by Lure on August 11, 2009
It’s finally ALMOST here — we’ve got just a week left until Big Sea Games is launched and all of the redesigns, awards, and new community features are going to be available to us. Recently, Big Fish Games posted a guide on how to prepare your account (scroll down to the heading “Get your Big Fish Games account ready to access Big Sea Games!”) when Big Sea Games goes live on August 18th.
Besides that, what are you doing to prepare?
For most of the awards, we’ll need to play the game after the awards have been implemented to earn them, but there are a few things I realized I could be doing in preparation before Big Sea Games is launched.
I decided to work on unlocking some courses in Fairway Solitaire. The “Beat the Baron” award requires you to “Finish The Baron with a score of par or better”. Since unlocking The Baron course requires you to unlock a few others (it’s the last course of the second installment of Fairway Solitaire), I made sure I had it unlocked so I’d be able to play for the award on launch day.
Big Fish Games also posted a list of awards that can be earned automatically on launch day if you’ve completed them prior to launch. They’re in Plunder, Unwell Mel, and Farm 52. They also detail a L.O.B.E. award you can prepare for by unlocking Mouse Untrap’s Hard Mode.
Check out the full list of Game Awards for reference and let us know what you’re doing to get yourself ready for the launch!
It’s only slightly obvious that I am a big fan of Big Fish Games (laugh). With that said, I’m also a total commitment-phobe. My interests vary from month to month and don’t like getting tied into subscriptions. So the Big Fish Game Club, while a pretty cool idea (get a game each month for only $6.99), is just too much for me and my fleeting interests.
Recently, Big Fish announced that all of their games are now $6.99 — that’s awesome, I thought, I can go grab a few old Pogo deluxe games I never purchased and I can take a look at the Azada series while I’m there. But at first glance it looked like I had to join the club and pay $6.99 monthly FOR A FULL YEAR to get only a game a month. I’ll admit it: at that point, I walked away. I looked at some other sites to see how much their downloads cost, but most of them were $19.99. Yuck.
Today, after a little research, I figured out a way to be able to get any game for $6.99, but not get locked into that 12-month subscription (which ultimately would cost you $83.88). Here’s how to do it:
- Visit the Big Fish Games Homepage and click on the red graphic on the left sidebar of the page that says “Gifting Services” (it looks like this graphic below).
- Click on “Start Gifting”.
- At this point, it’ll ask you to log in — if you’re already logged in, the site will automatically take you to the Choose your Gift Certificate page, so skip this step. If you don’t have an account, just create one and activate it. They won’t ask for your credit card number and it won’t cost you anything until you actually purchase a game. Plus, their online Game Community is a lot of fun and you can use your account for that too.
- Choose your Gift Certificate: for this, just choose the 1 game option — $6.99 — click on Give a Gift Certificate. (If you really want to buy five games, go ahead, but this tutorial is just geared toward buying one game for $6.99.)
- Now, Personalize your gift certificate: Fill out the form TO yourself and FROM yourself.
- For Billing and Shipping, fill out your information and select and enter your payment method. This is where you’re purchasing a single game for $6.99 (plus tax — mine was 42 cents) and not getting roped into a year of $6.99 monthly fees. Awesome.
- After you submit your order, you’ll receive an email with a coupon code for a game.
- Head back to the Big Fish Games Home Page, browse to the game you want to purchase, and click on the “Buy Now” button.
- On the Cart page, you can enter your coupon code in the box under “Have a coupon code?” It looks like this:
- Once you check out, you’ll be able to download your game.
So there you have it — no commitments and a game for $6.99 (plus applicable tax). If you’re looking for suggestions on games to play, check out my daily archive of new releases. (A new game every day!)
I personally LOVE the entire Mystery Case Files series and the Azada series:
And, for whatever reason, Hell’s Kitchen is the top selling game among people who found Big Fish Games through my site. I’ve never played it, but now that I know it’s a top seller among my visitors I may just have to pick it up… for just $6.99!
by Lure on September 15, 2008
Imagine my disappointment this morning when I went to do a Riddle and got the following:
It looks like a problem with the javascript to me, so I checked a few different games out on another account, another browser, and another computer running another version of Java. Other people have reported having the same issue — or something similar — so if you’re having problems playing the games today, you’re not alone. Here’s hoping things are fixed before my morning coffee runs out!
by Lure on August 4, 2008
Lure’s gotten into a rut. She’s been playing the same games every day for a few months and hasn’t re-visited games she used to play nor tried out a new game in a while. Help her out, give her a few suggestions by posting a comment:
Tell us about your favorite community game and why you love it so much.
(Here’s a direct link to the Community game list to refresh your memory, if needed.)
If you’re looking to download a game in the next day or so, try using STARSANDSTRIPES as a coupon code (for a game priced with the $19.99 option).
We recommend checking out Big Fish’s selection of Hidden Object Games. Because these are our favorite genre of downloadable games, we’re going to start writing reviews and including tips and hints on these games, so if you want a head start, try out a few of them this weekend!
Happy Fourth!
