Gayo's judgement criteria

• GAMEPLAY: 30 pts.
  • Was the game actually a game? To what extent did it involve interaction, strategy, options? Was the gameplay included fun or monotonous?
  • 0: No interaction (pushing a button to advance text doesn't count!).
  • 10: There is interaction, but it's superficial and is either completely linear or has no major effect on outcome.
  • 20: There's an actual game here, and gameplay has a meaningful effect.
  • 30: You could make an entire game out of just the gameplay elements shown here, and it would be fun.
• PRESENTATION: 30 pts
  • Art and music can be ripped or original, so their quality doesn't contribute directly to the rating. However, the way all the aesthetic elements go together is important. Is there a sense of wholeness about the game? Are the graphics and sound put to good use?
  • 0: Aesthetic elements might as well have been chosen at random.
  • 10: Rushed or awkward presentation. Clashing graphics, missing sound, or extremely inappropriate choices.
  • 20: Pretty well done, but has some distracting problems -- elements might be overused or there might be a blandness to the presentation.
  • 30: Art and sound are professionally managed for maximum impact; presentation is compelling. Two thumbs up.
• DESIGN: 30 pts
  • Are there many bugs, and are the bugs that are present serious or cosmetic? Does the interface make playing easier or harder?
  • 0: The game doesn't work.
  • 10: The game is riddled with serious bugs, the interface is clumsy and non-intuitive, or both.
  • 20: There are no game-breaking bugs and the interface works fairly well, but either there are a number of minor bugs, the UI could stand to be friendlier, or both.
  • 30: The game has virtually no notable problems and the interface is tidy and functional, doing more than is necessary.
• PROPS: 10 pts
  • How much the game tickled my whimsy.

---

SUPER URGAN THE WHITE IN THE SUPER QUEST FOR COLOR

GAMEPLAY: 25

The reason this compo judgment is months late is because it took that long to beat this game. Although it only has one map, getting through SUtWitSQFC takes a surprisingly long time. The gameplay is simple, but well-done -- with a few nuances added, this premise could easily support a full-length game. A little more strategy would be nice, since right now the only way to survive against fast enemies is through luck and overwhelming force, but aside from the incessant dying it's pretty fun, and the idea of it is very neat. Although the game is mostly levelgrinding, increasing stats feels meaningful, and it's fun to throw around giant long-lasting patches of colour in the high levels. I liked the switching; it would have been nice to see the two-screen thing take a more central role. Something -- I assume it's the enemy pathing -- lags the game at points, meaning that your running can be kind of jerky. It's distracting, but on my computer at least it was a minor woe.

Oh, there was one big annoyance here: since some of your skills are used to bypass obstacles, it's very easy to get stuck in an enclosed space without a healing panel and with no skill points left to escape. I saved in one particularly large such space and had to edit the savefile to give myself enough SP to get out.

PRESENTATION: 18

Pretty repetitive. Most of the work obviously went into the actual game mechanics here, as there's only one song and a handful of tiles in the entire game. Also, the map design is really, really uninpsired -- it almost looks randomly generated. In a game based on colour, it would have been nice if this were a bit more colourful. However, what's in there works pretty well -- there's certainly nothing objectionable on display. The two-screen thing is very nifty and is done in a non-distracting way (though I do miss being able to maximize). The font is good, enemies are readily distinguishable, and the "chat box" that appears for dialogue and menus is just great. I also like the way the damage numbers fade away.

One last quibble: there's virtually no contrast or difference in texturing between tiles, so it's really hard to tell what the hell you're doing if you look at the black and white window exclusively. Not a problem since you can just watch the top window, though, so no marks off for that.

DESIGN: 24

Let me tell you something. In this game, you will die a lot. This is one of those games that tells you when you've crossed the invisible boundary between an area you're allowed to be in and one you aren't by killing you immediately. The number of times you will die playing this game is so huge that it has no meaning to the human mind, like the number of stars in the universe. Given all this, it would have been nice if you didn't get kicked out of the game every time you die. Buuuuut that's a minor issue. I just needed to vent.

Interface is very basic, but clean and functional. Except for lack of a load/continue option during the game and at game over, there weren't any glaring omissions. I really liked the way the system vitals switched back and forth to show which your main window was -- it was a simple, efficient way of solving the problem. The repeat rate on menu scrolling is way too high, so it's easy to "overshoot" the item you wanted by holding the arrow key a little too long. It was also really annoying how fast enemies slowed your walk into a lurch thanks to their extra movement. Also, citizens demand the ability to advance the text in scenes. That's about it, though.

