Summer 2011 Dualstream Day of Zeux Scoresheet: wildweasel

Summer 2011 Dualstream Day of Zeux

Scoresheet by wildweasel

Preramble

This year's turnout is probably a record low - we haven't had so few entries submitted since the Weekend of Zeux years ago, and of the two topics (Anger/abstract and Nightmares/concrete), not a single entrant bothered with the abstract, and nobody opted to go theme-heavy either. So let's hope this year's entries aren't the stuff of nightmares (cough). anyway, let's get on with it already...I was hoping judging this year would give me something to do for the next three days, but I'd have to really work at it to make these last three days.

41356 - Nightmares of a Knight

Team: Cute Bounty Hunter (Baby Bonnie Hood)

Topic: Nightmares (concrete)

Scoresheet: Theme-light

To start with, I am a bit sad that BBH hasn't opted for the obvious "Knightmare" pun. Then again, that'd make the game have the same title as a certain popular ZX Spectrum game. You're a knight. You go to sleep and have a nightmare where a bunch of monsters attack you. You cut them up with a sword. Whoopee.

THEME - 1/20

For going the absolute most obvious path with the topic, i.e. the game takes place in a nightmare where you have to fight things. You get one pity point.

GAMEPLAY - 5/120

The whole idea of the theme-light scoresheet is that your game holds up well on gameplay merits alone, and this game isn't really cutting that (no pun intended). There are many major failings here, and I'll list them off in a handy numbered list.

1. It's your basic overhead Megazeux action game.

2. Enemy AI consists mostly of GO RANDNB or GO SEEK. I bet the code for each enemy is no more than 20 lines.

3. Single screen boards with little to no decoration aside from trees and maybe the lake.

4. Were it not for the fact that they turn into blood splats, I'd assume the author isn't using robots at all.

5. No status bar, so checking one's health requires a press of the enter key.

6. Sword range is too short.

7. No way to heal. The game is a battle of attrition against the author, basically.

8. Each change of landscape is punctuated with a grey message window, which covers up the board and doesn't present any opportunities to know where to run to avoid taking damage immediately.

9. I eventually figured out that I can easily complete each landscape with minimal damage by starting at one end of the board, holding down one direction and then holding down the sword button for that direction, and the enemies' tendency to meet me horizontally eventually became their downfall, as if my sword was a vacuum (but no, that's probably mzx's random number generator at work).

10. This sword engine is oddly familiar, as if it were from MZX Encyclopedia. Like...even the sounds.

11. Dragons. Motherfucking dragons. And fire. But thank god BBH was at least smart enough to not make it burn space.

12. And a complete slap to the face as the last board is a yellow border...that comes alive and attacks you with shots that are impossible to dodge.

13. It's insanely obvious that BBH was getting very tired near the completion of the game, as immediately after this you have to fight space mushrooms.

14. Then there's Gilgamesh, apparently, judging from the ripped FF5 music.

15. That's about when the game ends. So you see, the 5/120 is justified. I had no fun playing this - I probably had more fun writing this column than I did playing the game.

GRAPHICS - 1/90

Mostly default char set, mostly default palette, and the boards are extraordinarily bland. Even considering the lack of any actual graphical substance, there are STILL some serious aesthetic issues with what's there, including some really horrible color choices that cause characters to blend with their background color or just look plain stupid (like the blue-on-green smiley on the Showdown board). Even the board that's supposed to represent reality, the knight's bedroom tower, has some issues with the brick texture not quite looking correct around the window. How much time did BBH actually spend making this game? I'd be shocked if it was more than one hour.

TECHNIQUE - 5/80

At least there weren't any glaring bugs or show-stopping issues, and the author obviously knows a thing or two about copy-pasta.

STORY - 6/50

You're an unnamed knight for an unnamed kingdom that just celebrated a victory. when you go to sleep, you fight nightmare monsters, and when you wake up, it turns out it was the work of a dark wizard who is now dead in your quarters. Pretty much the most obvious use of the nightmare formula. I give it 6 pity points because at least I don't have to sit through cutscenes.

SOUND - 3/40

The music initially consists of halucin8.mod which has been used in all kinds of other MZX games, then moves into an impulse tracker file consisting entirely of SPACE MUSHROOMS being chanted over and over, then what I assume is some anime theme song, then more ripped music from other MZX games, including the Autumn Dreams theme music. Also, most of the sounds are from other MZX games as well, like the sword swipe sound which doesn't even sound like a swipe anymore, and then...uh...weird anime-style slashy noises for when the player takes damage. None of it seems to fit very well - not even the ripped-from-Contra ricochet noises when you hit enemies with your sword. The music only served to remind me that I could be playing other games that are much better than this one.

OVERALL - 21/400

This is the worst game I've ever played that wasn't a joke entry. (Or at least, I assume it wasn't. Feel free to correct me if you didn't have the most serious intentions with this project.)

78977 - INTROSPECT

Team: Suspicious Borborygmi (ThdPro, Brother)

Topic: Nightmares (Concrete)

Score: Theme-light

I assume this is supposed to be a take on Inception. I haven't seen said movie yet though...

