Ultimate Puzzles Marine Life:

In Brief:
Ultimate Puzzles Marine Life is a simple 16 square piece's jigsaw puzzle with five images and no lugs. You can see a video of game play HERE

The Game:
Ultimate Puzzles Marine Life is another of those jigsaw puzzles from UniDen with square shaped puzzle pieces that have no lugs. We get five images to solve instead of the usual four. The theme is fauna in the sea. We've had several of these types of puzzle games previously from the developer UniDen, i.e. America, Countries, France, Nature, Nature 2, Animals 2 & 3, China and Japan as well as a few other non jigsaw games such as Knight's Tetris, and Legend of the Fallen Castle 1 & 2.


Each of the five puzzles is made up of 16 square pieces. which are placed on a 4 x 4 grid i.e. 16 pieces. Some of the pieces are not oriented correctly, so you will need to change their orientation by clicking on the piece with the left mouse button. Each click turns the piece clockwise 90 degrees. To place a piece on the board use the left mouse button, grab then move to the grid section you think it belongs on. If it is correct it will lock in place; if it's the wrong place it will move to a random place on the periphery of the jigsaws grid. The addition of rotating the pieces and also placing them in different places each time you attempt to complete the puzzle adds to the difficulty slightly. Also, some pieces will overlap at the start of each attempt and in some cases totally obscure one or more pieces. You can restart any of the puzzles at any time by clicking on the back arrow.

All five puzzles are relatively simple. An adult could easily complete the whole game in around 10 to 15 minutes at the very least. I think the developer is asking far too much over on Itch.io for a jigsaw with only five puzzle images and with only a small 4 x 4 grid at $5 per game. If all of the series were to be combined, it would seem a fairer price. That said, there are free jigsaw programs available online that in my opinion are far better than today's jigsaw puzzle; (okay it's free today).

The giveaway team gave away a jigsaw puzzle called Infinite Jigsaw Puzzle on Feb 13th 2008 which allowed your own images to be added to the game; plus, it had several jigsaw shapes from complex lugged shapes to various geometric shapes (though no squares) and you could adjust the difficulty from around 25 pieces to over a thousand. You could also create categories to place your image as well. I've still got that puzzle and sometimes dip into it, with several hundred images added over the years since I've had it. I'd buy it from the original developer if I could find them (Media Research Group); basically as a thank you for such a great jigsaw game that I received for free and have had many hours of enjoyment from it over the intervening thirteen years.

Notes on Security
I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game and it found zero hits from 58 antimalware engines. The downloaded executable may include some low level adware that only opens your browser to Falcowares home page after the game has installed and places four shortcuts onto your desktop (which can be safely deleted once the game has installed). The installation does not inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to Falcowares home page when the game has been installed, it earns Falcoware games some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free. You can see the results of the scan via the following link:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/023aca191996555fc2c693830000430cad696a371ecbca05c80cb484ee22590b/detection

Other Free Games:
The latest game from Epic Games is now live and is called NBA 2K21 which you'll find HERE. It ends tomorrow at 4pm (UK time/11am EST), where it will be replaced by a mystery game. 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. I've been posting redeemable codes (time limited for 5 to 7 days from the day of posting) for free 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 specific amounts of gold to your bank 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 is well supported by the developer and has a massive following. I'll be posting codes 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

Please see Delenns threads for Steam and Non Steam freebies HERE and HERE respectively. It’s worth adding these 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, it’s yours to keep. Delenn has recently posted details of more Steam games that are temporarily free. One may be until it leaves early access??? - i.e. Tower Ball - Incremental Tower Defense plus a reflex game called Keyboard Killers are still free.

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.

I've not posted details of any Indie Gala freebies since my older computer went on the Fritz back in October last year. Since then Indie Gala have added quite a few more free games, some of which are definitely worth downloading. You can find the latest freebies HERE and their 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. :)