Summer 2010 Dualstream Day of Zeux Judging Sheet:Lancer-X
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Summer 2010 DualStream Day of Zeux Judging Results - Lancer-X This was a rather unexciting DoZ and generally a breeze to judge, given the incredibly low number of complete games. It's a shame that so few of the signups felt inclined to work seriously. Hopefully the Winter DoZ will have a better turnout. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #7494: "Immortal Nanomachines" by "diamond <3s club spades" (GreaseMonkey) Theme: Immortality / Scoresheet: Theme-Light Gameplay: 80/120 Before I say anything further, I'd like to point out that this is one of the best, if not THE best examples of, if not quite an RTS then a Cannon Fodder-esque overhead squad tactics strategy game in MegaZeux. The game involves you controlling a group of riflemen and grenadiers which you can select with a bounding box and then point them at things to go shoot. As the enemies outnumber you a rudimentary amount of strategy is necessary. The grenadiers do relatively little damage given their attack delay and reduced range and I found their main utility was in selecting one and moving it around the map to clear out enemy riflemen that it could hit from behind the terrain and enemy grenadiers (which are very easy to dodge the grenades of if you're controlling a single unit) and later to take advantage of the splash damage by throwing them en mass at tightly-knit groups of enemy soldiers. The game features two missions, neither of which are particularly difficult and both of which simply involve killing off all the enemy units. I had some fun playing this, which is reflected in the score, but it would have gotten higher if the game featured more variety (actual mission objectives beyond 'kill everyone', the grenadiers being more generally useful amd some graphical considerations that do harm the gameplay but are further described under Graphics below. Graphics: 35/90 Rudimentary char editing (mostly dither graphics) and some colours of the palette were changed slightly. As the author favoured high-contrast dithers for background graphics, the in-game background art and troop graphics clash a lot and the overall effect is not pleasant on the eyes. The troop graphics are entirely devoid of animation and only differ to show you which side the troop is on (the colour) and whether the troop is a rifleman or grenadier. In general, the biggest flaw with the graphics here is the lack of feedback. While the grenades use some simple animation, the only feedback given for rifle fire is audial and it is impossible to tell who is firing at whom. Even just tracing lines to show fire would have helped. The overall effect is that it is hard to work out what's going on during combat, which units are taking the most damage etc. The game would look and play better even if it just used the default character set with the default palette as long as it gave some visual feedback of combat and had the background clash less. There were some okay-looking transitions, most notably the title screen, but nothing that made me go 'wow'. Technique: 65/80 In general, implementing this sort of thing at all is impressive to some degree and it worked fairly well. I did not observe any bugs that were harmful to gameplay and the game plays from start to finish every time. The game sports a pixel-perfect mouse engine; while not a great feat to code, this is something previous mouse-oriented tactical games in MegaZeux have lacked and it makes a HUGE difference in terms of playability. There are also other nice touches, such as your troops automatically firing on enemies that get in range so you don't always have to watch them constantly. Some things could have been implemented a bit smoother - better pathfinding and moving could have prevented your troops from getting stuck behind terrain or queuing up. It would also have been nice to be able to select individual units by clicking on them rather than having to draw a box every time. In addition, as you have to drag the mouse against the edge of the screen to scroll, having the screen continue to scroll down while the mouse was hovering over the status bar at the bottom (which contained no clickable items anyway) would have been a nice touch, so that the cursor doesn't need to be repositioned when you're trying to scroll down. There are a couple of odd bugs that pertain to the display. One of which is the fact that grenades tend to not get cleared in some cases, leaving them on the display until something else clears them up. The other one I observed was the mouse cursor graphic being replaced with one of the terrain graphics after finishing the first level. While odd, this did not have an effect on the playability as it was still clear where the cursor was. Story: 20/50 The story is pretty much rubbish. The entire delivery consists of text screens, which isn't so bad by itself but the story they present doesn't make them worth reading. The game namedrops cameos, but in a way that doesn't seem to be used for humourous effect so the logic is mind-boggling. The