THEME - 13/20

This one takes some real attempts at really trying to theme the game mechanics after the topic, such as your GOOD FEELINGS BLASTER that shoots an awesome rainbow colored wave of happiness at the various ghosts and apparitions. I like that the flower items will boost your health and Good Feelings meter as well. The team basically takes the Inception theme and rolls with it, almost going as far as having the specialist outright say "we need to go deeper." Hey, whatever works - it's better-executed than BBH's, anyway.

GAMEPLAY - 90/120

This one is an overhead action shooter sort of thing. I actually had some fun with this one, but there are some irritating holdovers from the "classic" MZX games, such as four-directional shooting. The Blaster hits a three-space-wide arc in the direction you aim, and goes an average distance (around 15 spaces) before stopping. It's much easier to aim than the traditional dot-shooting MZX gun, but the limited range and inability to aim diagonally can cause some headaches in combat, especially since the enemies are capable of free aiming in any direction.

Both enemies and flowers are randomly spawned throughout the level, even as you play, so you're never in any danger of running out of Good Feelings (even though it slowly recharges over time). And since the blaster can shoot through walls, that makes things quite a cinch. I would still have appreciated diagonal or even mouse-based shooting, though...

On a side note, I also really like the fact that there is a status bar, if a bit buggy (but that's for another category). I also like that the screen will flicker and shake when you take damage, which makes damage much more noticeable.

GRAPHICS - 65/90

The "dream" boards appear to have been pre-generated using some sort of procedural algorithm, and due to the nature of the colors and characters used for background and wall elements, goes a long way towards adding to the organic, dream-like qualities of the game levels. The real-world area, the player character's house, is well drawn but nothing too special. Character edits are average-to-good, font characters are not changed from the IBM defaults, and things are overall very well representative of the things they're supposed to be, such as the flowers.

Upon close examination, it seems that the Good Feelings bar on the status bar is supposed to be made of peace symbols, which is a nice touch, except that they don't really look much like peace symbols due to the lack of roundness - I personally would have used two characters for it to achieve a more circular shape, and paid no mind to the fact that you'd end up with half a peace symbol when the bar is only partially depleted.

This brings me to the status bar overall - there are some technical glitches with it (but that's for the Technique category), but overall it doesn't really look that great either, because it has no background color, causing the level's colors to bleed through the bar, leaving ugly black spots on some occasions, and making it hard to read on others. Could have been prevented with a simple low-contrast background color.

TECHNIQUE - 50/80

This game did some neat things with the way the game actually plays, with the enemies shooting a "bad feelings" wave at the player to counter the player's "good feelings" blaster. The code and execution of gameplay is not bad, but I can't help but wonder about the actual characters used in the waves, since they appear to be a mess of flowers and what looks like the player's face. Maybe the author should have used the dither chars instead. [[On second thought: no, those are the peace symbols from the status bar, so that last bit is retracted - flowers and peace symbols make perfect sense for a Good Feelings wave.]]

The status bar presented a few strange technical issues, such as the aforementioned lack of background color, but I also noticed that if the screen is scrolled to the very top of the board, the overlay suddenly sticks the status bar on the top-left of the board instead of attaching it to the screen, making it scroll over to the side if you start running to the right. The lack of diagonal aiming for the Good Feelings Blaster kind of drops this category a couple of points as well, even though it's more of a gameplay issue.

STORY - 25/50

I'll try to describe the entire plot here, so spoiler warning in advance.

Your character is suffering from horrible nightmares that he doesn't understand. Realizing that there is a sizeable blank in his memory, he contacts a specialist who helps him explore his subconscious and open the doors (literally) to his memories. After each segment in the dream world, the walls close in and you witness one of the blocked memories. At first it's just stuff like running over a dog, then punching his father-in-law (helpfully labelled for us), but then as we go deeper, we witness (I assume) the protagonist's wife cheating on him (the game only says "EXPLICIT" though and never describes the scene to us). After one last layer of subconscious, we witness the player character shooting his wife.

When we fade back into the real world, the player is dead, having shot himself. The specialist makes some final remarks about how it's not uncommon for his clients to end themselves in such ways, stoically noting that this is the reason why he only accepts payment in advance. That's about where the whole thing ends, on the same Game Over we'd get if the player had died in the subconscious (i.e. going into a coma).

I do like what the authors attempted with the story here, and the dialogue is not badly written. The cutscenes, on the other hand, really could have used some spit-and-polish - it's hard to really get the full effect of certain scenes the way they're designed. For example, the scene where the player punches his father-in-law could have done without the ISO-9000-compliant label, and the revelation that this was the player's father-in-law could have been moved to the dialogue scene afterwards. The "cheating" scene also lacked impact, because we have no idea what's even going on there until the scene immediately following that when the player says "that bitch was cheating on me." Perhaps that scene could have been visually done without the need to show anything explicit - perhaps solely a shot of the player opening a bedroom door and recoiling in horror, _then_ the player character describing the scene afterwards.

Overall, I like what this team tried with their story - the execution, on the other hand, needed work. Therefore, a middle of the road score.

