The 2013 In Review Contest [Reviews: 94]

[crowtongue]

BACK TO BASICS COLLECTION

I actually had great admiration for the idea of this, which was Chronoboy limiting himself to not using plotscripts to focus on game design. Great concept! The lesson in this I guess it that finishing any game, especially a lengthier story based one, is difficult no matter what tools you use.

There isn't a lot of game here, and what little there is, he mostly gets wrong. The graphics, while ripped from different sources, are serviceable enough, but the gameplay fails to capture what made these simpler retro games enjoyable. I went back and played Dragon Warrior about a year ago, and while it's not my cup of tea, I had an appreciation for the progression.

The combat in Dragon Warrior wasn't fantastic, but as you walked further on the world map, you leveled up, which gave you skills that helped cope with the new enemies you encountered. The skill progression I thought was quite well done. But there is none of that here. You get a sword that does barely any more damage then your fists, and then find out you could have just stuck with your fists anyways. I leveled up a few times and never gained any skills, but that didn't matter because there were barely any enemies.

There seems to be some villages with sidequests, and there are definitely some interactions that gave the villages personality, and there are a couple of secrets, but really I think these things should have been fleshed out after the basic game was done. Just my 2 cents. I would recommend not wasting your time here.

[Fenrir-Lunaris]

Unofficial 2013 Great Review Contest Random Game Chooser

I think I've just experienced an Inception moment here.

2013's game chooser is a fancy (and completely non-biased!) random selector for choosing which game to review. It's like one of those "pick a card" type deals, where the card is the game. Bright, colorful, it remembers your progress. While it isn't so much of a GAME, it's the sort of thing that I'd expect to see each year for the review contest. And then the 2013 game chooser picked the Terrible Contest Review game. So the review game chooses a review game of a game that reviews other games.

[Spoonweaver]

Project Caterpillar, I remember playing this a while back and it basically coming off as a throw away game. However, the review contest has deemed it worthy enough to not be placed into the discard pile, so I shall give it another shot.

The game starts off with some witty intros to characters that all look pretty similar. Then I walk around and talk to the various people to form my team. I talked the guy on the left first and it seems the game wasn't expecting that, because it says that he's left to take up the rear. Oh well, it was a bit amusing in any case. And that's what I'm getting from this so far, this is an amazing little game that may just entertain me for a short while.
Moving on we get to what I can only describe as a spoiler, though if you're at all in touch with pop culture you may have seen this coming.
I amused myself a bit by walking around in circles before collecting the apples. Walking around in caterpillar mode is half the fun of the game you see. Then came the combat, which is where the game really shines. ( if you can call it that) The combat is set up in a way that I feel if the player hasn't seen or heard of the movie this is roughly based on, they might not understand what to do. However, I figured it out pretty quick and was delighted to see the battle set up so well.
After that, the game ended. I'd say too bad, but I it's for the best.
4/10



What the heck is Timmy's Maze. I've never heard of this game before now, which is saying something considering how informed I try to stay about new ohr releases. It seems this one might just be an update though. Seems ol' Sparrowhawk has "updated some slime". Let's hope that's not literal. The game DOES starts off with some wit. I name the idiot Chubs and continue on.

Oh the generic graphics, the lazy tilemaps, the unanimated hero, it all taunts me so. The battles, a testament to the players ability to endure. The game describes itself as a maze game, however what you get is actually just a long winding hallway. In order for it to be a maze there would need to be dead ends, forks in the road, choices! Instead what you get is a long brick hallway of endless fights against the same group of guys.
While playing through the endless battles, I can't help but think of that scene in Bill in Ted's Bogus Journey where they go to hell. They escape their own personal hells to a massive hallway where their worst nightmares are chasing after them. I can only assume that Chubs is super afraid of these Bilopusi and that grin on his face as actually stuck there by terror. After what seems like hours and hours of playing (or perhaps just minutes of pressing f4), I final get to the end. A show down withe the boss. After him, I'm treated to an exist to this hell hole of a brick death trap. Finally, Chubs can see trees again. He can feel the grass under his unmoving feet and even chat with his friend Guy.
3/10

