Winter 2010 Dualstream Day of Zeux Scoresheet:asgromo

Day Of Zeux 2010 Q1

 378/400 -- 30641 Celestial Altar (alien invaders, theme-light)
 352/400 -- 70273 Antares (alien invaders, theme-light)
 349/400 -- 60441 FORSAKEN DAYLIGHT (isolation, theme-light)
 315/400 -- 66482 THOSE ALLIEN INVADER! (alien invaders, theme-light)
 308/400 -- 34477 Duck Rescue (alien invaders, theme-light)
 281/400 -- 36306 Voluntary Solitude (isolation, theme-heavy)
 265/400 -- 47527 Abandoned (isolation, theme-heavy)
 259/400 -- 49781 Turncoat (alien invaders, theme-light)
 228/400 -- 13210 ALIENS ON AN ELEVATOR (alien invaders, theme-light)
 215/400 -- 18030 PRISON ESCAPE (isolation, theme-heavy)
 213/400 DQ 72164 [no title] (alien invaders, theme-light)
 201/400 DQ 62239 [no title] (alien invaders, theme-light)
 182/400 -- 79530 [no title] (isolation, theme-heavy)
 65/400  -- 11617 ISOLATION (isolation, theme-heavy)

11617 ISOLATION

isolation, theme-heavy

So here we've got a "puzzle platformer" involving same-ol' mechanics, a single apparently unbeatable enemy, and a single, apparently unbeatable level. No visuals or sounds. Pixel-precision, though! WOOOOOO

Theme: 10/100

The player is alone, and the game world is dark.

Gameplay: 20/90

Underdeveloped, unexplored, and what's there is fidgety.

Technique: 30/60

You get points for doing up the engine. You lose them for doing nothing else.

In the future, please allow the player to set their own controls. Do this first! It's easy!

Sending the player back to the beginning but not resetting the level entire is a funky little Z[ZT/eux]ism and it's difficult to argue in favor of it. With what little you had to submit, and working on ostensibly a puzzle game, I would in your position just reset the level entirely when the player gets touched or hits a cliff. Nobody wants to listen to the MegaZeux game over tune. Nobody wants to quit and press play again.

Unless there's a good reason for the player to jump multiple times when he holds down the jump button, don't let it happen. If there is a good reason, then change the delay between jumps accordingly. The player should never, ever, ever jump entirely by accident. They figured this one out in the 80s.

The post-fall jump never made any sense in Adlo, but crankgod did design an entire game around it. You designed one jump, the opening jump, around it and you never explained it was there. Bad! BAD

We have all kinds of nice features these days that make these tweaks simple to implement, but you went with infamously quirky pixel precision stuff instead.

Oh, and normalize the game speed plz.

Graphics: 5/70

Normalize the game speed plz! The few objects on screen are bouncing and gliding way too fast. What little is there isn't really clear or attractive, either. I like your funky robot animation, though.

Story: 0/50

Nothing turned in.

Sound: 0/30

No pity points because I'm personally sick of the gameover tune and I feel there was no good reason for it to play. No, I don't want to turn off the PC speaker sounds.

With all that vitriol out, I just want to thank you for turning something in. You've helped make this a successful Day of Zeux. But next time try making a game! I'd have probably doubled your score if you'd only included a second level and an iota of polish.

65/400

13210 ALIENS ON AN ELEVATOR

alien invaders, theme-light

Loads of title screens! Taitorian polishes and polishes but forgets the game. WOOOOO

Gameplay: 24/120

A three-dee hall maze with a map. You can walk around and after a little while Taitorian--I mean--the aliens--leave, and the game abruptly ends with a dedication and a nonchalantly grinning face.

Graphics: 72/90

A sprinkling of Taitorian's trademark finesse for animated whizzbang, just not as impressive as earlier showings. The bland and featureless three-dee maze is a disappointment.

Technique: 60/80

What's here is surprisingly tight. I'm docking points because there's not enough here, and gameplay appears to begin (according to the map) on some kind of buggy pseudo-wall tile, causing all kinds of confusion from the start.

