Summer 2007 DsDoZ Judging Sheet:Luke Drelick
DOZ Reviews
Team 18385: Last Generation
Topic: Genetics
THEME: 100/100
The storyline of Last Generation mainly revolves around genetic experiments done to the main characters, and goes into excruciating detail about the topic in its cutscenes. The theme doesn’t hit you right away (only after a few battles), but effort was definitely made to follow it.
GAMEPLAY: 50/90
A strategy RPG in MegaZeux? This has gotta be a first! Cool on concept, I love SRPGs... and the game plays very much like a typical SRPG... you have your characters and enemy characters taking turns, with a blue transparent overlay showing where you can and can't move. Unfortunately, the game is really limited in its options. You can only attack or use some spells, which for the most part, are worthless. The range of movement on your characters is lacking (especially for Adina, who has the shortest range of all), so it takes a while to traverse the map, this is even worse because some of the maps have tight passages that you need to squeeze through. But the biggest offender in the game is the enemy AI... Enemies are dumb as a brick, and usually just move in a random pattern, not taking pot shots at characters who are clearly in position. This makes the game a total cakewalk, as opposed to a console SRPG, where enemies are brutally cunning and will be on a party member like flies on shit.
GRAPHICS: 65/70
Alright, this game looks really nice. The characters are all 2x2, featuring clean designs with easily-discernable characteristics. The color palette is balanced, using lots of cool, earthy tones, and the subtle battle animations are top-notch.
TECHNIQUE: 45/60
The overall engine is very tight, well-programmed, and features few bugs (transitioning to the side-view battle screen in the city environments and then going back to the overhead map will mess up the graphics on a few of the tiles, but that's about it), but the dumb-as-dogpoop enemy AI becomes problematic, as it massively lowers the challenge in the game. 2x2 characters are used, and the transparent overlay that shows movement ranges show that the team put a lot of work into subtle details. I really wish the team one day fleshes this out into a full-fledged game... adding more combat options and better AI, and maybe a bit more polish (like an "enemy death" animation)… MZX sorely needs a game in this genre.
STORY: 45/50
The storyline is told via dialogue-driven cutscenes, your reward for completing a battle. The story deals with a band of humans genetically experimented on, and their escape from the corp. who did the experimentation. It’s extremely detailed and very sophisticated for a game of this length, and has enough twists and turns to keep you occupied.
SOUND: 25/30
The soundtrack is solid, containing some well-composed original tunes. The battle music has a slight buttrock feel, with its synthesized electric guitars, and the story-driven sequences feature a subtle ambient piece that conveys a haunting mood. The music is definitely in line with your typical RPG/SRPG. My main complaint is the lack of sound effects, which I feel could've added more to the experience.
Team 23217: A Nervous Stroll
Topic: Genetics
THEME: 50/100
At first, I had no idea what was going on, the game just kinda put me in some dude’s house and hinted where to pick up ammo… but when I got outside and saw all these strange creatures revolving around, I could tell that it would have something to do with genetic mutation. Luckily, you learn a bit more about the story and that confirms that it is in fact a genetic screwup that’s causing everything.
GAMEPLAY: 15/90
This game was really annoying to play for me. It was set up like a typical overhead action game, but instead of your traditional bullet-firing system, everything is done on a line-of-sight, which threw me off guard. I couldn't tell if I was damaging the enemies or not. There are an overwhelming amount of monsters, who rush at you like blacks on fried chicken. This makes trekking through the spartan environments even more dull. The game is reasonably long, and you traverse through a variety of environments.
GRAPHICS: 15/70
I don't even know what a lot of these monsters are supposed to be... are they slimes, or are they rabbits? Most of the game is made up of solids/normals/fakes in a garishly bright color palette, although I gotta give credit for the nice-looking car graphics.
TECHNIQUE: 20/60
Nothing really showcasing any kind of programming expertise, aside from the line-of-sight gun firing... which I didn't like to begin with!
