Game Giveaway of the Day

#1

Fill Up:

In Brief:
Please see the introduction below the countdown clock for details of today's game giveaway.

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

Notes on Security
I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game using Virus Total and it found zero hits from 65 antimalware engines. You can see the scan results HERE

Reply | Comment by Whiterabbit-uk – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+8)

#6

Sorry, this 1 may be good for the experienced players like WR & Sailorbear, but I'm floundering a little. The help screen isn't unhelpful, but it's hardly detailed. Playing level 1 timed, I'm quickly out of diesel, which is realistic - buses gobble up must more gas than cars (also, is it a Europe thing? over here we have more diesel trucks and less diesel, more gasoline, [and a lot of LP gas], buses, but all of my diesel customers in level 1 are buses. Lot of buses in this game world!, at least in level 1). But, can't figure out how to refuel. Something that would be reasonable for the game to explain. Quite possible that you're not supposed to refuel in level 1. But, I have buses piled up after I run out of diesel. Then they drive away. Do I lose bonuses for this??? And see my reply to Anthea about other things not well explained about how to select play options. And I agree with Sunil and Anthea that all of this repetitive dragging is, well, in my view, a good way to get carpal tunnel.

Whiterabbit, as usual, conscientiously posted links to the 2 gameplay videos from Falco, but, hilariously (!) neither of the Falcoware posters understand how to play level 1. They keep trying to fuel up cars at the diesel pump, which seems to break it - smoke rises up - which seems to prevent the buses from popping up, and this poster or posters just continues to try and ram the gasoline square pegs into the diesel round holes! Maybe they just rushed the videos, but not helpful. Also, I have to disagree with Jason. Looks to me that this is a 16:9 game and not for older resolutions. Both of the 4:3 Falco videos seemed to be improperly sized, and the 2nd 1 looks like it's in so low of a resolution that it's forcing the tutorial dialogue out of it's blue box. I have more evidence of this from what I think is a more important discovery. This was apparently originally - and still is - distributed by Big Fish, which is how I found out about the other 2 languages. They have a video on youtube also, just search Fill Up! game - it apparently originally had and exclamation point in the title. Unfortunately, their video is only 1:09 and doesn't show much, and is also 4:3 and obviously mis-sized. It looks fine on my 1280 x 800, 1:6 (16 x 10) ratio setting on my old 1:6 wide screen monitor, so I wouldn't shy away from trying it on higher resolutions. No offense intended, Jason. But, the real reason I mentioned this is that the Big Fish video has music during the game play. Mine - and the music is definitely on and at 60% volume - is absent. I would chock that up to an incomplete load, or a problem on my end, BUT it's also absent in both of the Falcoware videos. Might as well turn the sound off, as traffic noise just adds to the feeling that level 1 is a grind.

This lack of music is suspicious to me. I'm going to put this as diplomatically as I can. It seems to me that when this game "fell into the hands" of either Ashoot or Falco, or both, it didn't fall completely into their hands, though the music loss might be the only flaw. I would suggest that Ashoot fix that, consider better instructions, and take Sunil and Anthea's suggestion to have the cars move to the buildings themselves, but, unless he's great at reverse engineering, he may not be capable of doing so. That's also as diplomatic as I can put it. Playing the Big Fish demo may or may not shed some light on whether there are other flaws, but I'm not THAT interested.

I can't really review this because my older graphics with this custom cursor just makes the dragging mechanics a little jerky for me and half the time I can't grab the vehicle. The game might be really good if you can get into it and get to the levels that have more strategy - and maybe the racing levels - but, to borrow slang from America's hippy years of the 60s and 70s, all that dragging in the 1st level is just, well, "a drag"! Also, as I've said in reviews of other TM games, if the gameplay is more like work than play, it's not a good TM game. I think newcomers to TM are going to have a little trouble with this, it's definitely not entering the pool at the shallow end, and the Big Fish reviews might demonstrate it. They crucified it! 12 reviews. One 3 star and 11 one star reviews, some saying it was the worst game they'd ever played. Also a 3, 2, and 1 star review of the German version, none recommended it, and, to be fair, a 5 star review of the Spanish version (sorry Anthea, I said French by mistake.) I'm sure that's an big overreaction, but, to me, this vehicle needs to go back to the shop for repairs.

BTW, it has a sequel on Big Fish, Fill Up 2, no exclamation point. Almost all reviews bad on that, too. For some reason it's listed as a Match 3, though no match 3 screenshots. It also seems like time management. It's available in English, German, and French, btw.