[Spoonweaver]

After playing those two gems, I have to contest the discarded games. I've actually played through a few of them and they have much more to offer than most of the "games" on this review list.
I can't even imagine why last year's game review chooser is up there aside from some sort of perverse biased. The worst part is, that's not even the worst offender up there.
I demand every game released or even updated last year not only be put on the official list but also be placed into gizzes review chooser. And that everyone redownloads the new one and deletes the old one.
Who's with me? Give me a "Here Here"!

[Meowskivich]

After playing those two gems, I have to contest the discarded games. I've actually played through a few of them and they have much more to offer than most of the "games" on this review list.
I can't even imagine why last year's game review chooser is up there aside from some sort of perverse biased. The worst part is, that's not even the worst offender up there.
I demand every game released or even updated last year not only be put on the official list but also be placed into gizzes review chooser. And that everyone redownloads the new one and deletes the old one.
Who's with me? Give me a "Here Here"!

"Here Here"!

[Gizmog]

Its good to be back.

[Gizmog]

Double post! This thread is SO active!

[Gizmog]

Spooky Times was up next. Here's all the stuff I already reviewed:

Spooky Times!
Scare Spree!
Alice Is Trapped!
C. Kane!
Ace of Swords!

[Gizmog]

THE FOLLOWING IS A REVIEW OF TIMMY'S MAZE

ALWAYS INCLUDE GAME.EXE IN YOUR GAMES. THERE'S A BUTTON ON THE MAIN MENU OF CUSTOM LABELLED "DISTRIBUTE GAME" WHICH WILL AUTOMATICALLY MAKE YOU A ZIP FILE WITH ALL THE NECESSARY FILES TO PLAY YOUR GAME. THIS GUARANTEES THAT NO MATTER WHEN A PERSON DOWNLOADS YOUR GAME, OR WHAT VERSION OF GAME.EXE THEY USE, THAT YOUR GAME WILL WORK FOR THEM THE WAY IT WAS INTENDED TO. I DON'T CARE THAT THIS WAS A TERRIBLE GAMES CONTEST GAME. IF YOU'RE GONNA UPLOAD, UPLOAD RIGHT.

There's always some dumbass or another who doesn't realize the point of the Terrible Games Contest is to make an amusingly terrible game and not to just punch the player in the balls. Congratulations Sparrowhawk, you were 2013's dumbass.

You can't escape from any of the battles (Without debug keys), they take a decent amount of time between attacks, and you can go about 1.5 battles without dying. That's nowhere near the kind of survivability you'd need to get to the end of the maze. With debug keys, there's at least a boss battle and an item or two scattered through the maze, and kind of an ending. Not that you'd ever see it without cheating, but it's nice that it's at least there for those who would cheat to see.

Kinda pointless to review a TGC game, doubly pointless one that was deliberately actual terrible rather than charming terrible. The red and orange of the maze hurts my eyes, Timmy looks like a jackass, you can name him for no obvious reason and the "jokes" (NAME YOUR IDIOT) fall completely flat. It's a terrible game, and if that was the goal of the contest, we'd have a winner.

[Gizmog]

THE FOLLOWING IS MY POSTS FROM THE WEEKLY GAME TALK OF MOTRYA, WHICH CONSTITUTES MY REVIEW OF MOTRYA:

I really looked up to this game when it came out and I still think it's really great. Every battle is a challenge unto itself, and if you die you get the chance to re-strategize and try again right off the bat, no reverting to a previous save or anything. Super quick, super slick.

The story is compelling, the characters have some personality, graphics were beautiful until very recently and all of those things do a good job of covering up the bad spots.