Story: 28/50

I think the opening was entertaining and workable, but the arc from there needed work. Try less "ends abruptly before you see the aliens", more "see the aliens".

Sound: 20/40

Nice mods, nice sounds. Only the opening sounds like 1994 and the gameplay sounds like 87, and I'm betting you missed that entirely. The modem noise was cute, could be acceptable if toned down.

Theme: 14/20

Alien invaders, clearly. There are aliens and they are invading. There's a space elevator in the distant year of 2010 and a guy named Futureman who needs your help to save the day. Excellent work on exposition, but that's all we get.

I think you should work with a teammate next time.

228/400

18030 PRISON ESCAPE

isolation, theme-heavy

A doodle of a weird little adventure.

Theme: 85/100

I'm giving you a solid B for fleshing out an atmosphere. WOOOOO

Gameplay: 18/90

There's not really any game here. I was beginning to feel a dim zen appreciation for just walking around and doing things, but there aren't any real puzzles, just serendipitously orchestrated object contacts. Even so, if there were like twenty of these and enough scenario and environment to suit, it might have been enjoyable to do.

Graphics: 25/70

Nice touches, no meat. Study other games and try to do better with less effort. Map it on paper first to avoid doodling rooms for long. Your fans and drops and mice are fine, your swaths of dithered characters are looking mighty old-fashioned.

Technique: 44/60

I'm giving you better than half because your game is basically seamless. I also liked your smooth method of knowing I had an inventory item and what it was. You're bleeding points because your game could stand to have a title screen, your newspapers should react to a keypress instead of being arbitrarily timed (my brilliant idea involving no additional keys: scroll around the paper with the arrow keys, scroll off the paper to leave (yes, you can write this much filler text)), and the dynamite throw scene was mighty vague.

Story: 20/50

You put all your eggs in the scenario basket and I'm afraid you dropped your scenario basket all over the sidewalk of awkwardness. This game's story elements make it worse.

Where to begin!!! Why, at the ENDING, of course, noteworthy because you screwed it up so badly in such an unconventional way.

The problem with the ending is that for most people who know what they're doing in MegaZeux, your game took four minutes to finish, and the reasonable assumption to make is not that your game has absolutely no point or entertainment value at all, but that they missed something or they took a wrong turn. Now, I'm not saying you COULDN'T make a game with no point or entertainment value at all, I'm just saying that if you do, you're better off doing the ending correctly.

The game ends twice. First you get shot, which presumably means you died. Then you walk around very slowly until you realize you're not traveling back in time or in slow motion, but simply returning from the dead for a moment so you can stab a guy with a syringe for no reason. Then you die again. Now, there's no reason for the player to assume they can't die a third or a fourth time, or that your game isn't just bugging out due to an unlinked board or a poorly-designed gameplay mechanism when the player fades into oblivion. A simple "The End, This Game Sucks And Had No Pretentions To Profundity" would have sufficed.

What we got instead was a slap in the face. In the future, try not to do that, by accident or otherwise.

You put a bunch of newspapers all in one place to give us the plot, but I'd have preferred mystery if I knew the plot was about to end. Seriously! Guys, if there's no time to dress things up, just don't try to explain! It will be better without your yammering! I promise!

Also, that's it, no more prison escape openings ever. This Day of Zeux is the last goddamn time I'm solving an inconsequential puzzle in order to get my idiot smiley face who I have no reason to care about out of a room full of skeletons. Everyone who makes a prison escape game from this day forth will be banned twentyfold, and their utterly banned corpse draped with thirty-five banners arrayed in warn points and deposited 4,000 feet deep below the forum archives.

Sound: 23/30

I'm docking points for the Metal Gear Solid death yell, which signaled to me that, 1. the game is over but I get to continue from an earlier point, 2. that there is more to see, 3. that you have no tact. I got the last one right!

It would help if you spent about twice as many hours on your next Day of Zeux. You could almost certainly do something I'd want to say nice things about.