I haven't deleted it yet, maybe I'll figure it out. Thanks anyway, GGOTD.

P.S. Since Google's taken over Captcha, it's often a grind, too. GRR!

Sorry, this 1 may be good for the experienced players like WR & Sailorbear, but I'm floundering a little.  The help screen isn't unhelpful, but it's hardly detailed.  Playing level 1 timed, I'm quickly out of diesel, which is realistic - buses gobble up must more gas than cars (also, is it a Europe thing? over here we have more diesel trucks and less diesel, more gasoline, [and a lot of LP gas], buses, but all of my diesel customers in level 1 are buses.  Lot of buses in this game world!, at least in level 1).  But, can't figure out how to refuel.  Something that would be reasonable for the game to explain.  Quite possible that you're not supposed to refuel in level 1.  But, I have buses piled up after I run out of diesel.  Then they drive away.  Do I lose bonuses for this??? And see my reply to Anthea about other things not well explained about how to select play options.  And I agree with Sunil and Anthea that all of this repetitive dragging is, well, in my view, a good way to get carpal tunnel.

Whiterabbit, as usual, conscientiously posted links to the 2 gameplay videos from Falco, but, hilariously (!) neither of the Falcoware posters understand how to play level 1.  They keep trying to fuel up cars at the diesel pump, which seems to break it - smoke rises up - which seems to prevent the buses from popping up, and this poster or posters just continues to try and ram the gasoline square pegs into the diesel round holes!  Maybe they just rushed the videos, but not helpful.  Also, I have to disagree with Jason.  Looks to me that this is a 16:9 game and not for older resolutions.  Both of the 4:3 Falco videos seemed to be improperly sized, and the 2nd 1 looks like it's in so low of a resolution that it's forcing the tutorial dialogue out of it's blue box.  I have more evidence of this from what I think is a more important discovery.  This was apparently originally - and still is - distributed by Big Fish, which is how I found out about the other 2 languages.  They have a video on youtube also, just search Fill Up! game - it apparently originally had and exclamation point in the title.  Unfortunately, their video is only 1:09 and doesn't show much, and is also 4:3 and obviously mis-sized.  It looks fine on my 1280 x 800, 1:6 (16 x 10) ratio setting on my old 1:6 wide screen monitor, so I wouldn't shy away from trying it on higher resolutions.  No offense intended, Jason.  But, the real reason I mentioned this is that the Big Fish video has music during the game play.  Mine - and the music is definitely on and at 60% volume - is absent.  I would chock that up to an incomplete load, or a problem on my end, BUT it's also absent in both of the Falcoware videos.  Might as well turn the sound off, as traffic noise just adds to the feeling that level 1 is a grind.

This lack of music is suspicious to me.  I'm going to put this as diplomatically as I can.  It seems to me that when this game "fell into the hands" of either Ashoot or Falco, or both, it didn't fall completely into their hands, though the music loss might be the only flaw.  I would suggest that Ashoot fix that, consider better instructions, and take Sunil and Anthea's suggestion to have the cars move to the buildings themselves, but, unless he's great at reverse engineering, he may not be capable of doing so.  That's also as diplomatic as I can put it.  Playing the Big Fish demo may or may not shed some light on whether there are other flaws, but I'm not THAT interested.

I can't really review this because my older graphics with this custom cursor just makes the dragging mechanics a little jerky for me and half the time I can't grab the vehicle.  The game might be really good if you can get into it and get to the levels that have more strategy - and maybe the racing levels - but, to borrow slang from America's hippy years of the 60s and 70s, all that dragging in the 1st level is just, well, "a drag"!  Also, as I've said in reviews of other TM games, if the gameplay is more like work than play, it's not a good TM game.  I think newcomers to TM are going to have a little trouble with this, it's definitely not entering the pool at the shallow end, and the Big Fish reviews might demonstrate it.  They crucified it!  12 reviews.  One 3 star and 11 one star reviews, some saying it was the worst game they'd ever played.  Also a 3, 2, and 1 star review of the German version, none recommended it, and, to be fair, a 5 star review of the Spanish version (sorry Anthea, I said French by mistake.) I'm sure that's an big overreaction, but, to me, this vehicle needs to go back to the shop for repairs.

BTW, it has a sequel on Big Fish, Fill Up 2, no exclamation point.  Almost all reviews bad on that, too.  For some reason it's listed as a Match 3, though no match 3 screenshots.  It also seems like time management.  It's available in English, German, and French, btw.