There's really only one bug I encountered, and it's not a dealbreaker: you can call up the menu at any time (even while in the menu!). This can lead to some weird situations like multiple stacked menus that you have to cancel out of in turn, and save-games where you're already dead but don't realize it until you take a step. PROTIP: If you're feeling especially ridiculous you can use this method to continue forever as an undead abomination, taking one step at a time and then saving and resetting. Oh, and the tile-based movement got a little wonky now and then, but having struggled heroically with tile-based movement myself, I can empathize.

PROPS: 6

Props for team members yelling at Grue about late judging.

Props for the glowing red rabbit.

Props for not letting The Man stop them from having a tile-based game.

Props for actually using V3's multiple window feature.

Props for nice splash screen.

Props for multiple difficulty settings.

OVERALL: 73

---

<3

GAMEPLAY: 20

It's a very tidy engine they've got here. I had loads of fun just running around and beating on things. However, that's all there is to do -- if you actually follow the road that leads through the incredibly linear maps (which can easily be done without attacking once), the game runs out *really* fast without any resolution. As for the combat, it's entertaining, but very straightforward -- all the enemies act pretty much the same, growth is completely linear, and combat inevitably involves poking guys, backing up a step, and repeating until they die. Unless you make an effort to confront enemies, there's virtually no chance you'll get hurt. Also, the hit detection is annoyingly precise. With more enemy variety, a real world, and some kind of meaningful growth, though, this would make for a fun full game.

PRESENTATION: 22

Very simple, but not too badly done at all. Menus are attractive, font is nice, music's inoffensive. The maps in particular are nicely made. There may not be much to do in them, but they're well put together, and give the sense that the forest is actually a place. There's some nice asymmetry going on, and it doesn't feel random, which is the big pitfall in asymmetric maps. It all makes for a tight package in which no elementy seems too out of place. The downside is that the game's aesthetic elements are repeated heavily despite the its shortness. It was also a little annoying that both the life and magic potions were blue -- it took me a while to realize that the blur jars were refilling my health, since I assumed that life potions would be red to match the display.

A bit more of a title screen would have been nice, but eh, it suffices.

DESIGN: 22

Every early-release V3 game has certain bugs in its menu system relating to when the menu can be opened and what happens if you push buttons at unexpected times, and, being a V3 game, this one has those bugs. But they're so common that I'm not going to go into them specifically. Also, it kicks you out of the game when you die. I hate that. However, if you die in this it means you suck too hard to be playing video games in the first place, so it could be taken as a hint.

Menus are quite nice, and holding Enter speeds through text, which is a great feature. I was glad to see a configuration option, but they forgot to include configuration in the save file, so you have to reset it each time you reload. I really like that you get to enter your name, and the name entry menu is very nice and all, but the designers seem to be thinking inside the console box -- VERGE gamers have access to a keyboard, so why not let the user type the name? Oh well. The ability to speed the cursor up by holding Tab was spiffy, at least. Some kind of bounds checking on the name will be required, as you can currently enter a name that goes right out the message box and off the screen.

The overlay that shows your statistics is attractive and intuitive, and it's nice that you can get both a graphical and a numerical representation of your vitals. I wish the life bar weren't such a huge thing, though.

I bitch, but these are all trivial complaints. It plays well, the bugs are unimportant and the interface is smooth.

PROPS: 4

Props for team members yelling at Grue about late judging.

Props for evil wizard.

Props for incredibly gutsy "v0.1" designation.

Props for punching dogs to death.

OVERALL: 68

---

I'M SO SORRY (BOMBERMAN)

GAMEPLAY: 17

Wow, and I thought the other games flouted the compo theme. Okay, so, as you might guess from the title, this is Bomberman. The "love" aspect is added by having bombs explode in hearts instead of fire. Now, Bomberman is pretty good, and this pits you against other bomber...men, with enough AI not to completely slaughter themselves immediately, so that's swell too. There are powerups and a time limit. However! There are no "normal" enemies. Bombs do not trigger other bombs within their range, always one of the most important parts of Bomberman, and the AI gets annoying toward endgame. Characters can walk through each other, meaning that it's quite possible for two enemies to end up on the same space, and location is the only factor that varies AI between two enemies. This means that when two enemies end up on the same space, which is not unlikely as the map starts to clear, those two will act in perfect tandem for the rest of the match. Part of the problem is that all 3 enemies do their thinking at the exact same time, so the load is 3 times as high.