215/400

30641 Celestial Altar

alien invaders, theme-light

My favorite game of the Day of Zeux as well as my choice to win. Played it without a walkthrough and took about an hour and fifteen minutes. A fully-fledged work, not just an adventure gamebook as advertised, this is a video game that's serviceably balanced and entertaining for its extant elements, not its potential.

Gameplay: 94% 113/120

Natural and effortless. Lancer-X has played myriad visual novels and implemented his complete understanding of their mechanics and interfaces gracefully, in under a day, in software unsuited to the medium. He threw a simple turn-based battle system in as well, and it's tense and balanced and interlocks flawlessly with the rest of the game.

Graphics: 90% 81/90

Lancer-X is clearly not a practicing draftsman, but he has a critical eye and he knows how to make a pretty screen, and when that talent of his is combined with his mastery of MegaZeux's limited effects potential, we get work more visually impressive than anything else yet brought to the table. He did little time-consuming artwork for this game and it turned out better looking than any other entry.

Technique: 96% 77/80

Lancer-X had realistic goals, knew exactly what he was doing, and presented to us an exceptionally fun, exceptionally good-looking, 99% working game. I'm subtracting a few points for the increasing number of typographical errors as the game progressed and the existence of some fatal bug landmines here and there. I didn't run into them, though!

Story: 100% 50/50

250 pages of it, and more importantly it follows an arc, it fits the theme, it's semi-linear, it's unusual (by no means unique), and it captured my attention.

Sound: 96% 38/40

Nine tracks and twenty-four effects included. They sound good and they augment the mood.

Theme: 95% 19/20

The plot works in favor of the theme on the more than one level, in more than one way, and in more than one instance. This is just gravy.

Hey guys, this is what you should be attempting when you play the Day of Zeux: exactly what you're capable of and only that.

378/400

34477 Duck Rescue

alien invaders, theme-light

Gameplay: 80% 96/120

Jump, glide, shoot bad guys. The faster you shoot the weaker your shots. You walk to the right until the view stops scrolling and the game throws enemies at you, beat-em'-up style. The enemies are dumber than rocks, nearly as slow, and don't pack a punch. They fling themselves off cliffs and rise into the heavens. The game doesn't use many of them at once, and they tend to appear offscreen and spend their short lifespans right about there, hopping erratically.

Runs limp and lame as released on my Athlon 64 TK-57 1.9GHz cores. Playing with Lancer-X's upgrade makes the game doubly enjoyable and doubly short.

Graphics: 84% 76/90

Very pretty, but then, it's a resolution of 80x50. That's 4000 pixels, or in digital camera marketing parlance, .004 megapixels. Just want to stress this.

It's a big background, though, and LogiCow drew it with skill (not always care).

Technique: 72% 58/80

Slow, dog slow. An awkward sensation of continuous bullet-time is exacerbated by weirdly feeble enemy behavior and unnecessary particle effects, which are unattractively huge, repetitive and seem unsuited to the cartoon mood. I suppose they should be considered a demonstration of technique, but I've seen them before and I'm not impressed.

That said, once the game is upgraded everything plays much more naturally (the enemies are still feeble). If other people can improve your code after the fact, such that your game becomes enjoyable, you didn't do it right.

Your girlfriend disappears at the end! What the hell!

Story: 82% 41/50

Alien menace steals girlfriend, you kill the aliens and get the girlfriend back. Pretty swell stuff as executed. Next time, though, find a way to keep the girlfriend from abruptly disappearing as the game fades to black. Honestly, what is that?

Sound: 73% 29/40

One garish chiptune and two bleepy sound effects. There's no impact when something explodes, there's no difference between shots of visibly varying size and apparent strength.

Theme: 40% 8/20

Logicow doesn't need to work on theme because his games are so great anyways!!!!! WOOOOO

Did I excessively harp on the disappearing duck? Maybe if your game lasted more than a minute and a half or did more than three things I wouldn't be so bothered about one of them being screwed up. This was pretty weak, LogiCow. When do we get another Cheese's Adventure? Or another Fritz Blitz? Before the next Day of Zeux would be good!

