I guess we don't have to worry about the limited number of games cycled through the Free Game of the Week program. Take a look at this Sandlot Information page.
NOT good from my point of view. ONLY "Social Games" and you have to contact them DIRECTLY if you have a problem with an existing game. This site is going away from what they say.
Drop dead date -- November 1, 2011
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
That's such a shame. The more distributors the better.
I know what you mean re' support. I purchased well over 800 games from Reflexive arcade over a period of about 3 to 4 years. I only changed distributors because I discovered and liked the Alawar registration method better. Anyway, when Amazon bought out Reflexive a few years back, they gave until July 2010 to ensure your games were installed and registered. After that date it wouldn't be possible. That's fine if you were able to copy the registration code and use it globally on any computer. The problem was, once you changed your operating system or upgraded your computer with a new cpu, motherboard or hard drive, the registration code no longer worked.
Thankfully after over a year of occassional searching I used what could only be described as an illegal registration code generator. Now I can re-register my games any time I want apart from a few that used a different coding method. What's annoying is that Amazon basically washed their hands of any responsibility once the deadline ended last year. Though I was later told they extended the support but I don't know for how long.
In the UK, if you purchase a company you are then held responsible for the promises that were made by the previous owners to previous clients; in this case unlimited registrations for the lifetime of the license holder. Though in reality that has never worked because they had a get out clause which involved liquidating your company and reforming under a different name.
This is what worries me about digital downloads as opposed to owning hard copied. Also DRM activation. Are any of these distributors safe? Refelxive should have created patches for all those who'd purchased licences, especially considering that most of the game purchased from them were before games started to become cheaper. That is I paid $19.99 for each game. That means I spent around $16 000 on those reflexive games over a three to fur year period. (I was too intent on trying to distract myself from the ever present pain once I'd discovered that games really helped with pain management to realize how much I was spending. Morphine tends to take away self control (well it did for me, lol))
Not neccesarily, Terri. Just make sure you keep track of the email address support@sandlot.games. If the email stops working, yell at Digital Chocolate!
If you have the series up to this point, you're fine (with the unlock codes). The series may continue but NOT as a downloadable game. They said they would use the characters in the new social game environment.
PlainVanilla
Member
So much for my hopes of picking up the rest of the Westward games free (legally). I thought I had the first three but it seems I only have 1 and 2 from Sandlot. Now would be a good time for someone else to step up and take over this opening with other games that don't require steam, install extra garbage or redirect your homepage, etc.
Michelle,
Aren't Gamehouse's free games "Ad-Supported"?
PlainVanilla
Member
Bigfish installs that obnoxious game manager that tries to hijack your web browser and wastes a lot of system resources doing nothing. There's a site that I'm a forum mod on that has a lot of classic games for different systems but most of them have a custom installer/front end and lately the owner has started putting up ESA protected games which is a good way to get the site shut down.
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
You can play Big Fish Games (BFG) without using the Client, just find where the game is installed to and create a shortcut from the 'drmactivator application', then re-name the shortcut. For example my 4 Elements drmactivator application is labelled 'lnflzpg' as opposed to 4 Elements (there's also an executable that is labelled 4 Elements, but if you use this one you'll also get the client opening and if you've transferred the whole game to another computer you will also need to re-register). You can copy any of your installed BFG games to any other computer and play them as a full version game without having to re-download them from BFG; you just have to create a shortcut from the drmactivtor application then rename the shortcut to the appropriate name of the game.
With respect to Sandlot Games and re-downloading purchased games once the site has closed, yes you still can. You can find information regarding this in the FAQ's section which you'll find via the link Dragonlair posted in the first post above. To re-download you'll need to contact support and give then proof that you purchased the games previously by supplying the order number and date of order which can be found at the top of the Email order confirmation just above the activation code that they send when you purchased the games; (I save all of my activation Emails to a specific folder). I'm sure even the free ones we've got will be re-downloadable because we received purchase codes, even though we paid $0 for them.
