Abandoned Well was previously given away twice before, the first time early January 2007 where it received a positive 91% of 97 votes with 25 comments; (the game giveaway was relatively new having only been in existence for about a month) and the second time it was given away in Feb 2008 it received exactly half of 358 votes with 56 comments. You can read the comments by following the links below:
http://game.giveawayoftheday.com/abandoned-well/#comments
Introduction:
After the interplanetary nuclear war, many planets laid in ruins polluted with nuclear waste. In state of total energetic crisis, people found a way to use the waste as fuel to their space ships.
Countless space ships wandered from planet to planet searching for fuel. According to a legend, there was a tremendous resource of nuclear fuel in the interior of a planet. This place was named Abandoned Well.
In search of Abandoned Well, your space ship landed on one of a suburban planet. The onboard sensors detected large beds of nuclear waste on a continent of the planet.
Your task is to consume nuclear fuel from all dungeons. Be careful, monsters-mutants are guarding the waste and can damage the pipeline. Protect the pipeline from monsters by studying mutants' habits, swallowing or avoiding them. Process mining until the whole continent is cleared from the waste be the first in the Abandoned Well.
Reference: http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/Abandoned_Well_4519_p/ accessed 13th Dec
The game:
You can adjust your video settings via the options menu; there’s a color depth button where you can toggle between true color and high color video modes as well as enable or disable shadows, explosions and other effects by toggling the special effects button. As mentioned in the game features above there are several creatures that you have to either avoid damaging your pipeline while you are mining, or devour to gain points. Each creature which I’ve listed below (all have pseudo binomial Latin names) also have their own attributes and points worth. You can see what each creature looks like by checking out the info section found in the main menu. Which is also accessible in game by using the Esc key to pause the game: The following five creatures can be found in each mine.
Lycos emeraldis, an aggressive creature that moves at a medium speed and is worth 5 points
Hexafus calligatus, and aggressive and fast moving species that are worth 10points
Fyxis flana an aggressive and very fast moving species which is worth 15 points if consumed.
Acina viperis is a slow moving and non-aggressive species which is toxic, so don’t try to eat them. :lol:
Acinia vulgaris is a slow non-aggressive species that is worth 100 points when consumed
There are also several power ups that include extra lives, extra time, speed up, creature slow down, one that kills all the monsters that are visible and another that changes all monsters into harmless creatures You can use either a keyboard or game pad controller to move your pipeline through the maze. To return the pipe head to the start, press your space bar; otherwise if a creature touches the pipeline it will damage it and you have to start again with a loss of points. play the game, though if you don’t have a controller installed it will be grayed out. There are five zones to play through. You can see what these look like by clicking on the demo button, which is found in the main menu. Default keyboard keys are the arrow/cursor keys for movement up, down left and right and the space bar is for a quick backtrack. Finally there are three levels of difficulty; so all in all you have 120 levels to play through. On the harder settings creatures increase in numbers and move faster. The only problem I found with the game was that the movement of the pipe head moved to fast, so to ensure you turned in the correct direction throught the maze I had to depress two keys, one for the actual direction the pipeline was moving in and another that was the way I wanted the pipeline to turn into. You’ll see what I mean when you try the game. Though I’m sure as your skill increases, the above problem will probably melt away. :lol:
Main game features:
• 5 different climates
• 40 levels
• 5 different insects-mutants
• 8 types of bonus devices
• joystick and game pad support
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System Requirements:
• Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP
• Processor Pentium II 300 or higher
• DirectX 3.0 or higher
• Video card with 4 Mb video memory
• Memory 32 Mb RAM
• 15 Mb free disk space
Images:
All on one page:
http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/Abandoned%20Well/?albumview=grid
As a Slideshow:
http://s109.photobucket.com/albums/n61/Whiterabbit_01/gaotd/Abandoned%20Well/?albumview=slideshow
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Conclusion:
I found this game quite challenging at first, especially when trying to remember which creatures were worth eating. It’s a lot harder to play on the hard setting, so I would suggest that you start with it set to easy. The graphics are excellent and game play though not inspiring its okay in small doses. The power ups and different creatures made the game worth playing. In my opinion, this game is ideal for those ‘in between moments’. I personally couldn’t play it for more than about 10 minutes at a time though I’d still give it 6 out of 10 for family fun.
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More info:
You can get Oilswell the old DOS version of this game for free from the following link. It’s basically the same game with very retro 8 bit graphics. It comes as an iso image which means you will have to burn it onto a CD if you want to play it. Just click on the file and it will open up your default burning software. Insert a CD into your reader and start the burning process. Don’t waste a DVD on this as it’s less than 1Mb in size.
http://retrograde.trustno1.org/sierra.htm
Also there’s an online version of the game called Diamond Well:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/gamegarage/diamond-well
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Thank you very much Realore and the game giveaway team for another decent game. :)