308/400

36306 Voluntary Solitude

isolation, theme-heavy

The best stupid game of this Day of Zeux!

Theme: 91/100

Moody, angsty, lonely! Takes place entirely in a little house being rampaged by teeth monsters. On the campy side of perfect.

Gameplay: 50/90

Well, it's a touch things until you find stuff and then shoot stuff game. Finding stuff is pretty straightforward. The teeth monsters aren't much of a threat, but they get a nicely composed entrance. Still, it's barely a one-trick pony and on their second entrance the enemies appear offscreen and walk into walls, which seriously upsets the fear potential.

Graphics: 25/70

Barebones, cluttered. Average by 1995's standards. Please edit the glaring clashes out of your palette. The few features of your tiny, nonsensical setting should be crystal-clear. I'm looking at you, 2x1 crates(?), dim grey on dim brown submachine gun, single mysterious white health-giving object, and boxes of ammo with confusing little shells lying around.

I like the red outdoors and the teeth monsters, though.

Technique: 44/60

Not much programming to critique here, but the game runs seamlessly. For being so ugly it's surprisingly polished. More care should have been taken with the walls- either I can walk in front of them or I can't.

If your enemies are going to burst into the house and attack me, and if you're not going to figure out pathfinding, at least make them eat their way through the walls to get to me, so the scene is surprising instead of quaint.

On a better note, you have a mature grasp of making an item pickup a Clearly Good Thing.

Story: 41/50

We open with a spoken introduction darkly explaining the premise, which is apparently just I Am Legend/The Omega Man but with marauding teeth monsters instead of zombie illness. But are the marauding teeth monsters real, or just a figment of a madman's imagination? The latter!!!!!!!!!1

High score for steadfastly banging out a strongly cinematic rehasing of brainless, extremely hackneyed horror tropes.

Sound: 30/30

Nice stuff! Sound effects, musical tracks with purpose, and an effective and hilarious voice over. Full points because, for this, you deserve them.

281/400

47527 Abandoned

isolated theme-heavy

Awww, this looked so promising! And like way too much work for one guy, or maybe even three.

Theme: 69% 69/100

Isolation, isolated in a prison, more prison escape, whoopdeedoo Did NOBODY think of setting their game in a SPACE PRISON? Maybe, like suspended over the everpresent Earth, which is covered with people? Isn't that an obvious idea? How isolated could someone be inside a plain old prison? A prison that they IMMEDIATELY BEGIN TO ESCAPE. Come on!

Gameplay: 71% 64/90

It's an inventory adventure game. It's nothing new, and the one complete puzzle in here, escaping the cell, is pretty poorly contrived.

Graphics: 82% 57/70

Not bad! Not GREAT, but there's character and effort and juicy detail and animations. It's not every day you see big side-view rooms in MegaZeux, and this is very close to how they ought to be done.

Technique: 74% 44/60

The game opens with an introduction in text messages at the bottom of the screen, with a message above reading "press space to skip". But you can't! The spacebar doesn't do anything!

Everything else, that's here, seems to work just fine. There's text missing in places and frankly it was a bad idea to allow the player to APPLY, USE, EXAMINE and COMBINE objects if you hadn't planned up to a point where all three features were necessary. Can't you see it's three times as much work?

Story: 20% 10/50

Mysterious imprisonment, mysterious prison escape. Points for excellent use of a giant blood spill in a dark room.

Sound: 69% 21/30

The fire alarm sucks! The floor sound outside the cell sucks! Everything else was good, glad it was there.

Next time plan your work first, K?

265/400

49781 Turncoat

This traditional MegaZeux adventure had a lot of potential. Too bad about the bugs!

Gameplay: 78% 94/120

Three good weapons, three decent enemy types, three inconsistent gameplay boards, two puzzles.

These weapons are satisfying! There's a short-range lightning gun, a big old long-range cannon, and a spread firing thing. They feel different, they have different uses, and they're fun to shoot. Hooray!

The Guardbreeds have a little bit of personality but for the first thing you fight their difficulty is tuned a little high. They need to warn the player when they're about to charge.

