BFG Facebook wrote:

Happy Monday! It's time for another Sneak Peek at this weeks upcoming games! What game(s) are you playing this week?

PC/Mac:
Mystery of the Ancients: The Sealed and Forgotten CE
- Pictures have now been added!
Cadenza: Fame, Theft and Murder CE

iOS:
Ominous Objects: Lumina Camera CE
Haunted Legends: The Iron Mask CE

Android:
Off the Record: Liberty Stone CE 

February was not a good month for me.  I only finished 4 games - 3 CE's and 1 SE.

On the plus side, I didn't get any new games.  And I did play ART's Valentine Day event and there was an update for MC which involved finding puzzle pieces and then assembling the jig saw puzzles.

I hope I do better in March.  I have 6 pcc's to use, so I have to finish 6 games just to stay even.

Last night I was actually up til 12:30 working on a necklace.doing some samples sup for the store I work at.

BFG has finally released Gizmos: Interstellar Voyage!  

So I went back to last year's posts and found my very short review that I posted when it was released by GH and have posted it again now.

stusue on 30 September 2016 wrote:

I demoed the newest Gizmos game  -  Gizmos - Interstellar Voyage.  

OMG, I absolutely hated it!  

I tried to finish the first level but could only manage up to 1.13 before I just couldn't take any more.   The graphics are blinding!  You have a cartoon background then the grid is down in the bottom right of the screen.  It's see-through white, like fog.  And the + you get in the column and row of wherever your cursor is is like headlights through fog.  I simply couldn't take it anymore as I was getting a headache and was playing it while I was squinting.

I've loved all the earlier games and can't remember ever having had this problem before.

I hope all you Gizmos lovers don't have the same blinding problem as I had and love it as much as all the others!

Obviously, it's a game I'll neither be buying nor playing.


 

But it's only a soft release?  

Also, there seems to be a problem with playing it on Windows 10, although I didn't have any problems, and this is what GH posted about that:

GameHouse wrote:

Note: Some Windows 10 users have experienced issues with opening this game and the workaround is to change the screen resolution settings to 1024 x 786. Unfortunately, the developer has been unable to resolve this issue. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause. 

I've now demoed it again to see if anything's changed in the BFG release.  

Nope, it's exactly the same with the same annoying white column/row crosshair wherever your cursor is.  

However, when I played this time, after every square that I filled in I clicked outside the board and so wasn't blinded when I tried to work out my next move.  So it's playable if you don't mind all those extra clicks.

I also like the story and quite like the funky music.  There are also some jigsaws to play, which are quite easy, but they break up the constant grids.

There are also a lot of achievements and it's a looooooooooong game.  There are 10 Planets, each with 20 levels = 200 levels!  There are 27 achievements, one for completing each planet, but also some with different levels, eg. several achievements from 100 up to (I think) 1000 squares filled in with no misclicks, and several for how long you play, the last one for playing for over 100 hours - and each of these playing time achievements has a clock that continually counts the seconds.

The gameplay is one lot of numbers for one grid - ie. no different colours on the one grid or several grids for different colours - but, as you fill in squares, they turn into whatever colour they are.  At the end of a grid, whatever the picture is is colour blocked, ie. you may have several orange blotches which, once you've finished, turn into mountains.  And I like the cartoon pictures you get at the end which, if I remember correctly, are all related to space.

You can choose to have the rows filled in when they're finished or not - so you have a choice of difficulty.  I think you also have a choice of having the squares filled in in their colours, or to have it monochrome. 

You can get up to 3 'awards' (not stars) for each level - 1 is for time (gold, silver, bronze), 1 is for no hints, and 1 is for no mistakes.

So far (I've just started the third planet and each planet is 20 levels) I haven't had to guess a single square and, if I remember correctly, the difficulty progresses slowly.  But it's possible that each planet has a bigger grid.  I've just finished Planet 2 and the few grids I played at the end were 20x10 grids.  Planet 3 = 20x15 grids.  Planet 4 = 25x15 grids.  Maybe Planet 5 will be 25x20!  And there are a lot of planets to play - 10 in all!  What size grid is Planet 10 going to have?

The hints slowly increase as you play a grid, starting at 1.  There's a meter that slowly rises over the number that shows how many hints you have.  When you use a hint, you'll get however many you have at that time, eg. 4, and the counter resets.  However, you don't know where they go and you have to look around for them!  And that's hard when you're playing a 25x15 grid and have single squares everywhere!   When you click on the hints, some sort of white things appear all over the grid and then disappear, leaving your new filled-in squares somewhere on the board.

Recommendation:   Yes with a caveat

If you don't mind the blindingly white crosshair you get when you play, or you don't mind the extra clicks if you choose to click outside the grid to get rid of it while you're thinking about your next move, then I recommend the game.  It's fun with good gameplay, no guessing (as far as I've played), a good 'interstellar' story, good graphics and good music.  And, if anyone's interested, you have to double-click outside the grids if you're playing with touch but while you're filling in the grids it's only one touch (yay!).

  

I'm adding it to my list of games to get if I need an SE for an expiring PCC or if I need to fill a punch card.


ETA 1:   I've made the 2 following corrections:

1.   There are 10 Planets, hence there are 200 levels!
2.   The achievement for playing for the longest time = 100 hours, not 20 as I originally posted.

ETA 2:   I've made one correction (3) and one addition (4):

3.   All of Planet 3 = 20x15 grids.  Planet 4 = 25x15 grids.  Will Planet 5 = 25x20 grids?  Planet 10????
4.   The hints slowly increase as you play a grid, starting at 1.   
      When you use a hint, you'll get however many you have at that time, eg. 4, and the counter resets.
      However, you don't know where they go and you have to look around for them!
      And that's hard when you're playing a 25x15 grid and have single squares everywhere!
 

Last edited by stusue (March 4, 2017 7:30 pm)

the same!