I haven't deleted it yet, maybe I'll figure it out.  Thanks anyway, GGOTD.

P.S. Since Google's taken over Captcha, it's often a grind, too.  GRR!

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Reply | Comment by watcher13 – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+3)

watcher13,

I think you must have found out how to refill the pumps by now. But just in case you haven't (and for other players who have the same problem):

When you click on the refuel button at the bottom of the screen, the game says the refuel tanker (I forget the exact term it uses) is coming. Within a few seconds, a vehicle will appear in the parking lot with a "liquid drop" icon (black, for diesel). Drag that vehicle to the diesel pump/station to do the refueling.

Reply | Comment by Sunil Suresh – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+3)

Sunil Suresh, thanks Sunil! But doesn't help. I don't have a refuel button at the bottom of my screen. In the blue box at the bottom, I have the following buttons at the very top edge of the blue box: Resources, Construction, Task, Awards, Help, Menu/Pause. Clicking on any of those doesn't help. Clicking on the empty pump doesn't do anything, either. I may have a bad copy. I tried windowed mode, which doesn't seem to work correctly either, in order to see if some things were rendering off of the screen. But it looked exactly the same. BTW, windowed mode won't let the cursor out of the screen, not even to go to the top of the window to move it. So the idea that you could multi-task in windowed mode, making it pause when you go off the screen to, say, look at or load a webpage, doesn't apply here, though it's pretty much game standard. I had to hit ctrl-esc to pull up the start menu. May have been better methods, but at least that put me outside the game so I could move the window with the windows cursor - because the bottom was at the very bottom of the screen and I wanted to make sure nothing was hidden there - but nothing else was revealed when I moved it.

But this whole thing fishy to me. The Big Fish video has music. The Falco videos don't, and neither do I. Of course, they could have switched off the music when they made those videos, but I don't recall ever seeing anyone do that. You're usually trying to show the whole product, music an all. I have a suspicious that Ashoot is not the original source. Whether he has permission from that source to distribute these games, well...

But, if you've downloaded it here, then I must have a bad copy. And the diesel pumps flashes the whole time, even when practically full. Why? Clicking on is does nothing. To me, this game needs to go back into the oven. It's "half-baked".

But I do appreciate it, Sunil. In any case, I can't play it practically on this old machine. I liked timed mode, but my problem in consistently grabbing the vehicles because my sluggish graphics - and I am making sure that the vehicle is highlighted before I attempt to grab it - makes it just too hard. You have to have 3 super bonuses to build the service station, and close to the end of the nearly 8 minutes I only had 1 bonus, not 3 super bonuses. I'm speculating that if I played it untimed, it might take me 30 to 45 minutes - and maybe permanent wrist damage!

I'm actually happy for those who can play this. They got good copies, and I'm glad. But, to be honest, developer suggestions here are worthless. The games we get are seldom new, no matter what it says on Ashoot's Itch page, and, unlike the main giveaway, developers practically never respond here. Perhaps the only thing that may happen here to criticism is that a publisher/distributor will, once in a blue moon, drop a game. Almost none of these games will ever be changed from now till the end of time. I criticize games for the community. Whiterabbit, your objectives here in encouraging commentary are pure and well intentioned, but, if the developers don't live up to them, pretty much moot. Please don't take that as a criticism. I would do the same in your position. Certainly, I see no value in giving Ashoot feedback. I doubt he has the capability to implement those suggestions. As diplomatically as I can put it.

Sunil Suresh, thanks Sunil!  But doesn't help.  I don't have a refuel button at the bottom of my screen.  In the blue box at the bottom, I have the following buttons at the very top edge of the blue box:  Resources, Construction, Task, Awards, Help, Menu/Pause.  Clicking on any of those doesn't help.  Clicking on the empty pump doesn't do anything, either.  I may have a bad copy.  I tried windowed mode, which doesn't seem to work correctly either, in order to see if some things were rendering off of the screen.  But it looked exactly the same.  BTW, windowed mode won't let the cursor out of the screen, not even to go to the top of the window to move it.   So the idea that you could multi-task in windowed mode, making it pause when you go off the screen to, say, look at or load a webpage, doesn't apply here, though it's pretty much game standard.  I had to hit ctrl-esc to pull up the start menu.  May have been better methods, but at least that put me outside the game so I could move the window with the windows cursor - because the bottom was at the very bottom of the screen and I wanted to make sure nothing was hidden there - but nothing else was revealed when I moved it.