There's a mech boss that targets apparently at random and fires after a delay, but the target isn't very visible. It could have been made substantially faster, preferably locked you into the field, and had a target we could see. You shorted your boss a sense of urgency, which is really the worst thing you could do to the poor guy.

The aliens themselves feel like generic "go 1 seek"ers. Yeah, they dance a little otherwise, but they're mostly a pain for their numbers. The bridge wanted to be much larger, with more entrances for the enemies, more enemy types, and more opportunities for a variety of tactics. It wouldn't have been especially time consuming to just reuse what you had for the sake of a more interesting finale.

You needed another board worth of adventure gameplay, or maybe a whole lot more to do at home before the real game started. You could have strongly developed the character or you could have extended the adventure. Either route would have taken this game from having potential to being an outstanding entry.

The two puzzles are identical and half-baked. Stronger choreography! Tell the player what's going on!

Graphics: 70% 63/90

Rather adorable and modest. Locations and objects have some character, just, not enough. Try coloring in your floors in the future to help quickly lose the "generic old MegaZeux game" look. Careful with your char reuse: I'm looking at you, jiggling fence corners.

Technique: 20% 16/80

This game is broke, broke, broke. The dialog engine is finicky with text spacing and doesn't lock the player. The lightning gun sometimes takes on the essence of walls and enemies. There are misplaced and missing lockplayers elsewhere. The game over screen doesn't necessarily trigger when you die. The game balance is waaay off--painfully and immediately difficult, with a trivial middle boss. The puzzles work, but you have to guess the second puzzle's combination manually, and the first one is extremely unclear about its existence and intent.

I enjoyed the spelling mistakes, personally.

Finally, there's a fatal bug that breaks the game in half. I had to play the adventure section in the editor.

Story: 80% 40/50

The story's about an alien invasion, with the player as an alien invader who betrays his race to fight on the side of the human beings and his dog. Sort of "Dances with Wolves", but a MegaZeux game, and no character development. The player sacrifices himself. I just couldn't feel anything about this. One problem is that the character was a featureless cliche, but there was also a simpler thing to fix. Look back at Duck Rescue, which in me elicited just a little bit of emotion by giving me a cage to break and a slow fade at the end. "I hope somebody feeds my dog"? Honestly, what is that? Next time just show us the dog and we'll be happy we finished the game. Please, use honey over vinegar until you're really damn familiar with vinegar. You get a decent score here because I'm thanking you for giving it a try, not so much because I enjoyed your storytelling.

Sound: 70% 28/40

The musical selection was appropriate but unremarkable. More and shorter tracks next time, with more contextual cues. Distinct tracks for battles, cutscenes, and exploration segments are always a big help. Same deal with sounds. Glad you included effects for firing and being hurt. The shuttle smashing into the ship was welcome as well. The puzzles and the enemies themselves definitely could have used sounds.

Theme: 90% 18/20

Alien invaders, theme-light, and properly indicated right there on the title screen. Can I give you bonus points for that?

I wrote so much because I liked this game and wanted it to, well, work. Next time make it work. Practice!

259/400

60441 FORSAKEN DAYLIGHT

isolation, theme-light

Maybe you dopes could have beat Maxim if you'd deliberately chosen a teammate known for being useful--somebody who could have tied up your loose ends--instead of deliberately giving the position to a Polish child with ADHD. I liked your game better, I liked your game a lot, but I don't think it deserves second place with or without the grace period penalty.

Gameplay: 92% 110/120

A fun dark POV shooter, and a fun first-person shooter. The former has flair, the latter is a new thing and surprisingly well-executed. But the boss fight at the end was quite awkward. It's not necessarily obvious when your partner appears, and it's not an interesting battlefield as far as tactics are concerned. I think it needed to be more than one screen in size. Left 4 Dead's survival games give the player a variety of tactical options (raised platforms, narrow halls, doors), and all we had here were holes full of ammo to hide in.