STORY: 12/50
Not really that much here... you start off, descending the stairs, getting a gun and some ammo, then leave to find a bunch of mutant rabbits or something terrorizing your quaint suburban neighborhood. You eventually make your way to a building where you learn that some research has gone terribly wrong, unfortunately this isn't really elaborated on or anything. What's there is extremely spartan.
SOUND: 3/30
Okay, this is where stuff gets weird. The outdoors stages feature an ambient track, birds chirping, wind blowing. Nothing that interesting, but slightly atmospheric. But then you go into Wal Mart and hear a loop of "Age Of Aquarius" (a pop song from the 60's I think?) that repeats after 3 seconds, that's all there is to the music, I can't rate this high at all.
Team 2628: Oops!
Topic: Sentient AI
THEME: 15/20
When you run into Dr. Polish-Last-Name-That-I-Forgot, he explains on how back in the day, a robot was created that had the ability to think on his own… and then the robot begat another robot, who was even more capable… and so on, until the robots took over in a Terminator-esque war against the humans. Too bad most of this is implied, and not shown. So you are sent back in time (heh, more Terminator-esque things) to try and stop this… Yeah, I think the story fits the topic at hand well enough.
GAMEPLAY: 65/120
It’s a one-character side scroller… not one of my favorite genres in MZX, I feel that having a 1 block character makes movement imprecise, and aligning with jumps tricky (especially with some of these games, that make 1 block platforms that you need to jump on). The enemies like to bump you off the edges, making things annoying, and level design consists of lots of tricky jumps to make, but nothing terribly creative. You get some slight upgrades, which break up the monotony of things, one of them, a double-jump, could’ve made stuff more interesting, but it was frustrating to use and seemed very trial-and-error based. Another thing to note, is the liberal placement of “continue” points, which helps ease the frustration a bit.
GRAPHICS: 50/90
The graphics won’t be winning awards, but they get the job done and aren’t too distracting. Platforms feature some nice textures, and the occasional character edits are well-drawn (such as the fans). The enemies and characters are all standard smileys.
TECHNIQUE: 40/80
Well, here I’ll admit my biases for the one character side scroller, since I feel it doesn’t offer the precision I need in a game. The actual side scrolling engine is competent, and no better or worse than other games in this genre. Where the programming technique fails is with the double-jump item… a lot of times I felt like I was relying on blind luck to trigger this item, and the location of some of the platforms in the game mean you need to line up your double-jump perfectly. Some bugs are also present, like a message badgering me, saying “YOU CAN’T SHOOT UNDERWATER!”, when water is nowhere in sight. A nice little touch that scores some points is, when you land in water, you see a subtle “splash” effect.
STORY: 30/50
The story isn’t bad for a game of this length, but the game seems to end just as the story is about to get good. It involves a time travel plot against an evil doctor, the creator of the first robot, told in simple dialogue exchanges.
SOUND: 35/40
I really dug the music in this game. The music that plays during the story scenes nice mellow feel to it, with a nice "bell" sounding sample, and the actual game features a jazzy riff. I found myself bobbing my head to the beats. The boss music gets slightly more upbeat, with its electric guitar and a synth straight out of Mega Man 1.
Team 2716: No Name
Topic: Sentient AI
THEME: 1/20
Well, first off, the game doesn’t even spell “sentient” correctly! And then what happens… you fall in a hole, and hear some nonsensical dialogue about zombies and robots… Hmm, it mentions robots, those are sentient AI’s… I think… Can’t say it even tries to follow the theme.
GAMEPLAY: 40/120
What’s presented here is an overhead view, resembling classic MZX titles like Caverns of Zeux. That got me a bit excited, nothing I love more than MZX overhead action-adventures. Your gun fires extremely rapidly, and there’s unlimited ammo. But, aside from a few enemies, there isn’t all that much to the game. A couple of boards long, then it just loops.
GRAPHICS: 15/90
The cavern exudes a strange, minty color, characters are 1x1, and the world is filled with lots of empty space. What’s there isn’t hideous, I guess, though I question the color choice and lack of detail.