Even though I just said it was compelling, I think my main beef is with the story. I've never been a big fan of the whole... "Intro shows us something terrible going down, and then flashback to how we got there" kind of slime. The point is to instantly grab the audience's attention and then create a contrast that makes them wonder how Point A ever lead to Point B and it's effective, but it's too jarring for me. Why should I care about this redheaded jackass and his hoodlum friend playing grabass with each other when there's clearly bigger fish to fry? And then later on,when you do start to get to the big fish, to the high stakes it's like you've blown your load already, you can't take it as serious.

Like, imagine if Star Wars had opened with Luke barreling down the trench of the Death Star. Wedge can't do any good back there, he's out. Biggs hangs on for a little bit and gets blown up. Luke switches his targetting computer off and Princess Leia and that dope at the radar are wondering if he's alright. Zoom into Luke's face, and fade back to the sands of Tatooine, where the Jawas are about to unload two droids and a lifetime of adventure onto this dipshit moisture farmer.

That wouldn't have made it a bad movie and you'd still want to find out what happens, but it'd undermine some of the lower-stakes parts of the movie like Greedo or the Sand People. Why bother with them when we KNOW Luke's gonna be fighting this other thing later?

The intro they did go with, with the Tantive IV duking it out with a Star Destroyer over Tatooine and Darth Vader kicking the door in and laying the smack down establishes the greater threat and over-all conflict of the outside world, but is more directly connected to Luke's character and helps establish him as somewhat of a nobody in the bigger scheme of things until this slime lands on his front door.

Admittedly Star Wars is still frustrating as a narrative and isn't the perfect example, but I'd call "Farm kid runs into two droids who get him involved in a bigger galactic conflict" less of a stretch than "Kids school teacher tells him he's the chosen one, coincidentally the day before he graduates, coincidentally the same day that the enemy chooses to attack, etc.".

Kinda getting off-message here, and about to start spoiling slime so get out while you still can, but basically, the most emotional point of Chapter 1 is the death of Icebird's parents. We should feel really depressed at this point, it's a brutal departure from playing card games with Rodney and flirting with Claire and is setting the tone for the rest of the game.

However, thanks to the flash-forward we're expecting something to go wrong. Hell, we're WAITING for something to go wrong and trying to decide whether or not this was "it", whether or not we've caught up to the flash forward. And once we decide that we haven't, it's like "Okay, false alarm. slime is going to get WORSE than Dead Parents!", it undermines the emotional content of the scene.

I could be crazy, but looking back I feel like the emotional pacing is kind of off in general. You start with the boring final exam, then you get into a little bit of mystery about Murlor, then we get into the practical exam and robotic Holo-Forlats, then it's back to school-party antics, then there's a battle with a giant monster who's taken out two powerful mages... and then a bunch more battles against the rank and file, and two kind of Ultros-esque battles with the semi-comedy relief villain Exsoin.. her mom and dad just DIED, for christs sake, is she really gonna be caring about an enemy general who looks like a dude?

Would it have made more sense for the generic soldiers to have attacked at Yormus, and for the Stone Beast to have attacked and killed Icebird's parents at the cathedral at the very end of the chapter? Do there really need to be two battles with Exsoin in the first chapter (ARE there even two? Am I crazy?)

We talked about this a bit in IRC, and I hope I'm not stealing anyone's complaint, but a major problem with the pacing is Lyte Snap. It feels like something you're supposed to pay a lot of attention to, which means it feels like you need to talk to every NPC at every possibility to make sure you're not missing something, which means a lot of games of Lyte Snap in a row which can get tedious, especially if you're trying to win a particular card.

The NPCs have cool personalities, and it's fun to get that extra flavor from them but that just makes it an even more dangerous trap, something you don't want to miss out on.

Gonna quit talking while I still like the game and while JSH likes me.