Graphics: 83% 75/90

Typical stuff, and not for the most part unattractive. A larger variety of tiles used in the first person shooter segments would have made them feel less like mazes and more like decent level maps, which upon careful inspection it can be seen they just about were. Asiekierka's contributions are out-of-place and unwelcome.

Technique: 89% 71/80

Your engine work is fine, fine stuff. But you missed details! Your control scheme suddenly changes for no reason and without indication. This should have been easy to catch and easy to fix. The game boards were properly linked together but there's no more polish than that. The message text runs in [ "" boxes and * "" captions, and it's readily apparent you could have whipped up and implemented better than that in a few minutes' time.

Story: 84% 42/50

For keeping your story going throughout the game and being relevant to the theme you're getting high points here. You'd have done better with an ending that didn't blow predictably and with better storytelling methods. (The * messages were especially problematic during the FPS segments.)

Sound: 82% 33/40

Your sound choices are good, even excellent, but you have bugs and annoyances. Much as I liked the shifting lines, Asiekierka's title screen was crap and you shouldn't have used it. Sorry Asiekierka! The music during the first person shooter segments cuts off inappropriately instead of looping.

Theme: 89% 18/20

You forgot to tell us which theme you picked independent of the scoresheet, which is a spectacularly weird way of doing it wrong, and this is actually important. It's clear that you were doing isolation, but that was the general scoresheet and you specified the specific scoresheet. How in the world do you screw THIS up, but not your raycaster or your level design?! Go back to kindergarten! Still, nice use of theme.

This game makes me SO ANGRY

349/400

62239 [no title]

isolation -> alien invaders, theme-light

Some sort of dungeon crawler with mouse controls that never got turned into a game.

Gameplay: 48% 58/120

Gesture magic! Neato! I might have enjoyed this game.

Graphics: 78% 70/90

Malwyn's chunky, funky style and fine eye, but there's not a lot of it to see. The dungeon as rendered is barebones.

Technique: 85% 68/80

What exists seems to work perfectly.

Story: 0% 0/50

Nothing turned in.

Sound: 5% 2/40

Nothing turned in.

Theme: 15% 3/20

Well, there are mean-looking critters.

Thanks, guys!

201/400

66482 THOSE ALIEN INVADER!

alien invaders, theme-light

Overrated Kenta Cho ****!

Theme: 75% 15/20

A couple paragraphs of flavor text and three spaceship graphics illustrate the theme just fine.

Gameplay: 81% 97/120

It's a solid bullet-hell shooter, but it's very short and the learning curve is way off. There's a hilariously difficult third and final boss, and the second boss is significantly easier than the first boss for anyone with any familiarity with this kind of game, because it moves slowly and often vertically and its shot density is so low.

Player firing slows the whole game down. I can't quite tell if this was a deliberate gameplay mechanism or not. I'd have preferred firing to slow the player down, rRootage-style, but I guess it's a matter of taste.

Shots can return south of the screen, which is awfully cheap! Seems more like an oversight than anything.

Graphics: 74% 67/90

Four ship graphics, a few different rotating bullet-types, a tiny player death animation. No other images or animations. Runs in a postage-stamp window with pixel precise movement.

Technique: 83% 66/80

Well, it's sort of good-looking, and it's unusual and more or less smooth, but there are serious drawbacks: It's slower than bridge-playing old ladies on a cold day and the enemy collision detection is ambiguous. The bounding box is centered inside the enemy and of some size or another, a problem the game doesn't inform you about even in goofy engrish. Colliding objects of differing colors change color, but it's just an ugly artifact and has no gameplay function. The borders of bullets that touch occasionally disappear, which rarely affects gameplay but looks pretty goofy.

Story: 86% 43/50

IT IS A BAD DAY... ... AND IT LOOKS LIKE 3IT JUST GOT WORSE?

THOSE ALIEN INVADER!

FORTUNATELY YOU SHIP CAN KILL EVIL ALIEN BUT YOU JUST WATCH OUT!

Sound: 73% 29/40

A decent piece of music for each boss. No sound effects, but probably not appropriate to the game anyway.