TECHNIQUE: 50/80
The rapid-firing gun made combat look like it was gonna be fun, but having all of 3 enemies to fight against made
STORY: 5/50
You fall in a hole, fight some enemies, see a short cinema that makes no sense, and the game resets.
SOUND: 15/40
Light and airy, none of the samples have any kind of punch and the music seems like an afterthought. Entirely forgettable.
Team 27347: Skwirl stars in... The Game That Skwirl Stars In
Topic: Genetics
THEME: 90/100
A genetic experiment leads to unfortunate consequences in an underground city, and you are sent in to investigate… learn the mysteries of this experiment as you play, and most of the monsters you do battle against look mutated in some way or another… The story and monster encounters play upon this theme very well.
GAMEPLAY: 5/90
This game was a total chore for me to play through. Yup, another 1-char sidescroller, but what makes this different and almost unbearable for me, was the extremely awkward control setup. Pressing CTRL/ALT to respectively shoot and jump is something very appreciated, but then you have to hold X to aim diagonally down (something I could never get to work), and then hold ALT (the jump button) while on a rope, which doesn’t seem logical to me at all! There is no recovery time whatsoever when you are hit, and enemies like to gang up on you, so you’re made into mincemeat really quickly. Not to mention, enemies have a lot of HP each, and the game is overloaded with them, so it takes a long time to make any progress. Oh yeah, and once you’re gone, you have to start back at the beginning of the level, which makes progress through the game even more annoying. I hated this game.
GRAPHICS: 10/70
The graphics start out really bland, nothing but default MZX patterns, but as you progress through the game, the designs change and improve slightly, with a bit more background detail from the opening board. The bosses look pretty nice, as they are multiple character, and are easy to discern.
TECHNIQUE: 30/60
Alright, I appreciate the slight changes to the jumping engine, instead of pressing a key, you press the ALT key, but what is up with this line of sight gunfire? I like being able to see the bullets I shoot. There are multi-segmented bosses, but aiming and firing at them were tricky, and things with them didn’t work exactly as advertised, i.e. they showed some problems.
STORY: 37/50
Upon starting the game, you are treated with a dialogue box that clues you in on what’s going on… you’re sent to a city where a massacre occurred, and it’s your job to discover what exactly happened. A funny gag involving the MZXer, “Lancer-X” was well-placed, and the story threw out just enough to keep me interested in solving the mystery.
SOUND: 1/30
The music was painfully bad, the samples used in the song had a very harsh sound to them, and the compositions are entirely mediocre. I found myself reaching for the volume rather quickly. There are some sound effects here, but the one for the gunshot was brash and annoying, not to mention you’ll be hearing it constantly over the course of the adventure.
Team 28635: BOB OF THE FUTURE
Topic: Sentient AI
THEME: 9/20
Well, the theme of this game is pretty questionable… your character is aboard a pirate ship, goes through a portal that turns your crew into AI? It seems like the team shoehorned the theme into their story at the last minute. I like the whole setting of the game, pirates in a tropical island environment… something sadly underutilized in MZX games, although I’m not sure how conducive that is to the topic of Sentient AI. But then again, I don’t think this game is supposed to make sense.
GAMEPLAY: 75/120
This game has a commendable amount of variety… you’ll do everything from playing tic-tac-toe, to solving inventory-based puzzles, to battling enemies in the classic MZX style. Not to mention, the game is long, with many different areas, and has a lot to offer. But the actual gameplay can be very frustrating in areas… you get only one life, no ammo (have to attack with a sword via inventory) at the outset, dragons are spitting fire all over the place… ugh. And I don’t get the questionable decision of making the “U” key bring up the inventory, instead of the more traditional “I” key… hell, there were no help screens that told me I needed to press “U” to bring up my invent.