CHAPTER TWO SPOILERS AHOY

I agree with James about the swamp. The tiles definitely need work. But more importantly, I agree with him that the challenge level is awesome there if you're in the right frame of mind, it's a battle for survival and an escape kind of situation you don't see very often in RPGs. It could possibly be frustrating though, if you didn't know you could come back to poke around, if you thought you needed to fight every battle and get every item to get out, etc.

The Toxic Scroll bug did make things way harder, and I think that's a problem with Chapter 2 in general: Almost all the battles expect you to use some form of poison. Early in the chapter, IE: The swamp it's just hard to succeed without it. Later on in the desert, and especially the temple there seem to be battles where poison is literally your only option and for me, at least, it turned those battles into a kind of waiting game rather than an intense conflict between two groups. The tank is another example of the kind of big-boss that's kind of an anti-climax when the game seems to want you to poison it and then stay alive for twenty minutes.

Story-wise I think Chapter 2 had better pacing than the first Chapter, though we possibly got a little too indulgent with some of the NPCs and jokes. There's some parts that are a little convenient, they just happened to be in the swamp where there was a lyte ghost, just happened to land in the town where someone had found a scroll, the goons just happened to leave medkits for them, just happened that Icebird was okay. I do like the party dynamic of Murlor and Dayang by themselves and I hope we'll get to explore that more.

I would imagine the temple is going to be very divisive. I think splitting up the party and facing the different challenges is cool and gives some good character development, but I can see how it might be bordering a little on tedium and where it's a lot of battles in a very short space without a whole lot of scenery or plot development to space it out.

I feel like we should've had some kind of external shot of the temple. The travelling montages do a decent job of establishing a sense of distance, but some kind of... "Here's the temple, we're getting off our mounts and taking a look around" might've helped place that scene a little better. Especially later on when they go to where Lashaundra's parents (conveniently) are it feels a little... disconnected somehow. Maybe an external shot would've been good there too. Not that I could've pulled it off.

Speaking of Lashaundra's parents, I loved drawing them. All the walkabouts were a lot of fun to design and then implement in the existing style. The maptiles were a lot harder and as people have noted, I didn't do as good a job on them. I'm sorry for that. I had kind of hoped people would violently object to my graphics and then I could finish the whole thing in pure spite mode. I wasn't expecting any kind of understanding and definitely not the comments we've gotten from outside the community. Newbie left a lot to live up to, I'm trying my best and I appreciate all the support, advice, praise and especially the complaints that I've received. Complaints I know what to do with.

And without turning it into too much of a jack-off fest, I really enjoy the music. The soundtrack dudes did a great job and I think having so many unique tracks helps to make scenes and battles stick out in your memory.

IN THE INTERESTS OF FAIR JOURNALISM, I MUST POINT OUT THAT I WAS INVOLVED WITH THE ART OF CHAPTER 2 AND slimed UP JSH'S MOJO. THAT IS ALL.

[Gizmog]

Probably my last one for the night:
NINJA NOAH'S NIGHTLY PLANET

Kind of cool, actually!

[Gizmog]

Oh slime, I lied.

Double Pumpin

[Sparoku]

What the heck is Timmy's Maze. I've never heard of this game before now, which is saying something considering how informed I try to stay about new ohr releases. It seems this one might just be an update though. Seems ol' Sparrowhawk has "updated some slime". Let's hope that's not literal. The game DOES starts off with some wit. I name the idiot Chubs and continue on.

Oh the generic graphics, the lazy tilemaps, the unanimated hero, it all taunts me so. The battles, a testament to the players ability to endure. The game describes itself as a maze game, however what you get is actually just a long winding hallway. In order for it to be a maze there would need to be dead ends, forks in the road, choices! Instead what you get is a long brick hallway of endless fights against the same group of guys.
While playing through the endless battles, I can't help but think of that scene in Bill in Ted's Bogus Journey where they go to hell. They escape their own personal hells to a massive hallway where their worst nightmares are chasing after them. I can only assume that Chubs is super afraid of these Bilopusi and that grin on his face as actually stuck there by terror. After what seems like hours and hours of playing (or perhaps just minutes of pressing f4), I final get to the end. A show down withe the boss. After him, I'm treated to an exist to this hell hole of a brick death trap. Finally, Chubs can see trees again. He can feel the grass under his unmoving feet and even chat with his friend Guy.
3/10