But this whole thing fishy to me.  The Big Fish video has music.  The Falco videos don't, and neither do I.  Of course, they could have switched off the music when they made those videos, but I don't recall ever seeing anyone do that.  You're usually trying to show the whole product, music an all.  I have a suspicious that Ashoot is not the original source.  Whether he has permission from that source to distribute these games, well...

But, if you've downloaded it here, then I must have a bad copy.  And the diesel pumps flashes the whole time, even when practically full.  Why?  Clicking on is does nothing.   To me, this game needs to go back into the oven.  It's "half-baked".

But I do appreciate it, Sunil. In any case, I can't play it practically on this old machine.  I liked timed mode, but my problem in consistently grabbing the vehicles because my sluggish graphics - and I am making sure that the vehicle is highlighted before I attempt to grab it - makes it just too hard.  You have to have 3 super bonuses to build the service station, and close to the end of the nearly 8 minutes I only had 1 bonus, not 3 super bonuses.  I'm speculating that if I played it untimed, it might take me 30 to 45 minutes - and maybe permanent wrist damage!

I'm actually happy for those who can play this.  They got good copies, and I'm glad.  But, to be honest, developer suggestions here are worthless.  The games we get are seldom new, no matter what it says on Ashoot's Itch page, and, unlike the main giveaway, developers practically never respond here.  Perhaps the only thing that may happen here to criticism is that a publisher/distributor will, once in a blue moon, drop a game.  Almost none of these games will ever be changed from now till the end of time.  I criticize games for the community.  Whiterabbit, your objectives here in encouraging commentary are pure and well intentioned, but, if the developers don't live up to them, pretty much moot.  Please don't take that as a criticism.  I would do the same in your position.  Certainly, I see no value in giving Ashoot feedback.  I doubt he has the capability to implement those suggestions.  As diplomatically as I can put it.

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Reply | Comment by watcher13 – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+1)

#5

I prefer those games with no time limitation - I know, I know, this is why they are called TM.

I would love if the car would go to the station, when you either click the free station or the car. I already have a cramp in my left arm from all the clicking.

I downloaded the game cause I like cars but I don't think I will keep it as I already run out of time in the second level.

Reply | Comment by Anthea – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+4)

Anthea, you can play without a time limit. This is one of the things that's poorly explained by the game. When you get to the select a player screen - this game is also available in German and French - which has the German "spieler", which means player, you can select #5 (maybe 4 too, I forget), which has no time limit. These are basically presets, though the 1st 3 are exactly alike it seems. But, 1 of the things not mentioned is that you can click on any of the 5, then click create, and it rewrites that player preset anyway you want. There are actually also easy and hard modes, which is not mentioned, (besides the normal mode, which is on all 5 presets), you can turn the tutorial on and off, also not mentioned, and you can turn the time limit on or off, again, not mentioned.

Reply | Comment by watcher13 – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+7)

watcher13,
Thanks for the information.

I'll have a look the next time. I just now can't get it to start *sighs*
I also will look for German cause it's my main language (well Swiss German technically).

This would make it so much better.

Reply | Comment by Anthea – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+2)

Anthea, Big Fish is the one that I know that has 1 & 2 in German. I suspect that's the original language.

Reply | Comment by watcher13 – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (0)

watcher13, I found the profile without time limit but nothing in German.

Reply | Comment by Anthea – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (0)

Anthea, sorry for the confusion. What I meant was, if you really wanted the game in German, you would have to buy it from Big Fish. Or use 1 of their free coupons, if you had 1. They're are also selling Fill Up 2. Our version is English only, it seems, except for that 1 word, spieler.

You can make all of your profiles no time limit if you want. If you select a profile and then hit the create button, you can choose: easy/medium/hard, and tutorial on/off, and time limit/no time limit. It will just erase their profile and make it what you want it to be. Since you don't want to play timed mode, you can erase profiles 1, 2, or 3, and make them what you want them to be. You can erase any or all of the 5 profiles. I think they were wrong to make all 5 spieler profiles Normal mode. If I hadn't experimented with changing 1 of them I would have never known that there were easy and hard modes also. Who cares about the preset profiles? Make them what you want them to be. You can change them over and over, as many times as you want. No harm will be done. Hope you enjoy the game.

Reply | Comment by watcher13 – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+2)

watcher13,
Ah - now I got it. No problem, English is fine for me too.