GRAPHICS: 20/90
The graphics are pretty bland, relying on the default MZX palette and character set, and a lot of solid/normal/breakable/floor characters… water is made out of default lava… which means, don’t jump in! Not much in the way of character edits, although there is a large assortment of different smileys that you interact with.
TECHNIQUE: 50/80
I ran into a bug towards the beginning of the game, where the bowl of salsa exploded into a mess of slime that exploded… maybe I did something wrong… but I looked at the code and I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. But other than that, the game has a diverse array of engines, from a tic-tac-toe to a quiz game, and a lot of it is competently programmed. The enemies follow fairly basic patterns and there are quite a few prebuilt ones here, but overall, yeah it’s decent.
STORY: 35/50
The story is pretty trippy… so you’re on a pirate ship, drive through a portal, and then your crew gets replaced by AI? Now, I’m in an island where everyone plays Pogs… the story jumps around quite a bit and gets stranger and stranger as you advance, which I happen to like… but fans of a more traditional storytelling setup will be scratching their heads.
SOUND: 0/40
This game could have really done with music.
Team 31067: Contingency Crisis
Topic: Sentient AI
THEME: 15/20
Well, you’re very obviously a sentient AI, and it’s revealed via manual that you were a scrapped project that had so much more potential. So yeah, it communicates its theme effectively.
GAMEPLAY: 5/120
Not really too much to the gameplay, you’re a robot and you walk around, solving slight puzzles (mostly involving basic interaction with the environment). Easy to pick up and figure, but there isn’t much to do in the 2 minutes this game lasts for… Yes, it’s over much too quickly.
GRAPHICS: 10/90
Graphics were all over the place. Your character is a multi-segmented robot made up of ASCII, and a lot of the graphics use MZX default characters, arranged in ways that make it hard to tell what’s what… The only thing really easy to discern was the toilet. Palette was very bland, with a lot of grey. The title features some cool animation, though.
TECHNIQUE: 10/80
I like how you can move diagonally, and your character is pretty speedy, but the scrolling tends to lag behind the speed of the character, making it hard to see where you are going. Other than the movement of the robot, the game is really bare bones. Alright, the operating system bootup upon game start was creative, I’ll have to give it credit for that.
STORY: 5/50
You start the game as the R-FOIL, a sentient robot, and you have to discover what happened when a scientific experiment went wrong. Story is revealed in logs and stuff strewn about the maze. Although, what you find out is there isn’t much of a crisis at all, which I guess could be interesting in an ironic way.
SOUND: 5/40
The game suffers from some really poor music, it reminds me of bad FM synth from a Mega Drive/Genesis game… actually… is one of those songs from Ranger-X? That’s cool, I guess. But the music was pretty obnoxious due to the low quality of the instruments.
Team 40984: Unit Unresponsive
Topic: Sentient AI
THEME: 12/20
Right away, you see a cinema that tells you that you’re a robot designed to streamline production (shit, guess this is gonna make my systems engineering degree obsolete!), and one day, the robot starts moving on its own accord. The fact that you learn that your robot had to become sentient, instead of starting off sentient, was interesting, though the game struggled to utilize this theme in any interesting way whatsoever.
GAMEPLAY: 3/120
Eew, more 1-char sidescrollers. The contestants really have it out for me this DoZ. Yeah, so this game is more of the same, jump and shoot your way through an overly blue maze, killing everyone standing in your path. Your adversaries are braindead, they just stand there firing at you. One part that got tricky was, there is a vent that you need to enter, and the vent takes a lot of hits to break. I couldn’t figure this out the first time I played it, so I was wandering around for a few minutes wondering what to do.
GRAPHICS: 2/90
The whole game looks like a 1995-era ZZT game. In fact, it uses the ZZT/ASCII default character set. There is a whole lotta blue here, and nary a character edit in sight. No background detail, either. It’s not eye-gougingly bad, at least.
TECHNIQUE: 1/80
Technique? There wasn’t any! Game was incomplete and over much too quickly. A few stationary enemies that fired at you, that was about it.