Ho hum! Have a decent grade.

315/400

70273 Antares

alien invader, theme-light

Maxim game, hot off the presses!

Gameplay: 88% 106/120

Ah, a beat-'em-up in MegaZeux. Our holy grail. Maxim did it in one day and it works! I didn't enjoy it much, but it works~! There are virtually no extras, but it works!!! It's perfectly playable, it's difficult by default but the curve is fair, it has multiple pickups and three stages, it's smooth as silk, and it works!!!!!!!

Graphics: 82% 74/90

Spare, vague, and weird, but consistent, clear, and not hideous. There's a studious implementation of animations and effects for the purpose of clearing up possible ambiguities or ugliness in gameplay. The look is functional and nothing distracts.

Technique: 92% 74/80

A little more flair would net a slightly higher score here, but it's a pure sprite game and everything just works. A few points off for an extremely short repeat rate on the spacebar in the main menu, meaning, in the worst case, that the game appears to suddenly restart from the ending scene.

Story: 83% 42/50

There's a skippable introduction with fine art slides and an anticlimactic ending with one fine art slide, and there's a game in between. I'm calling that a beginning, middle, and an end. CHA-CHING, next please.

Sound: 100% 40/40

The whole soundscape is Maxim's work, and apparently he did a lot of it during the 24 hours. It's complete, in that nearly all unique actions in and out of the gameplay are accompanied by unique and appropriate sound effects. It suits the minimalist visuals and actions and doesn't feature chiptunes or PC speaker-style noises. His work has matured and there's a good deal of it here. I'd be giving a very high score for the striking attention to detail even if I weren't keen on the style.

Theme: 84% 16/20

Alien martial artists invade a spaceship and kill everyone, so you beat the crap out of them! The bulk of the thematic work is in the introduction, but since you're clearly killing invading aliens in a spaceship, I won't complain too much.

I have to admit I don't like this as a game as much as I like it as an entry.

352/400

72165 [no title]

alien invaders, theme-light

Lordy, what was the big fancy idea here?

Gameplay: 45% 54/120

It's an action puzzle game. You match tiles in lines to cause certain effects on the enemy. Occasionally the game throws tiles randomly into the field. There's a bunch of dummy magic and abilities onscreen. Eventually the guy's health goes to zero. Victory is mine! Only, I didn't really care.

Technique: 72% 58/80

Everything works except the stuff that clearly doesn't do anything. There's no title screen, there's one gameplay board, it ends eventually, and it's not very fun. It was clearly going somewhere, it just didn't get there.

Graphics: 68% 61/90

Garish colors and character portraits made of zig-zagging lines. Although I kind of liked them! Everything else was fine, fine, fine.

Story: 0% 0/50

Nothing turned in.

Sound: 70% 28/40

There's a unique sound effect for each tile, which is fun, and a sound effect when tiles appear, which is good, and ridiculous music that eventually ends instead of looping.

Theme: 12% 2/20

Well, there's an enemy? Presumably invading?

I guess this could be something fun someday.

213/400

79530 ?

isolation, theme-heavy

More unplanned, unfinished crap.

Theme: 65% 65/100

Well, I like where you were going with having to figure out complicated stuff all alone.

Gameplay: 10% 9/90

Guess the word? Come on! It's not clear what's going on in your computer, either. Also, "reset" and "reboot" are in this context synonymous and your failure to think of both of them reflects the same failure in your players. All this failure makes for pretty awful adventure gameplay!

Graphics: 73% 51/70

It's dark and green, yeee haw. I like your cinematographic taste, but there's just not much to see.

Technique: 18% 11/60

A [press enter] appended to the first message would suffice, to keep us from punching keys and guessing, especially since spacebar is the traditional default.

The computer doesn't always register appropriate words on the first try. I'm not sure why.

Your game never indicates it's not going anywhere, which is confusing and annoying!

Story: 40% 20/50

Furries!

Also please save the sadomasochism for your friends and relatives.

Sound: 88% 26/30

Excellent choices, I guess!

Nothing to see here.

182/400