THE FOLLOWING IS A REVIEW OF TIMMY'S MAZE

ALWAYS INCLUDE GAME.EXE IN YOUR GAMES. THERE'S A BUTTON ON THE MAIN MENU OF CUSTOM LABELLED "DISTRIBUTE GAME" WHICH WILL AUTOMATICALLY MAKE YOU A ZIP FILE WITH ALL THE NECESSARY FILES TO PLAY YOUR GAME. THIS GUARANTEES THAT NO MATTER WHEN A PERSON DOWNLOADS YOUR GAME, OR WHAT VERSION OF GAME.EXE THEY USE, THAT YOUR GAME WILL WORK FOR THEM THE WAY IT WAS INTENDED TO. I DON'T CARE THAT THIS WAS A TERRIBLE GAMES CONTEST GAME. IF YOU'RE GONNA UPLOAD, UPLOAD RIGHT.

There's always some dumbass or another who doesn't realize the point of the Terrible Games Contest is to make an amusingly terrible game and not to just punch the player in the balls. Congratulations Sparrowhawk, you were 2013's dumbass.

You can't escape from any of the battles (Without debug keys), they take a decent amount of time between attacks, and you can go about 1.5 battles without dying. That's nowhere near the kind of survivability you'd need to get to the end of the maze. With debug keys, there's at least a boss battle and an item or two scattered through the maze, and kind of an ending. Not that you'd ever see it without cheating, but it's nice that it's at least there for those who would cheat to see.

Kinda pointless to review a TGC game, doubly pointless one that was deliberately actual terrible rather than charming terrible. The red and orange of the maze hurts my eyes, Timmy looks like a jackass, you can name him for no obvious reason and the "jokes" (NAME YOUR IDIOT) fall completely flat. It's a terrible game, and if that was the goal of the contest, we'd have a winner.

Thank you both. <3

[SDHawk]

After playing those two gems, I have to contest the discarded games. I've actually played through a few of them and they have much more to offer than most of the "games" on this review list.
I can't even imagine why last year's game review chooser is up there aside from some sort of perverse biased. The worst part is, that's not even the worst offender up there.
I demand every game released or even updated last year not only be put on the official list but also be placed into gizzes review chooser. And that everyone redownloads the new one and deletes the old one.
Who's with me? Give me a "Here Here"!

"Here Here"!

If a third reviewer agrees with this, and no one contests it by Tuesday, I'll merge the lists. Adjusting the review chooser is up to Giz. Reviewers can easily slip in the new games manually if they don't want to break their existing saves or if Giz doesn't want to update it.

Games that were updated before/during last year's contest or had trivial updates such as ouya/android platform support (that is to say, stuff that didn't even make it to the optional list) still won't be added unless you want to specifically propose them and reasons why they belong on the list. I'm sure you could argue Horse Game having its ending music changed is probably as significant of an update as whatever sparrowhawk did to Timmy's Maze, but I can't make that call when authors don't specify their changes. I keep that kind of criteria loose when there's doubt so stuff like Megaman Sprite Game can get its chance even though it was released outside of the OHR community in a different year. In particular I'm more generous about the update nature of older games because it's less likely for reviewers to have played it in recent memory and will thus be more likely have something new to say about it even if the changes weren't major.

Next year the optional list will likely start out empty and be populated by the reviewers themselves rather than trying to authoritatively determine what games have too little to talk about.

[Gizmog]

Sorry, I forgot we were supposed to spam this thread and doubled up. I'll try to spread a review across two posts later on to make up.

The Absolute

Time and Time Again