STORY: 25/50
Story was kind of weird… a robot goes crazy on a human-killing spree and now everyone is trying to get him. The catch is, you are that robot, so you have to fight for your own survival.
SOUND: 0/40
Sound? What sound? There is nothing here, I could put on some good MP3s when I’m playing at least, that would make this game a bit more bearable.
Team 5171: The Galatea
Theme: Sentient AI
THEME: 16/20
First things first, when you start up, you find a floppy-disk based log of the commander of a new colony… talking about the colony’s powerful computer, which has a mind of its own. Now maybe I’ve seen too many movies and played too many games… but I could guess right away that this computer means trouble!
GAMEPLAY: 105/120
Your character has pixel-precise movements, making jumping across platforms silky-smooth. You move through a Metroidvania-esque maze of platforms and crevices, searching for items to power up your character (such as a high jump boots, life-up, and a stronger weapon), doing battle with the fierce creatures you come across. This game probably feels the closest to a retro 2-D sidescroller that I have ever seen in MZX. I have some slight problems with the gameplay, namely that the range of your weapon is a bit limited, making it harder to hit certain enemies, and the boss patterns are uninspiring (usually consisting of them just moving back and forth in a simple pattern, eventually speeding up to the point of ridiculousness)… and for multi-HP enemies, there is no visible effect when you hit them (such as those bosses!). Still, this game is a total blast to play, and there is a cheat mode included for those who suck at gaming (oh, not this judge :P)
GRAPHICS: 85/90
Graphics look rather lovely, too. The environments are varied and distinct, and your character and the monsters you battle with have impressive animation. There are several questionable color schemes in areas, but overall, the game looks lovely.
TECHNIQUE: 78/80
I have so much praise for the programming ability of the developers of this game. Your character moves via pixel-precise movements, leading to a very smooth and solid feel… there are hardly any bugs to speak of, and multi-character opponents impede your progress at every step.
STORY: 35/50
The story of the game starts out on a high note… where you discover several floppies strewn about the maze which gradually reveal more and more about a HAL-like sentient AI causing trouble… but eventually it ends on a rather rushed note, and becomes an afterthought, as you are ushered into the final battle.
SOUND: 38/40
The music is pretty awesome and diverse… From the adrenaline-pumping chiptune riffs of one area, to a mysterious, spacey ambient tune, to a funky, ska track that sounds straight from a retro game, each tune is highly listenable both in game and out of game, and are used well… The boss theme in particular is a highlight for me. And you can’t help but smile when you hear the sound that plays when you find a new item!
Team 5443: Digital Crime Alert Monitoring & Prevention
Topic: I have no idea…
THEME: 0/20
I have no idea what the theme of the game is supposed to be.
GAMEPLAY: 1/20
Looks like a Night Trap inspired game, where you can monitor several areas and kill/sedate/ignore criminals. But, there is only one “scene” in the game, with 2 men fighting, and you can kill/sedate/ignore them. So yeah, no gameplay.
GRAPHICS: 10/90
Competent, but bare-bones. There isn’t much in this game, the little icons that I assume show you the locations of the cameras were drawn well, although the actual locations suffer from an overwhelming amount of blue.
TECHNIQUE: 3/80
I guess it gets a couple of points for concept… never thought I’d see a game inspired by Night Trap. If this game actually had a bit of substance, it’d get some points on creativity.
STORY: 1/50
Absolutely no story to speak of.
SOUND: 0/40
No music to speak of, either.
Team 5582: Mutant Farmer
Topic: "Genetics"
THEME: 60 /100
I think I’m going out on a limb when I try to figure out what’s up with the game… you work in a genetics lab, and people come to you with requests to genetically modify their pets. It gets points for originality, but the game is so poor it never bothers going into further detail.
GAMEPLAY: 1/90
Upon loading this game, it tells me to “Press <L> to load a different game”, gee, I have high hopes for this. You can get into a car and go to different areas, but the areas are devoid of much of anything. You basically fetch items from the different stores to meet the requests of a customer, but there are hardly any customers, and hardly any items to fetch. So yeah, terrible gameplay. I like how the game starts on the “outhouse” stage, so on the MZX load screen, the title shows up as “outhouse”… which is where this rubbish belongs.
