apparently (according to Lisa Haasbroek some of the assets were recycled from another game called kindergarten. I've not played that game, so cannot confirm whether this is true. Assets are often reused, especially if using one of the many game engines where the base engine is free.

Review with edited conclusion accessed HERE and reposted by Whiterabbit-uk on the 21st May 2021, originally posted by Lisa Haasbroek on Aug 1, 2008

Other Free Games:
The latest game from Epic Games is now live and is called Among Us which you'll find link to be added. It ends June 3rd at 4pm (UK time/11am EST) where it will be replaced by a mystery game. Also from Epic there are several other free to play games available; for example, If you play online with friends there's a decent PvE/PvP free FPS game called Scavengers and you can still get the clicker RPG Idle Champions as well as other multiplayer games. With respect to Idle Champions, I've been posting redeemable codes (time limited for 5 to 7 days from the day of posting) for free game chests over in the forums HERE. They contain various items that boost your heroes abilities and health as well as affect your group of heroes in game; for example potions that boost health or DPS, contracts that can improve armour or weapons already used by the heroes or other contracts that add amounts of gold that would normally take a specific time to earn if you were offline, as well as items of jewellery, armour or weapons that buff your characters stats. I don't usually play clicker type games, but this one I've been enjoying for the past few weeks and is well supported by the developer and has a massive following. I'll be posting codes for the redeemable chests for as long as I continue to play the game. I've posted some help sheets and links to a game wiki via the above link as well.

Steam have ten pages of free games that total 136 free games (at the last count). Many are free to play MMO's that may include extra content that you have pay for, but are not necessary to play the game (these are often called pay to win type freebies, but that's not always the case); however there are also plenty of free game that do not require in game or DLC purchases and have single player modes included. You'll find all those HERE. Steam also feature the occasional commercial game where the developer is giving away the game for a limited time period.

Please see Delenns threads for those games and other non Steam freebies (GOG, uPlay, Origin etc) HERE and HERE. It’s worth adding these to your browsers favorites and checking regularly to see if there are any new games added. They tend to be time limited so you need to grab them before the free period has ended. If you miss the deadline you may have missed out on something you'd have loved. Once added to your account, these temporary freebies are yours to keep. Delenn has recently posted details of more Indie Gala and Steam games that are temporarily free; e.g. Tower Ball - Incremental Tower Defense plus a reflex game called Keyboard Killers and Little Nightmares (thanks for the heads up Delenn) via Steam and JASEM, Chronology , Lawless Lands and Lightstrike via Indie Gala.

You'll find hundreds of freeware games of all arcade and indie genres on Itch.io and Caimans Games as well as other sources. Please do check out the game discussion forums for older posts HERE; (the sticky section is useful). Many of the earlier posts may be out of date with respect to the links I and others have provided to the free games; however, you only need to know the name of the game to find most of them via other sources. Many of those games from 2008 to around 2017 were posted as part of a project to supplement the lack of weekday games when the game giveaway went to weekend only games around Easter 2008 (mainly instigated due to the financial crisis of 2008) until November 2018 when Falcoware stepped into the weekday slot; however, from around 2015 onwards we did start to get the occasional Steam key for various games offered as limited giveaways, with a restriction on the number of keys available (anywhere from 25 to 2000+). These included over 60 decent AAA games and indie arcade games ; for example some of the better AAA games included , lucky Warhammer: Vermintide 1 & 2 plus DLC for version 2; Dreadlands, Mount & Blade: Warband, Immortal Unchained and Conan Exiles.

Indie Gala have added quite a few more free games since I last posted details of Indie Gala freebies regularily last year. Some of those games are definitely worth downloading. You can find the latest freebies HERE and Indie gala's showcase list, which includes all the freebies still current; (many of which have been included for a couple of years now) HERE.

It’s worth adding these links to your favorites and checking regularly for available freebies. Most are only free for a specific time. If you miss the deadline you’ll miss out. Once added to your account, they are yours to keep. :)