SOUND - 30/40

Musical selections are well-chosen and not obviously taken from any other games, sound effects work well, but there just aren't enough sounds - the game can tend to be a bit quiet outside of the music. Perhaps a sound effect for when the player picks up pieces of doors, or a more obvious sound for certain enemies being defeated to signal the player that they can stop shooting at them? How about a sound (or other sort of prompt) to signal the player that they've got all the door fragments and can find the exit? Audio cues are important, guys.

OVERALL - 273/400

A serious contender here.

80741 - Pandora's Gate

Team: [can't be replicated in plain-text] (Lachesis, Lancer-X)

Topic: Nightmares (concrete)

Score: Theme-light

Did I say "serious contender" on that last entry? Oh snap, sorry to get your hopes up guys...

THEME - 10/20

This team's use of "nightmares" has more to do with the source of energy used by the alien antagonists, and their usage of scary mythological creatures in combat. The most I can understand is that the main characters are on a mission to "stop the nightmares" by killing the enemy leader. Okay, it's more subtle than Nightmares of a Knight, but I thought Introspect's integration of theme was better executed, even if it wasn't a better game overall.

GAMEPLAY - 115/120

A neat point-and-click tactics RPG. I love what they've done here; battles feel at least somewhat tactical with an emphasis on use of cover (to avoid the projectile-throwing mages) and digging in (unused AP's carry over to the next turn, creating a reserve you can use to spend on the more expensive abilities). In the final area, you can find upgrades for the three characters' weapons that make their attacks do more damage at the expense of making the attack action cost double the AP - a tradeoff that I barely noticed, since my battle strategy involves spending the first three turns doing absolutely nothing so that my party is up to 99 AP by the time the enemies are in range.

I didn't notice any real flaws with the gameplay, but I will admit that I never found much use for the Cyclone and Blaze specials, since they do area-effect damage that also hurts the other party members. I also didn't see a lot of challenge; perhaps the game could have been made more challenging if the enemies could move further each turn. As it stands, I only needed potions in the final battle, and Celia's Healing spell was often enough to get by, and even then, I only needed it in 4 out of the many battles I fought. Major props go to this team, though, for having the mercy to auto-heal the party after every battle.

GRAPHICS - 79/90

Graphics in general are remarkably well done, with much attention paid to the environments and use of color. Character sprites are well done, environment graphics are nice all around (until late-game in which I wonder if the wall characters were loaded properly). There's an interesting background effect in the last area that causes certain parts of the background to shimmer when the screen scrolls. I'm unsure how that works, but I kind of like it. The font is _generally_ readable, but the capital B looks too much like either a number 8 or a cursive S, presenting some reading issues with the text.

The boss looks vaguely like Missingno. I wonder if that was intentional.

TECHNIQUE - 73/80

A lot of times, I see teams get in over their heads during DoZ because they were trying to make a game in a genre that they had not attempted before. This is usually the case with RPGs, where a team is just too ambitious for their own good, attempting to make an epic role-playing game in only 24 hours. However, this team consists of two veterans who have not only written RPGs before, they've managed to make several as DoZ entries, and thus a game system like this is really just them going through the motions.

That's not to say that this is same-old, same-old. The combat system is written in such a way that I could not get it to glitch out even if I tried, and the interface is an extremely simple mouse-based system where all one needs to do is click a person, click an action, and then click where the action should take place. The actual proceedings of the combat remind me of a simplified X-COM - positioning your units is important, but facing direction is not, and the AP Cost tooltips work quite nicely, even at the board edge. Mouse movement is pixel-precise, and there is never any confusion which tile you're aiming at thanks to the way the tile flashes. Clearly, a lot of foresight has gone into the construction of this engine. (There were, however, a couple of extremely minor instances in which the interface didn't respond to mouse clicks the first time, but that might have been due to my impatient clicking...)

If I have one complaint about the engine used, I would have liked not having to switch between keyboard and mouse when entering and leaving combat. It's a mild inconsistency, the type I only really tend to see in PC ports of console games, but I would have appreciated some alterations to the system so that I could click to move the party outside of combat, perhaps even click through dialogue boxes with the mouse button instead of the space bar.

STORY - 25/50

As is usual of a game with Lancer involved, the story aims for a certain depth that I'm not entirely sure is really reached without drowning. Bad analogy, I know...but the real problem here, I think, is that all the backstory and exposition is done at the very start of the game, when I personally think it would have been better placed in bits and pieces at the end of each battle, which would not only split the wall of text into large chunks, but also give the player a reward for finishing battles that isn't just a victory fanfare. That said, though, I did at least enjoy reading the exchanges between the main characters at the start of each battle, and through dialogue alone, the story does a good enough job at establishing the mad doctor (I forget his name, since I played the game in two parts over two days) as a complete bastard.

SOUND - 36/40

Excellent choices of sound and music. I can't fault this team much here, except for two complaints about the music: it's a little on the loud side (drowning out the menu sounds), and doesn't loop properly at all.

OVERALL - 328/400

Yeah...sorry, Introspect. =P

Standings

1st: 80741 - Pandora's Gate (328/400)

2nd: 78977 - INTROSPECT (273/400)

3rd: 41356 - Nightmares of a Knight (21/400)