story exists pretty much just to sell the theme, but it doesn't even do that particularly well. This is a shame because this kind of game would benefit from a bit of storytelling, especially when you associate it with story-related mission objectives. For example, it seems logical in the first mission that your real aim is to simply get past the enemy forces, especially since they don't seem to be vigorously pursuing you. So, why not have the enemy vastly outnumber the player and have a particular checkpoint you need to reach with a certain minimum number of remaining troops? Instead, both missions are simply to kill all the enemy troops and it's not at all clear why, save for the fact that the game tells you you have to. Sound: 28/40 Music isn't bad, save for the title screen music which contains an annoying crackling/popping sound and is irritating to listen to, and there's even some original pieces. The sound effects, made by the author of the game, are also decent enough save for the rifle firing sound (which sounds like someone tapping a microphone). Unfortunately, said microphone-tapping sound is the only feedback given for rifle firing. A better shooting sound would have helped a lot here. Theme: 8/20 Acknowledgement of the theme in the story screens but nowhere else, which is fair enough for theme-light, but disappointing. Given that the (basically nonexistant) plot could have been easily rejigged to have you controlling a bunch of combat nanomachines or something, this level of implementation was good enough to get above the DQ threshold but not much better than that. Overall: 248/400 I liked this game but there were too many little flaws and so much potential for improvement. With some actual thought put into artistic direction, some graphical feedback for attacks and other things to make the game a little more exciting, an actual story, more mission variety, more potential for strategy and more polish this could have easily won the DoZ and it wouldn't have been that hard to do on top of the existing engine either. Oh well. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #8724: "Nanofighter" by "Retro to the Future" (madbrain) Theme: Nanomachines / Scoresheet: Theme-Light Gameplay: 20/120 Decent versus-fighter games do not EXIST in MegaZeux for a number of reasons, one of which is the fact that you need to draw your character sprites very large for everything to work. They don't really work with MZX's display model all that well, which severely punishes that kind of work with the harsh character limits. This is a case of someone actually pulling it off, almost. The characters are large and look good, they've got a variety of well-executed attacks and there's even combos, which are fairly intuitive to pull off. Unfortunately, the game stops there. There's no enemy AI so the enemy opponent, if present, just stands there and there's no collision or damage detection so you can't even pummel the helpless opponent. There's nothing to do except jump around and try out the (admittedly great-looking moves). What a shame, what a shame. Graphics: 85/90 There isn't much there, but what's there looks great. Large, well-drawn characters with a huge amount of well-executed animation. Everything looks very fluid. The lack of a background makes things look a little dull but understandable given the heavy char use by the existing graphics. The characters look just a little squished in MZX's aspect ratio but it's nothing that noticeable. Technique: 44/80 What's there is good - the characters have decent, fluid moves, jumps, kicks, punches and combo moves, the attacks combine with the movements as well to create even more variety and it all looks very nice. Unfortunately the rest of the game, which is pretty much all programming, is sadly absent. Story: 15/50 No story, but for the majority of versus fighters the story is very much a 'bolt-on' anyway, so it's hard to argue the game needs it. On the other hand, this causes problems for the theme, see below. Sound: 15/40 Only one song, although it's a decent song and fits the sort of game this is. Sound effects might have been nice. Theme: 1/20 Only the title. I'll give that the fighters are probably made of nanomachines or something but the game doesn't even say that. A single screen of story text could have at least established a context for this game, but I understand that the game is unfinished and the author considered (probably correctly) that it was better to work on the actual game than that. Overall: 180/400 One of the dangers to working on something completely different to anything that's been tried before in MegaZeux is that, while you may pull it off every now and then, chances are it will backfire and you'll be left with far less of a game by the end of the DoZ than you might have if you made something more normal. This was nice to look at but it's not a game, the gameplay isn't there. Would be nice to see this finished. Too bad it'll probably be DQed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #19798: "One Tower, One Life" by "Team One-Hour-Entry" (KKairos) Theme: Immortality / Scoresheet: Theme-Heavy Gameplay: 30/90 The central concept to this game is that you have to defend yourself against an unending series of enemies with an automatic attack that you can spend energy upgrading the characteristics of. Killing enemies nets you additional energy and life which will both slowly drain away over time. Since your only interaction with the game is upgrading these characteristics, gameplay essentially involves in watching the display, buying new characteristics every now and then. Once you complete wave 10 or so you instantly lose. Graphics: 30/70 Use of default characters and palette in a way that's not particularly ugly but still won't win any prizes. The graphics are clean and make it clear what's going on so they don't hinder the experience at all. Uninteresting but not terrible. A better visualisation of the player attack could have helped. The drawing of the player is probably the nicest looking thing in the game. Technique: 10/60 The game is entirely robotic-driven, which is something; however, the large number of bugs present damages this game's score considerably. First of all, the player attack is flawed; while it checks for enemies along a line from right next to the player to the maximum range of the attack, if an enemy is detected it only sends the robot at the exact range of the weapon to the attack subroutine. This means that if an enemy gets past the player's range they can continue unharmed until they are right next to the player (in which case a second, close range player attack is used). For this reason it is nearly pointless to spend any energy on range at all. In addition, because enemies check whether they are in position to attack the player by whether they are blocked from moving, a newly spawned fast-moving enemy can do significant damage to the player simply by being blocked by a slower-moving enemy from the previous wave. Finally, enemies have a movement speed based on a delay that starts at 10 on wave 1 and decreases each wave, meaning that by wave 11 the delay is 0 which causes the enemies to exhibit strange behavior that causes the game to be lost almost instantly. Story: 25/50 Story is virtually nonexistant and consists of a text screen, but as the game is of a format that does not require a story to work it can be forgiven for this. Sound: 8/30 The audio for the game consists of one song, although it's not too bad a song. Sound effects would have helped. Theme: 25/100 Token acknowledgment of the theme on the game's text screens - the idea is to gain enough energy to be powerful enough to be able to stop any enemies from attacking you and threatening your immortality. This is a rare (in this DoZ) example of actually using the theme as a base for the gameplay, but as you die after wave 10 anyway this goal is unachievable. Probably should have used the theme-light scoresheet. Overall: 123/400 Could have been almost fun if the bugs were fixed but unfortunately the gameplay was too limited and noninteractive to stay interesting for very long and the game does not impress in other aspects. I guess it's decent for a BKZX-length effort, though. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #22625: "King Yu's Tower" by "';DROP TABLE teams;" (logicow) Theme: Immortality / Scoresheet: Theme-Heavy Gameplay: 80/90 This is a top-down MegaZeux game where you roam the titular tower slaying enemies, collecting items, fighting bosses while looking for a way to relieve an old king of his immortality. The gameplay unashamedly borrows from the Legend of Zelda series and other titles; the weapons you use include a sword, a bow that fires arrows and bombs you can throw. Enemies respawn each time you enter a stage and randomly drop coins and health. Coins can be used to purchase more items from a shop, including a one-use potion that restores your health (completely, contrary to the what it says in the inventory display; which I am rather thankful for.) Gameplay is semi-linear; once you've managed to uncover the base items you need to explore you can fight the two bosses at your leisure before going on to battle the final boss and win the game. It's quite well implemented on the whole, and actually fun, unlike a lot of MegaZeux games that also try to copy Zelda. Most weapons work fairly naturally and they have a generous area effect so you don't have to line up everything perfectly when using expendable ammo. The only real problem is that it is arguably a little too easy in parts; the shopkeeper is very generous when it comes to the amount he wants for items, and it's very easy to get a lot of money at one of the skeleton spawn areas (I favour the one with the chest) by using the tesla weapon to zap large numbers of them into health and coins; easily paying for the tesla ammo with plenty left over. The enemies are unvaried (they're pretty much 'skeleton', 'skeleton that can shoot', 'club-shaped thing that you need to kill with arrows and only meet a couple of times') and predictable in behavior- they basically throw themselves at you en mass. On the other hand, the bosses are quite varied and exciting, requiring the use of a