View topic - (VOTING THREAD) 2013OHR RANDOM COLAB CONTEST (VOTING THREAD)

TEAM GIZICHIRO: "Gizichiro's Random Collab"

I know the story behind this one's conception, and it's really kind of sad that this happened, because there's enough in this demo to suggest that it ultimately might have developed in an interesting direction. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and we have to judge the piece that exists. Sadly, there's just not enough of anything there to warrant a higher score in my estimation; this isn't a condemnation of quality, it's just an "incomplete".

Score: 1/5

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TEAM CHARBISAC: "NPC Life"

The last scene is a little better than other reviewers seem to have given it credit for, but I have to admit, this is probably because that nice last scene is just so overshadowed by the intensity of what comes before it. Unfortunately, that's not a good intensity; the NPC's brazen fury is a joke that wears thin really quickly, causing you to just not care that much by the time the game decides to make a serious point at the end. The bottom line is that the audience's reaction was misjudged, misconceived, and mismanaged. A risky entry, and one that ultimately didn't pay off. ((ADDENDUM: Even though I'm prone to the use of some foul muhfukkin' language both in art and in real life, it was definitely overdone here. It's not the usage of profanity that I'm opposed to, obviously, it's that it was used in an amateurish way.))

Score: 2/5

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TEAM BMEOWR: "The Dungeons of Koh-Lab'B"

I appreciate a good dungeon-crawl, but I've never been a fan of the randomly generated dungeon genre. I'm much more an adherent of the "Castlevania" school of design where elements are deliberately placed to make the best challenge possible. It may "limit replay value", but if it's a more interesting experience, what of it? In any case, I tried not to let that bias color my experience with this game, but it was unfortunately unavoidable because most of the problems with this stem directly from the random dungeon generation code. It's understandable that there would be bugs present in any game made in a week's time (hell, I still haven't debugged all of Dungeonmen), but it's particularly problematic when there are bugs in the primary core of the gameplay. As a result, the broken walls and sealed off staircases just made the experience kind of broken as a game. What points are given here are given for sheer hubris, evident effort, and a nice graphical presentation.

Score: 3/5

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TEAM SLEEPZUMA: "Undeadliest"

I may be a bit biased in this review, simply because I'm such a fan of Shizuma's work, but I'll try to be objective. Visually speaking, the game is quick good, as expected, and there are few complaints to be made there. The gameplay is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I appreciate that the battle system strives to be something more than a "holding down the space bar" competition, with its use of ammunition, different spreads, and randomly generated headshot chances. (I was thinking how cool it would be if the zombies slowly got closer and closer on each of their turns, only to one-shot you if they got close enough; I think that would be pretty tense, and doable in the OHR with transmogrifying/spawning. But I digress...) The problem is that there were some design choices made which really undermined this planned system, namely the massive over-availability of ammunition and supplies. I got the sense the challenge was supposed to be in resource management, but I never had to manage resources; I always had a huge surplus of what I needed. Still, this is a game that, like NPC Life, took some risks, and for the most part, those risks paid off. Those that didn't would need to be improved upon considerably before this became a longer game, but as it stands, it never really wears thin during its 10 minute playtime.

Score: 4/5

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TEAM SDK/MASTERKAWK: "Time and Time Again"

This game plays to me like a more somber take on the recent "Half-Minute Hero", which I really enjoy. Instead of trying to go expansive, the developers decided on a simple straightforward challenge and went as deep into it as was possible during the development window. The result works out quite nicely. It's not just that the scripting is nice, which it is, or that the visuals are pretty evocative, which they are; it's that nearly everything in this game feels purposeful and interconnected. The amount of detail is high, but there's nothing that feels purely arbitrary or incidental (like in, say, "Legacy"), which is a strong achievement in my opinion. A sense of actual village life is replicated, but in a way that is totally endemic to the game's rules, rather than simply window dressing. It's hard to quantify exactly why I like this one so much, but let's just say, in the end, it was a memorable experience and exactly the sort of thing I like to see come out of a contest like this.

Score: 5/5

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