The biggest problem with the gameplay is that there's only one map, and when somebody wins (whether it's you or an enemy) it just resets or kicks you out, depending on whether the winner was you or an enemy. Now, obviously most of the work went into the engine here, but sometimes they're just sloppy -- if you die, you get the great pleasure of sitting and watching the enemies prance around on their own until one of them wins or the clock ticks down. There is something else you can do while dead, but I'll address it in the Design section.

Oh, one last infuriating thing. The "explosions" will kill you if you even brush against them, which is easy to do with V3-style movement. It would have been nice if they were a bit shy of a full tile in size.

PRESENTATION: 10

The "main" graphics come from Bomberman and look pretty nice. However, the enemies are all Sully characters, and they really clash with your space fetus. There is a title screen and something resembling an opening sequence, but it doesn't have anything do with the game. The heart explosions are also kind of visually misleading -- the hit zone is bigger than it appears and they don't have a strong sense of being "together." However, there isn't anything really terrible on display visually except the inexplicable picture of Diablo in the opening sequence. The music is pretty weak, though. The "main" theme is a sped-up version of Aurora, which I've come to think of as the "shit I need music here" song. The only other tune is the intro music, which also has a "grabbed randomly" sort of feel to it. Neither song really complements the game or the graphics.

DESIGN: 12

This is where the worst of it is. Of all the compo games, this one suffered the most from time limits. I'm sure it would have had a lot more content and a lot fewer snags if there had been a bit more time to work on it (say, the two months between the end of the compo and the judging).

But what's here is what's here. The game has a couple of major bugs. First of all, Bomberman reaches out from beyond the grave to exact his terrible explosive vengeance. When you die, you vanish, but you're still there -- you can no longer pick up powerups or get hurt, but you can wander around setting bombs until the match ends, though of course it's no longer possible for you to win since you're already dead. The other problem is related to the clash between tile-based and pixel-based design paradigms, that terrible conflict to which we have already lost so many good men. This game does not like being pixel-based. See, when Bomberman lays a bomb, it goes right "under" his current position, and he can move of it, but it is then an obstruction for him that cannot be passed. The trouble here is that although the 'man moves a pixel at a time, bombs are placed on the nearest tile. I'm sure you can see where this is going. It's possible to be 15 out of 16 pixels on tile A and have the bomb go on tile B instead, and even if you're only slightly misaligned from the tile on which the bomb appears, it'll often start out unpassable, so you can't move in the direction of the bomb even if you haven't moved an inch since placing it. Both of these problems are liable to kill you when they crop up, at which point you are freed from your corporeal form to run around leaving ghost bombs until the clock runs down. The game also crashed once for no clear reason, but I couldn't replicate that so it might be an anomaly.

There isn't much of an interface here: you run around and drop bombs. There are no menus in this version (though you CAN skip through the opening sequence by pressing enter, happily). However, a pause button is sorely missed. Also, it'd be nice if winning reset the game rather than punting you out, but at least you don't get punted on a loss.

PROPS: 3

Props for victoly.

Props for Bomberman.

Props for one-man team.

OVERALL: 42

Super Urgan the White in: The Super Quest for Color

Graphics: 13/15

The graphics were exactly what we expect from VERGE games. I really don't have much to say here,except that Urgan looked like what I'd expect an Urgan to look like, and the enemies were generically unidentifiable. All things considered, well done.

Sound: 11/15

I liked the tune. Go figure. No variety, but eh.

Design: 11/15

The split-screen thing was fun and different, you don't see that often at all. It's very gimmicky of course, but as a gimmick it worked pretty well in my book. The rpgishness with exp and level ups worked fairly well, but...

Gameplay: 12/15

You run into a lot of pain here depending on where you spend your level ups. I played twice, once just jacking range/time every level, and once with a more balanced spread. The play was very easy with the huge range, but frustratingly hard without it. The faster enemies can get right in your face and eat you for dinner if you aren't paying attention, and honestly it was sometimes hard to focus on both the top and bottom screen, at least when I was tired. You spend a lot of time waiting for enemies to move or for your charge value to go down so you can actually attack the thing eating your buttocks.

Intangibles -or- Arbitrary Capricious I Need 100 Points Category: 24/28

This game never actually made me angry or frustrated, and actually didn't crash once on me, though I did wind up a half step out of phase a couple times. All in all it did what it said it was going to do and amused me. The difficulty wasn't too high if you were an exploitive bastard with your leveling, poor Urgan is a thoroughly unlikable and thus believable hero, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah does anyone read this blah blah. All in all I find this game to be a much better piece of work for the time spent than the reviews are. Victory++!