number of strategies. I very much enjoyed the fight with the council herbalist. Some of the weapons exhibit slight oddities. The bomb travels slowly all the way across the screen when you use it, making it fairly difficult to hit single-char moving enemies with it if they aren't near walls. The arrows do area damage as they fly along but only stop if they hit something. This encourages odd strategies such as firing arrows just above or below the demonic flowers spawned by the herbalist to knock both out completely with just one arrow. They're also very cheap for their high effectiveness. In the room with a coin chest and multiple skeleton spawners, there is an invisible wall at the end. Why wasn't this just an ordinary wall? Making it specifically an invisowall makes us think there's some way to bypass it and something on the other side! Regardless of defects, this was a very fun game to play; long enough to not end just as you think it's getting started but short enough for the repetitive aspects of the gameplay to not get old. Less play time than 22677 but that's mostly attributed to the latter's horrifying Level 4 than the game legitimately having more content to it. Graphics: 45/70 IBM-extended ASCII character set with EGA palette. It's kitch, it's old-sckool, it reminds you of Kroz and ZZT. How well were these graphics actually used, though? The game has some very nice cutscene art, even if you don't take into account the (self-imposed) graphical limitations. I especially loved how the airship was drawn. In-game, things aren't quite so hot. The levels designs are simple and either filled with solid colour (the necromancer's domain) or random crap (the herbalist's domain) - you can get away with this sort of thing when you're taking full advantage of the charset and palette, which can be very effective at disguising or at least compensating for copypasted design, but this just looks rather dull. Easily the best in-game artwork are in the animations; the tesla weapon and bomb are flashy and pretty, the little animated touches like the healer and the spirit portal looked nice and there's plenty of extra animation in the boss fights, especially the one with the herbalist which features some great-looking demonic flowers. So, there you have it. Moments of pretty don't make up entirely for the fact that you're mostly looking at boring for the whole game but they certainly don't hurt and the end result is a game that still looks nicer than the majority of releases this DoZ. Technique: 48/60 Enemies and bosses are one-char affairs, here, but the bosses can sport some additional flash - in fact, the most impressive work in the game was from the boss battles with the herbalist and the final boss. The weapons are all non-standard, and range in flash from the basic overlay sword and bow to the rather prettier tesla weapon and bombs. In general, the coding is used to complement and improve the traditional built-in gameplay rather than working against it and that's something I can always appreciate. Bugs; were there any bugs in this game? I didn't really notice any, which is good enough for me. I was a little bit surprised when the necromancer's skeleton-spawning lightning bolts blew holes in the columns but it didn't do the same to the walls so it could have easily have been intentional. Regardless, it's such a small thing it didn't bother me at all. There was nothing, technique-wise, in this game that exactly wowed me but it's above-average, non-standard programming and all used effectively to make the game more enjoyable. Good stuff. Story: 32/50 The story is simple but effective and well-presented. King Yu requested his subjects to bequeath him immortality so that he could forever rule his kingdom, but then had said kingdom destroyed by a volcanic eruption and has decided he's had enough, so he asks the player to free him from immortality, which the player does by searching out and killing the necromancer and herbalist that were keeping him alive. Not a bad story by any accounts, it fit the presentation style and went with the gameplay. My complaint: Why does King Yu attack you at the end? What the hell! I mean, I'm all for random betrayals in games and I get that it needs a final boss otherwise you're going to have a whole heap of coins and ammo at the end with nothing to use it on but SOME explanation for this would have been good. Almost seems to throw any chance the plot had of being taken seriously out the window. Anyway, after killing the king, the tower collapses (presumably not with you in it) and you take the king's solid gold walking stick or whatever for your trouble and take your airship out of there. Not a bad story for a DoZ game but what the hell, why does the king fight you? Didn't he WANT to die? Besides, I'd think he'd die almost immediately after the enchantments were lifted, given that he was evidently pretty old by that point. Sound: 25/30 Music consisted of a respectable selection of music that generally fit quite well and was just varied enough not to get old. Sound effects were 'play'-command work, but it fit the overall theme and didn't sound bad so I have little to complain about here. Wasn't a fan of the boss music though. Theme: 80/100 The theme was story-centric but the story and gameplay were closely enough linked for me. I'm not sure the treatment of the theme here was as thorough as is necessary for full marks on a theme-heavy sheet but it would have done well (probably 20/20) on theme-light. The whole game was about King Yu's immortality, the ways in which he is kept alive and returning him to mortality. Overall: 310/400 A fun, solid game that plays from start to finish - something this DoZ could have done with a lot more of. A good example of picking a concept, a gameplay mechanic and implementing it well until the end. My pick to win. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #22677: "immortality" by "Anything is Possible When You Believe" feat "Dragons (Yet again)" (asgromo, Kom) Theme: Immortality / Scoresheet: Theme-Light Gameplay: 100/120 This DoZ game is a sidescroller. You move a 2x2 character around a randomly-generated mazelike level, killing enemies with a weapon that can fire in 8 directions and trying to reach the exit door, placed randomly on the bottom floor. There's a number of dead ends and you often have to backtrack in order to find the right path. Sort of reminds me of Roland on the Ropes; at least in theory. The sidescroller gameplay is decent enough; while the jumping, gravity and (lack of) friction takes a little getting used to at first, once you've adjusted it's very natural. There are four levels of different designs, each of increasing size and populated by an increasing number of enemies that spawn randomly. These enemies attack you with varied particle-based attacks, some quite vicious and if you're not careful your health will go down quite quickly, at which point it is usually best to retreat until it regenerates. To fight off the enemies, you have a simple weapon that can shoot in 8 directions and, as you kill off enemies and gain points, your weapon increases in power, with the range, shot damage, firing rate, speed and accuracy increasing the more enemies you kill. Decent idea in theory, but this particular system happens to be the biggest flaw in the entire game. The problem is that the stats - particularly the firing rate - increase too quickly given the vast number of enemies you encounter in the same and fairly soon (pretty much after finishing the first level) it becomes so fast it starts to hog most of your CPU. By level 4 the game becomes too unbearable to play on most systems. For the purposes of playing this game I edited the .MZX to reduce the rate your weapon attributes improve to one tength of what they were before, which resulted in the game becoming far more playable and also far more difficult. Level 4, in particular, felt like revenge for the Level 5 of Reconquista Escalation except this game wasn't made by any judges of that DoZ. It's incredibly long (the aforementioned backtracking ends up being the main activity performed during this level), incredibly frustrating and has a simply ridiculous enemy count. I think I spent at least two hours on that one level, including a lot of reloading. Otherwise, this was simply great overall. Most fun I had out of any of the DoZ games, if also the most frustration. Graphics: 65/90 This game looks quite nice. The levels, though repetitive, show decent use of colour, the enemies and player are nicely drawn and animated, the graphical effects like the particle work were very nice (although I wish the particle clouds the enemies exploded into varied more; they're shades of red for the first level and bright colours for the three levels after. Just having the bright colours for one level would have been enough; they're too distracting). While the enemies attack with varied particles, the player attack is just a plain circular bullet. Would have been nice to have something that changed as your weapon got more powerful, but this isn't particularly important as it's only onscreen for a fractional amount of time. The cutscenes don't look quite so hot. Diamond-esque 'cel shading' style here but the artist doesn't have quite the same flair as Diamond had with it so it ends up looking even more blocky mess than usual. In particular it's hard to tell what's going on with some of the scenes. Overall, though, best looking game this DoZ. Technique: 45/80 Ahh, technique. The section where we reward good programming and punish bugs. This was particularly interesting to score for this game because it contains both the best programming in the DoZ and also the worst bugs. First of all, random level generation has been done in DoZs before (see Memory Leak for one example) but certainly never this well and never as a sidescroller. On the other hand, the levels basically just amount to mazes, which aren't particularly difficult to create, but nonetheless it looks good and works well. Next we have a sprite player, sprite enemies, high-speed projectile code, particles, all implemented fairly well (with some minor issues to be discussed later) and all effective in making the gameplay a touch above that of