The free games section is still active. This weeks game is Eye for Design. I'm sure they will continue with the free games until this site loses the download section; (though don't quote me, lol) :)
What I was told by BigFish customer service several years ago is to set Windows Explorer to show hidden files. The 'real' executable is "game.exe". Remove the hidden tag from that file (you can now turn off the show hidden files option) and use it to create your shortcut - no game manager at the end.
There is now an option in the game manager to NOT pop-up when a game ends so many may not do this anymore. However, if you remove the weird named file (as I normally do to save disk space), The games manager does not recognize your game. It's there and works great - you just can't play it through the manager! For me - that's no problem. The only reason I use these "managers" is to manage my downloads. I play the games totally independent of the manager.
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
Actually the info I've posted above isn't quite right. It was quite some time since I transferred some games from one computer to another. Just tried it now and discovered that you can play the game from the executable that is named correctly. I presume the other weirdly named file is the activation module that allows me to continue playing the game without having to reactivate it. I'll have to try playing the game without the drmactivation module and see if it comes up as a demo. I'll post later with my results. With the drmactivation file it is definitely a full version even though I didn't reactivate when transferring to a new computer.
Sorry for my error :)
Thanks for your info dragonlair.
Delilah
Member
Thanks, Dragonlair, for the heads-up on this. Of course, I had to rush right over and make sure I had the install file and code for my beloved Pirate Island! (Still playing it... a lot... love those skeletons!) And I've now got the files and codes for a few of the others I'd like to get back if I lose them.
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
I just did a search for all my Sandlot games and got a few pages covering all of the games, so I've recopied all of the reg codes onto a word doc and redownloaded all of the games.
I have a spreadsheet called "software". It's got one worksheet for games. Another worksheet has the registration codes for ALL my games and other utilities that I can find. It is backed up with our important files routinely. The downloads themselves are backed up in quadruplicate - 3 CD/DVDs (Local, On-Site, and Off-Site) as well as an external hard drive just for backups. It's hard to image all 4 copies going bad at once!
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
I wish I had been so sensible at recording my registration codes. I do have back-ups of all of my downloadable games, but my activation codes are spread amongst five different external drives and held in various game folders. I've been trying to consolidate my games , but it's a long process. I'm intending to get a couple more large externals that I’ll move all of my games folders to but in a more sensible manner than previously, though until I've built my new gaming computer and my daughter’s birthday present (almost finished my daughters) the externals will have to wait. I anticipate the main gaming computer is going to cost a fair amount because I want at least two NVidia 580 GS 1.5GB RAM graphics cards with the ability to add another (I was really surprised some time ago to discover that you could link up to four graphics cards together now giving a possible *GB of Graphics RAM if you get the latest graphics cards with 2G of RAM each. The main reason for wanting at least 2 graphics cards is so that i can finally max out all of the settings in GTA IV and a couple more games, but also in preparation for the release of Battlefield 3 and next year’s release of ArmA III. I only need a graphics card and a monitor for my daughters computer, which I’ll be getting before her birthday which is near the end of this month.
Anyway, back to the point. Thankfully Sandlot are still updating the free game a week page. This weeks is called Pirate Island
Terri218
Member
I've been redownloading some of my games. Word Monaco came up again with a malware warning. I am using a different AV program than I was using last time so I am concerned about this NOT being a false positive. Does anyone remember what the outcome of the virus discussion was?
PlainVanilla
Member
Whiterabbit-uk, can't you log into your Sandlot account and view all your old games? I just looked at mine and it went back to Nov 2009.
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
Haha, good point, I never though of doing it that way. Thanks. Still it's given me the oppertunity to place all of my sandlot registration emails into the same folder. most were unopened becasue you always get the code at the end of the payment cycle.
Terri,
I remember hearing that and I think it did come out as a False Positive. I would report it. I remember Glyph being reported as a False Positive from Avira and then when I scrapped that and switched to Microsoft Security Essentials, it tagged it as a High Level security threat trojan the first scan. MSE also cleared it the next day when I reported it.
You must log in to post.