2d6: 9/12

You rolled a 6 and 3.

TOTAL: 80/100

---

<3

Graphics: 14/15

This is pretty much the best I would have expected to see from a compo of this length. The enemies all looked different and had a little attacking animation, you actually swung your sword, it was spiffy.

Sound: 14/15

More than one tune, surpassing all else here. Neither tune grated on the nerves, which is a large bonus. The sound effects were kinda fun too. WHACk. dying noises. Things sounded like what they were supposed to, and the music didn't overpower it.

Design: 11/15

Fairly standard zelda-ish design. Unfortunately, the enemies were a little monotonous. They all were more or less the same thing, with only graphical/stat changes. Which means...

Gameplay: 9/15

...there was only one way to deal with the enemies reliably. Run forward, stab, duck back before it hits you. Not a problem early on, but the later stuff took forever to kill. Also, when the enemies ducked under the trees and the like, you couldn't see them, making it much harder to actually find and hit the things the dozen times or so required to kill them without getting mauled a bit. I suppose I could have just run past everything, but that's contrary to the spirit of things...

Intangibles -or- Arbitrary Capricious I Need 100 Points Category: 22/28

Very little crashing, which is a large plus. it DID go down once or twice, but that could have been the fault of my computer, because doing the exact same thing later resulted in no crash at all. Aside from the repetitiveness of the enemies, I really have no major complaints here. Extra time could probably work that out. Was nice to give us a healing spell, and useful.

2d6: 8/12

You rolled doubles! Do that twice more and you're going to jail.

TOTAL: 78/100

---

Bomberman

Graphics: 13/15

Sully sprites and bomberman. I can't decide if I should mark things up as yay for that or down for a lack of bomberman-standards, so I'll do neither. It didn't look too bad, really.

Sound: 11/15

Again, lifted from sully. I donno. It's a theme I guess. It's not a bad song, but not really what I'd expect for bomberman. Also, the victory cackle makes me want to punch my speakers.

Design: 13/15

BOMBERMAN!

Gameplay: 4/15

...is spinning in his grave.

Intangibles -or- Arbitrary Capricious I Need 100 Points Category: 17/28

I can't really take too much off for this because I've already reflected this in the gameplay category, but this was fantastically frustrating to play. The characters all move by tile, and place bombs by tile....except for yours. You move by pixel. So if you're not placing a bomb in a corner, it's frequenc to place them at a remove for yourself... often blocking your planned path of retreat, or getting you stuck entirely on the bomb, automatically losing. Managing to actually win was annoying. Which brings me to the crashing. You can go right to a new game if a computer wins, but it's out of the game for you if you win, or if all the blocks die. The AI is the same for all the enemies, so getting two of them on the same square basically eliminates an enemy from the game, since they will from there totally mimic each other. That said, it was a fun idea, and with more time probably could have been polished into something nice. You know, like the months in which it took McGrue to get people for the reviewing...

2d6: 11/12

That's a 5 and a 6, of course. What else could the dice be, except a guarantee that Grue will never ask me to review again?

TOTAL: 69/100

*cheer*
Congratulations


edit: Actually, looking at that, it looks quite sarcastic, but I can assure that I'm being being perfectly straight - it's nice to see that it's finally done.

Honestly, I thought that was supposed to be for Urgan's. I noticed that the faster enemies would slow you down if there were too many on the screen as they each took 4 moves to your 1. But I couldn't think of any better way to do that, and it didn't happen THAT often.

Quote:Originally posted by mcgrue

...but anyways, yeah, sorry. I'll finish the markup in the morning with links to the demos and the original post and stuff, but I'm really tired now. Night!

I just woke up. Cripes.

Edit: there, done. I should've done it while making the original post, but anything with a table in it needs to be done manually in the db. I was doing this way way early in the morning, so it slipped my mind.

w00t! results! thanks to the judges and thanks to grue!
<34evar

Hooray! Had we finished <3, maybe we would have got better marks... And crap, I hadn't considered the ability to use the keyboard in the naming screen. ;__;. The newest version at http://www.tomt64.com/heart.zip, which includes things such as wizards attacking with the fire spell!

Next Compo!

If this wasn't my son's wedding day, I'd knock your teeth out you anti-dentite bastard.

I remember I was totally incredulous when you first said you wanted to be a dentist. I was like, 'no one wants to be a dentist' and you were all 'no rly.' I win! Hahaha.