..................................Moderator comment.....................................

I'm out for the rest of today until mid evening, so won't be able to moderate until late evening/early morning. Also, I forgot to mention on Friday and Saturday that Conan Exiles is free to play until tomorrow late afternoon. It was given away as a limited give away last year. If you like open world first person role playing games, Conan Exiles is excellent. well worth checking out, even for the day. You'll find the free day HERE

Conan Exiles is an online multiplayer survival game set in the lands of Conan the Barbarian. Enter a vast, open world sandbox and play together with friends and strangers as you build your own home or even a shared city. Survive freezing cold temperatures, explore loot-filled dungeons, develop your character from a lowly peasant to a mighty barbarian, and fight to dominate your enemies in epic siege wars.

Conan Exiles can be played in full single-player, co-op, or persistent online multiplayer.

After Conan himself saves your life by cutting you down from the corpse tree, you must quickly learn to survive. Weather scouring sandstorms, shield yourself from intense temperatures, and hunt animals for food and resources. Explore a vast and seamless world, from the burning desert in the south to the snow-capped mountains of the north.

Forge the legacy of your clan as you fight to reclaim and dominate the Exiled Lands. Use the powerful building system to create anything from a small home to entire cities piece by piece. Wage war using swords, bows, siege weapons, and even take control of giant avatars of the gods to crush the homes of your enemies in epic battles.

Weird Park: Broken Tune

In Brief

Weird Park: Broken Tune is the third in the Weird Park series. As its name suggests its a weird HOG with colourful hidden object scenes and interspersed with the odd theme related puzzle (Sudoku-inspired tile sliding puzzles, object association games, lock/safe combinations) to break up the HOG action. :)

Installation Issues:

Weird Park: Broken Tune downloads to a 428 MB zip file that unzips to three files, (a setup.gcd security wrapper the set-up file and a read me). The game installs to the following path by default, but can be changed if you wish. The installed game is 443 MB in size.

C:\Program Files (x86)\MyPlayCity.com\Weird Park - Broken Tune

Four shortcuts are installed to the desktop; the shortcut to the game, plus three others ''Play Online Games, MyPlayCity Games and a shortcut to a free online game. These latter three shortcuts can be deleted once the game has been installed. The Themida wrapper may alert your security and even block the installation; there are details about this issue in the read me that unpacks from the downloaded zip file.

Introduction:

Explore a haunted amusement park in Weird Park: Broken Tune! Take the role of a private detective hired to investigate a rash of "accidental" deaths that befell those who worked at the park before city officials shut it down. Investigate amazing locations carefully in this incredible Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure game! Tread carefully to make it out of this Weird Park alive and discover the murderer!

Reference accessed HERE. 10th March 2019

The Game:

Weird Park places you in the role of a detective, out to find a man named John who has gone missing inside a long-abandoned theme park. The amusement park has a dark past and an equally depressing, dirty appearance, all surrounding a clown who died while on the trapeze of the park’s circus attraction. You’ll be followed throughout your adventure by both a tiny joker, that seems to want to stop your progress, and haunted by the ghost of the clown, whose intentions aren’t initially known.

The game play is incredibly straightforward, but is perhaps too easy for those veterans to the genre looking for a challenge. You’ll travel throughout a variety of scenes in the theme park, completing both standard hidden object scenes (find items on a list) and fragmented object scenes, with each bringing fairly crisp graphics and little difficulty to the table. The biggest problem with these scenes is the simple fact that you’ll repeatedly play so many of them. You’ll forever be required to backtrack from your current position, sometimes to the very beginning areas of the game to retrieve certain items (now that you’ve gathered the tools to interact with them) or re-do scenes you might have thought you had long since completed

With Weird Park: Broken Tune, you have a game that plays it safe in terms of game play complexity / difficulty, with nice graphics and an interesting setup that unfortunately don’t reach their full potential. However, if there’s one thing that can be said without a doubt, it’s that this one’s named appropriately, as Weird Park is definitely that: weird.

These scenes come with another issue, in addition to the fact that items remain in the same locations on subsequent play-throughs'. Here, the items that you’ve removed previously reappear as well, even if they were the key item from that scene. For instance, you may remove a Gear or a Balloon from a scene, travel throughout the theme park and then use that item somewhere else, only to find it back in the hidden object scene the next time you complete it. It’s a minor complaint, but it screams of laziness, or (at the very least) disappointing oversight.

With the amount of backtracking present here, it can be easy to get lost. Even though you’ll spend enough time in each area to quickly learn your way around, there are times when you are searching only for the next hidden object scene to complete, but have no idea where it is (as though they are activated at random).

Using the hint system is a double-edged sword, as the hints frequently ignore you entirely. You might click on the hint button (which automatically recharges) only to hear the hint tune, rather than actually see a visual cue on the screen (normally green music notes) for where to go. When this happens in hidden object scenes, you’re then left to wait for the hint button to recharge yet again, only to hope that it actually works the next time you click it, or that you can finally find your missing item in the meantime.