GRAPHICS: 1/70
Abysmal… solid lines and empty space, no effort was made whatsoever on the graphics in this game. Is that jumble of blue blocks supposed to be a car or what?
TECHNIQUE: 1/60
A game-killing bug once you give the girl the protein shake.
STORY: 2/50
You work in a genetics lab, I guess… and people come to you with requests for pets to genetically modify, or something. So, a little girl wants to make her cat into a killing machine, and asks you to fetch a protein shake, which you have to fetch from the supermarket. Then you give the protein shake to the girl, and nothing happens… because there’s a game-killing bug.
SOUND: 0/30
No music or SFX whatsoever.
Team 76385: Gene-ti-cal Experiment
Topic: Genetics
THEME: 1/100
Well, the title screen tells me that the theme of the game is “genetics”, but I don’t see anything in this game to even hint at that idea. In fact, I don’t see much content in this game at all.
GAMEPLAY: 1/90
You wake up in a house, and see a bottle of “Asie tea. Tea by Asie. PLUS.” And you are offered the option to drink it. And then the screen fades out, I guess that’s it.
GRAPHICS: 2/70
Not much to look at at all, basic MZX solids arranged in the shape of a house, and something that looks like a bed, then there’s a can of Asie Tea+, which is a single character edit.
TECHNIQUE: 2/60
It looks like there was a bit more effort put into this than Mutant Farmer, at least… That’s gotta count for something.
STORY: 1/50
I have no idea, is there even a story? This game is nonsense…
SOUND: 24/30
The music is pretty good, starting with a funky, upbeat chiptune, and then a bouncy theme with a solid melody line when you are wandering around the house. Both songs fit the locales, and are worth listening to out-of-game. It’s a shame that quality music wasn’t put in a more deserving game.
Team 7676: Rogue Android
Topic: Sentient AI
THEME: 18/20
Right away, you’re presented with the fact that you are a sentient robot, fighting similar models of sentient robots. The game doesn’t try to do anything unique with its theme, but the design of the game, the locales you travel to, and the combat you fight, fits the theme like a glove.
GAMEPLAY: 40/120
The game plays out like a traditional MZX shooter with an overhead view. There’s not much to the game aside from killing waves and waves of enemies, and a frustrating final battle where the end guy throws everything but the kitchen sink on you while you move around at random due to a “wind” effect cast on you.
GRAPHICS: 65/90
The palette uses some rich, aquamarine/green colors for the trees, and pale, earthy browns for the paths. The trees cast shadows, and your character and your opponents, while only 1 char. high, have multidirectional portraits that are clean and detailed. In the factory, you see some cool-looking wall textures and an eerie, neon green floor that suggests a frightening, alien locale. Nicely done.
TECHNIQUE: 50/80
There are a few bugs, like boards not linking up to each other, and sometimes, it’s unclear where exits to boards are. You can also walk on the treetops for some reason, why is that? You press the spacebar to advance through the text, but at times, holding spacebar skips through the text too quickly, causing you to miss plot details. The game is fairly competent, and there are no game-breaking bugs, but the game could strongly use some polish.
STORY: 25/50
You’re an android built to aid human beings, but you were abandoned by your creator and surrounded by other versions of your model, all malfunctioning and malevolent. You set out to the factory where you were built, to find your creator who can maybe clear some stuff up. Not much in the way of story development until the final confrontation, and points are taken off because the game ends abruptly with no ending.
SOUND: 30/40
The main song in the game is an uplifting, euro sounding tune, takes a while to get into the thick of things but has a great riff when that finally happens. When you’re in the factory, you get a grimey, industrial song with a voice repeating “HE’S DEAD”, resembles something like Marilyn Manson’s take on the Magitek Lab theme from FF6. Finally, we have a chiptune for the final fight, which doesn’t really jive with the rest of the game, nor is it fitting for an epic confrontation. Overall, the music is pretty good.
