You may be thinking of RealArcade or Real - they were always part of GameHouse. In fact the downloader is still the RealArcade downloader. It was tagged by my AV as a trojan last week but my initial report as a possible false positive came back clean immediately. I don't get that at all!

I cannot get a response from Alawar. I have emailed them twice. The first time I got a message that I would hear back in a day (never did). They have had a blank screen for their free game of the month for 2 months now.

Now this garbage of a "club" to play games is stupid. Since the new Montezuma game is available from BigFishGames, they are just cutting off their nose to spite their face! It's just gonna hurt them.

BTW - Alawar is making attempts to get business elsewhere. I just noticed that Opinion Outpost (surveys) will now allow you to "buy" an Alawar unlock code (supposed to be up to 250 games but I have not figured out what games are allowed) for 30 points. That's basically, $3. Not bad for just answering questions but I usually save up to 50 points and get a $5 Amazon e-card. :-)

I'm not happy with Alawar at the moment. They released the third in the Treasures of Montezuma match three games recently; which is one of my favorites of that genre. When I tried to purchase the game I discovered that the only waty to play it via Alawar was to go the subscription route. I emailed them and was told all their premium games are now on the scheme. I used to purchase all of my games from Alawar, but no longer. I ended up buying the game from big fish.

Personally I think this situation has arisen because of the massive price drop in arcade games over the last three years. Four to five years ago, virtually all arcade games cost $19.99. Since the recession hit many sites have droped their prices by two thirds of that price, which must have cut into the profits of many of the game distributors. I know of two big arcade distributors who no longer exist probably due to this; Reflexive (bought out by Amazon) and (forgot the name of the other, but it was bought up by Gamehouse), and now Impulse have combined with another big game distributor.

what a sneaky bunch of companies these are - thank you, WR, for educating us!

Basically this is a site not that disimilar to sites like MyPlayCity who pay the developers of these games a premium for allowing them to give the games away for free. The catch is you have to create an account that costs an unspecified amount. I didn't pursue the subscription further, but I suspect it's very similar to the one Alawar are trialing at the moment where you pay a weekly, monthly, three monthly or yearly subscription to be able to play any of their games as though they are full version games, The catch is, once your subscription runs out you can no longer play the games as full versions. You have to continue to pay subscriptions for as long as you want to play the games. Basically you never own a full version licence. Also to play the games you have to download their game manager, which is the mechanism that ensures you can't continue to play them once your subscription runs out because you have to sign in to your online account whenever you want to play any of the games. It's not possible to play these games without an online connection.

may be you need to register ?
http://www.puzzlegames4free.com/games/fish-tycoon.html
login or register to post comments | download Fish Tycoon get Page not found ?

Terri,

It's in addition to a pop-up blocker. It works for ads that are on a the site's page itself. They can be very distracting. I have both with Firefox and have had it for years.

Can you have that in addition to a Pop-Up blocker? If not, which one is better?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
http://adblockplus.org/en/

What is Adblock?

Adblock is an add-on for Firefox that blocks ads from being displayed. You're not even aware of them most of the time. Sometimes you see a little flag-like tab that says "block" when it's not sure but usually, the ads just don't appear.

I'll bet most sites don't like it but it's sure handy. I have a flashblock add-on, too but I recently disabled that because I kept adding to the "exception" list.

What is Adblock?

An attempt to download several games using Firefox (with Adblock running) only gave a page not found error. When I tried it on IE 9, I still got the page not found but I also got a download button. Trying that wants you to sign on (try for free).

UH-UH! This is not what I was wanting. I had to give it a try but nothing was downloaded and it ain't gonna be downloaded.

excellent detective work, chazzo, you smart cookie!

Sorry Dragonlair, while some of the games appear to be free to play online flash games, some of the downloads are either for Alawar or Big Fish games.

I haven't tried downloading any of these, but I guess they are time trials, so I cannot under any circumstances recommend this site.

:(

Oh yes, please do, Dragonlair - it's always fun to know about new gaming sites :)

Well, at least the website is clean:

http://www.urlvoid.com/scan/puzzlegames4free.com
http://vscan.urlvoid.com/analysis/76751c23a2a035a5e1a383f7ad74abf9/cHV6emxlZ2FtZXM0ZnJlZS1jb20=/

Test the games and tell us more, please.

When a website hides every information, every about, privacy and terms of use - I'm always cautious.
I think their "free" games are only demos - "free" to download - I couldn't see an evidence for warez. However, I did not download anything.

graylox

Hi Dragonlair, I don't know anything about this site, but SiteAdvisor (http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/puzzlegames4free.com) says it is safe. MyWot has not yet rated it.

I spot a game today and while researching it, I came across this site: http://www.puzzlegames4free.com/.

I don't know if it's a legitimate site, if there are problems, are the games, adware supported or anything else.

Does anybody know about them and can give any recommendations (positive or negative)?

Thanks!