As for the game’s puzzles, you’re left with fairly simple challenges, like tile sliding puzzles or object association games (click on items that relate to one another, all within the carnival / fantasy theme). There are issues here too however, as certain puzzles seem to complete too early, without all of the steps actually being completed. Whether this was a bug or another design oversight isn’t exactly clear, but I found myself completing more than one puzzle (entering in safe or locker combinations, playing a Sudoku-inspired tile game, etc.) where I would finish three-fourths of the puzzle correctly, and it would suddenly move on as though I had finished entirely, even though some aspects were still incorrect.

When Weird Park: Broken Tune works correctly, you have a fairly relaxing journey into a nicely themed world and creepy story-line (no matter how shallow that story-line might be). When it’s at its worst though, you have a buggy experience that’s better left ignored until these issues can hopefully be resolved.

Reference accessed HERE. Originally posted by Brandy Shaul on Nov 9, 2011 , re-posted by Whiterabbit-uk 10th March 2019

Conclusion:

I bought Weird Park: Broken Tune almost 4 years ago via Steam as part of a bundle with the other two in the series (Weird Park: Scary Tales, Weird Park: The Final Show CE). I can't remember much about the game now (even after 16 hours of game play) apart from it being a little weird (hence 'Weird Park', lol). With a limited amount of game play under my belt last night and this morning, I'd still give this a thumbs up despite my usual aversion to HOG's. The game is colorful and has some reasonably easy to medium difficulty hidden object scenes/puzzles to solve. I did enjoy revisiting the game, so will be playing the first two in the series again via my Steam account soon.

Other Reviews and Videos of Weird Park: Broken Tune :

You can read other comments about Weird Park: Broken Tune HERE ( feedback based on the trilogy - see end of review for link to the bundled games.)

Also, you can see several in-game videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE & HERE and a written walk through HERE, HERE & HERE.

Suggestions:

After you've had an opportunity to play today's giveaway please take a few moments to give some positive or negative feedback; for example, what you liked or disliked about the game, or how it could be improved. If you don't like the genre at all, please explain why and if any, what improvements would change your mind? If you don't have time to post a comment today, please do so at your convenience, thank you. If you wish to post a review or comment about the game later, you can access the comments section by going to the game giveaways home page, then scroll to the bottom of the page where it says Archives and select the date the giveaway was live (giveaway days are in bold type). This will open the appropriate page for you to post your comment or review. Alternatively, you can google the name of the game and include Gamegiveawayoftheday in the search. This should give you a list of links to whenever this game was given away.

If you miss today's game giveaway you can always get the game via MyPlayCity HERE; or If you prefer to purchase the game you can get it HERE via Big Fish Games.

Problems getting the game to work:

If you're having problems installing or activating or getting Weird Park: Broken Tune to work please visit the FAQ's Thread HERE and read through the communities comments because sometimes fixes have already been posted, for example, a common issue seen since the Themida wrapper was introduced three years ago is that some community members installation of the game are blocked by their security because Themida code has been known to hide malware, (usually an error message is flagged for example 'The executable is corrupted' even though in reality it is not); so as a precaution some anti malware programs will block and even delete the suspect installation files even though the files (i.e. the setup, read me and setup.gcd files are actually totally free from malware. This issue can be solved either by rebooting your computer in safe mode with networking or a quicker method is to temporarily turn off your security software to allow the installation. You could also try white-listing the setup.gcd file. In the almost 12 years this game giveaway site has been operating there has 'never' been a game given away that was infected with malware.

If for any reason you want to contact the giveaway team, for example, you have a game to offer the community, or are unable to download the latest game or other issues that the FAQ's thread or these comments don't cover or solve you can do so HERE

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank MyPlayCity for giving away Weird Park: Broken Tune and also to the game giveaway team, as always, for securing other ways to get free games.

Useful Information not related to today's game giveaway:

If Weird Park: Broken Tune doesn't interest you, but you still hanker for something new to play, you'll find details of some game deals whether they be sale items, indie bundles or games being given away for free HERE (I've not updated the thread in a while, but most of the links still take you to the latest deals).

The rest of the information that used to be posted in the game review can be found in the forums HERE. Finally, check out Delenns threads for details of other free games and offers HERE and elsewhere in the game discussion forums HERE, (usually on the first page of the game discussion forums). The free game over at epic games is Slime Rancher a first person sandbox action adventure game with management elements and a female protagonist. It's free until March 27th. worth £14.99/$19.99/€19.99. Indie Gala also have a new showcase section with 18 free games listed at the moment including adventure, RPG, Simulation, strategy and casual games i.e. AntiSquad, Dreaming Sarah, False Birth, GOR - Gorilla Office Rampage, Home is where Chip is, Age of Fear: The Free World, Die Legende von Saya: Befehl aus der Dunkelheit - (The Legend of Saya: Command from the Dark), What Never Was, The Last Humans: Awakening, Childhood, Dunwell, Safe Not Safe, Hi Hotel, Bugs Must Die, Cuadradito y Circulito, Hellino, Hovership Havoc and Wake Up , or you can find them all HERE. Finally, there are some excellent bargains on sale via Steam HERE (71 pages with 25 per page).

If you are interested, you can pick up the Weird Park trilogy via Steam HERE. The bundle includes Weird Park: Broken Tune, Weird Park: Scary Tales, Weird Park: The Final Show Collector's Edition. Costs £14.99/$19.99/€ 19.99 when not on sale. If you are into HOG's it's definitely worth getting when its next on sale.