Yeah, I figured this one out with the profiles, thanks again.
Seems I can play a very lazy version now :-)

Reply | Comment by Anthea – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+1)

#4

Game failed to load properly. Screen resolution glitched on an NVIDIA display and threw out the desktop layout.
Tried running game twice but no chance to set up display options at start before it even tried running. Didn't even get a chance to try it.

If the developer can put a screen display option before loading the game maybe I could have seen how good some are saying it is.

Reply | Comment by just me not – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+2)

just me not , Do you have a dual video card setup inside your machine? Some computers with that has the ability to right click the executable and choose the GPU they want to launch it with. On my Intel UHD graphics card on my laptop there were no issues playing the game. It appears to be looking for 800x600 or 1024x768 which were common resolutions back in the day.

Reply | Comment by sailorbear510 aka Jason – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+4)

#3

Overall a fun game.

I had a suggestion for the developers: I think it would be fun if we could click on a vehicle and then click on the destination (pump, facility, restaurant, etc.) instead of dragging and dropping, and then the vehicle should move along the road to the destination. Also, this gives us a little extra time to look at what's happening on the screen. Otherwise, in timed mode, it is just drag and drop, drag and drop, drag and drop...

Of course, if you follow this suggestion, then you will also have to assign more time for each task as each refill will take longer as the vehicle has to first drive up to the destination.

Reply | Comment by Sunil Suresh – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+8)

Sunil Suresh, I see what you are saying. There have been some games where I click on an item, it sticks to the mouse and you drag it over to where you want it. Some people don't like the idea of holding down a mouse button to drag constantly. Given the single screens and resolution limitations of this game I think it would be hard to expand on this idea unless they did an HD remaster of the game to make the worlds a bit larger and so forth.

Reply | Comment by sailorbear510 aka Jason – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+2)

sailorbear510 aka Jason,

Hi Jason,

That's not what I meant. I was thinking of movement as in games like Gnomes Garden, Royal Envoy, etc. where we click on a person and then click on a resource (say a Sawmill), and the person finds his way and walks up to the sawmill and collects the logs of wood.

In the same way, I thought this game (Fill Up) would be more fun if we just click on a vehicle and then on the destination and the vehicle finds its own way to that destination.

Reply | Comment by Sunil Suresh – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (0)

#2

Today's game is very unique in a sense from an indie developer and I believe we have not seen this before. Its a time management and building simulator. A young man inherits a fortune and must learn how gas stations work.

Drag cars on the map to fuel them up, build bigger facilities and so forth. The quicker you build and refuel your customers, the bigger a bonus you get. It really feels like playing one of Sim Series of games from EA.

If you have questions about playing the game, the game does have a comprehensive tutorial built into it with a help section if you don't know what something is or does.

The graphics are actually pretty decent and colorful to a degree for an indie TM game. It's actually one of the best ones I've seen so far that's pretty much polished up and different from some of the other games in this genre.

Even if you don't like TM games you may find this one enjoyable. Personally I did and found it better than some of the giveaways found this month given away over the weekend.

Reply | Comment by sailorbear510 aka Jason – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+14)

sailorbear510 aka Jason,

Thanks for the feedback J.

Been really busy all morning trying to buy a new computer for my daughter as a present for her degree result, getting her first job, which started this Monday and for her birthday this coming Saturday. I spent all morning contacting the bank as each time I tried to authenticate, no code would come through. Turned out it was the bank's fault all along (seems they hadn't checked the box for phone and/or email authentication.
I finally succeeded in the purchase almost five hours after trying from the first attempt. I've been on the phone for most of the morning, apart from initially as our new male rabbit had cut the phone line, I'm using an old 40-year-old phone at the moment that I'd kept as an emergency phone; until I can replace the line on the newer phone system (bought earlier this year).

I can't believe someone has given Sailorbear's review (at the time I posted this) a thumbs down.

I'm not going to bother expanding on my comment today as I think your short review tells everything that's needed. Besides, I've got too many other things to do for the rest of today.

Reply | Comment by Whiterabbit-uk – 2 years ago – Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (+11)

Whiterabbit-uk, Thank you for your praise on my review :) I am also happy that you were able to get that purchase to go through for the new computer. I am still enjoying the laptop I bought for $99 on Black Friday in July at Best Buy and learning everything it can play by trial and error. It's not a gaming machine by any means but I've been able to play lots of games on it through trials and errors and adjusting system settings and so forth. A lot of people don't know that their system is possibly capable of gaming if you adjust the right details for the system you are playing on. Intel had come a long way when it comes to their integrated graphics processor and can run games you can't imagine it can run unless you try them first.