Team 8165: Project Excelsior
Topic: Genetics
THEME: 95/100
Although I was admittedly confused by what the theme was supposed to be (there were some mentions of AI in the introduction cinema… looks like the team couldn’t decide what exactly they wanted the topic for their game to be), but after that, the propensity of story-drivers let you know right away that the overall theme was genetics.
GAMEPLAY: 50/90
Pretty much done in the classic MZX style, you run around a lab, find ammo and medkits to keep your life up, and shoot your enemies. The game isn’t terribly challenging and the enemies aren’t frustrating (i.e. they don’t take a million hits to kill), it’s a little stingy with the ammo and health, but the game is pretty short so it’s not really a problem. Not much in the way of puzzle-solving (aside from a simple fetch quest at the end), nor are there any penultimate encounters… the game ends pretty quickly, and you can tell that efforts were made to try to fit as much of the captivating story in as short a game as possible, so you’ll spend half your time reading story documents, and the other half exploring the lab.
GRAPHICS: 40/70
The graphics convey a bleak mood, although everything seems pretty tiny (i.e. 1 char high walls). There are quite a bit of character edits here and the game doesn’t rely on default graphics. Your character has 4 different graphics depending on the direction he’s facing, and there is an interesting-looking portrait of your guy at the end cinema. There was a decent effort made here.
TECHNIQUE: 45/60
This game had several unique touches to make it stand out from the normal adventure/shooter… first off, the game would let you pause during action sequences, by hitting “enter”, and it also has a HUD that shows you your life and ammo. There were very few bugs, like the HUD obscuring you when you are at the bottom of the board, and that there were several walls you couldn’t walk behind.
STORY: 48/50
Excellent story, dictated to you via NPCs, and many different documents left on the floor of the lab. Your character, being a pure-bred genetical creation (instead of a human exposed to genetic manipulation) is tasked to defend the laboratory he was created from the military, who originally funded the project, but now wants to destroy all evidence of their practice. Yeah, it’s pretty complicated, and it has a couple of parts that tug at the heart… it’s kind of interesting to learn what you were fighting the whole time, I don’t even wanna give it away…
SOUND: 20/30
Not too much in the way of music, only 3 songs, including a main theme that plays for the majority of the game, a song that plays when reading story-related documents, and an ending theme. The main theme is probably the best, a driving and energetic trance track, with a Ninja Gaiden like bassline, spacey fills, and snare rolls galore. The rest of the music gets the job done. Wish there were a few more songs, or that the other 2 stood up to the quality of the main theme.
Team 8898: Game 8898
Topic: Genetics
THEME: 5/100
Alright, this game is set up in the style of a Japanese visual novel, only problem is... it's all in Japanese (uses quite a bit of kanji, too...)! This makes understanding what's going on pretty tricky for most of the people playing the game! I think this means the game has to get DQed or something... and I just wish for a translation, because this game does look cool. Read on.
GAMEPLAY: 20/90
It's a visual novel type game, you're just pressing SPACE or CTRL (to make the text move faster!) and making a few choices. I'm not into these types of games, but maybe you are, and maybe you can read Japanese, too!
GRAPHICS: 50/70
Graphics look pretty sweet, they're converted static images, sure they look blocky but its easy to discern what's going on in them. The anime portraits look nice, too, and the Japanese text is clean and crisp.
TECHNIQUE: 40/60
So, the actual gameplay doesn't amount to much beyond dialogue selections, but the conversion of prerendered graphics to in-game MZX graphics took some technical ability.
STORY: 10/50
I don't remember much from my college-level Japanese courses, unfortunately, but I'm sure it's good, with all the text I'm reading.
SOUND: 29/30
Music is really great, it's got this poppy, lighthearted sound that doesn't sound out of place in a Japanese visual novel game. I'll put these choons on my iPod!