the typical MZX sidescroller (this was much more fun than, say, Mira the Pirate). You can even look further down, essential for avoiding (shallow) dead ends. In terms of bugs, the first and most noticable is the extreme inbalance in weapon attribute gains (inbalance would not normally be classed as a 'bug' but in this case it makes the game virtually unplayable after a point so it counts). Not difficult to fix but it really does hurt the game a lot when you have to edit it to gain the most out of the gameplay. Furthermore, player bullets have a habit of consistantly vanishing at times, meaning you can fire (sometimes repeatedly) at an enemy and not have any of your bullets connect. Not a huge deal but at times it can be very annoying, requiring you to move into enemy fire in order to attack. A flaw arising from the random level generation is that at times it is impossible to go back up a vertical passage you have gone down. Because the randomly generated levels contain a number of dead ends, the chances of going down a one-way passage and finding a dead end is rather good, at which point you end up hoping you've saved recently. Avoidable, by learning to recognise dead-end passages and saving before taking the plunge but still quite annoying. Finally, a bug that doesn't strike until the end- on the final part of the game you have to destroy a big pipe in order to get one of the two endings (the other ending can be reached simply by travelling through the door). Unfortunately the pipe's sprite is not initialised properly and still contains old data from the levels (the spr#_vlayer attribute, specifically) making it both invisible and impossible to attack when you get to that level from after level 4. Simple enough to fix but also particularly frustrating. The mix of decent programming and multiple game-killing bugs results in a fairly midline score, but a respectable total given that I didn't punish Gameplay for them. Story: 35/50 Excellent story presentation; rather than telling you outright, the game slips in hints and leaves you to work out the rest. As I understood it, the planet this story takes place on is one massive neural network used to essentially store the consciousness of humanity in order for humankind to achieve a kind of immortality. The 'voice' is a dissenting thought in this network that longs to end this eternity and creates the player to do its bidding. The story has two endings, depending on whether you choose to destroy the planet or not, but both simply show a single line. Accordingly, the ending feels a little anticlimactic, especially after going through level 4. The story was presented in the form of text dialogues and still images between stages. The actual link between the gameplay and story is as such fairly weak- you're going deeper into the planet where things are being more dangerous, certainly, but beyond that and the final part where you have to either destroy the pipe or leave there is little relation between what you're doing in-game and what the story is talking about. Nonetheless, story-wise it's the best showing in this DoZ. Sound: 35/40 A variety of songs and sound effects, all reasonably well used and none seemed too out of place. Level 4's music was especially appropriate given how horrifying the level was. Can't ask for too much more here. Theme: 18/20 Good show for theme-light - the concept of immortality is embedded thoroughly into the story. The only thing stopping this theme from gaining full marks is the fact that the story and gameplay are fairly divorced meaning that you don't really feel any link to the theme except on those between-level story scenes. Overall: 298/400 I both loved and hated this game more than anything else in the DoZ (the no-shows like 24560 and 79546 were more disappointment than anything else). Great ideas and execution but terrible, terrible flaws. Easily the most work to judge, both fixing the game and even just PLAYING it (which at times was more like work than fun). Nonetheless once you look beneat the mouldy exterior there's a definite gem in here. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #24560: "^255 nano robotz(?)" by "<%Kuddy> "epic doz team name"" (mzxrules) Theme: Nanomachines / Scoresheet: Theme-Light Gameplay: 5/120 Not really, no Graphics: 35/90 Well, there's some non-terrible 2x2 sprites, most of which are tucked away in a subdirectory and never used in the actual game. There's the overworld graphics, which actually look pretty nice. Beyond that there's nothing really to talk about. Technique: 10/80 Unusual. There's a bunch of code here, basically all in external files but almost none of it seems to be used. The author clearly spent some time coding but it never eventuated into anything the user can see, except moving an unanimated 2x2 sprite around a testing board and running into another unanimated 2x2 sprite. Why does the test board use 100% of my CPU? Story: 0/50 None, and it's clearly the sort of game that would require one. Sound: 1/40 None. Admittedly this does mean there's nothing offensively bad but still. Theme: 0/20 I can't really say here that the 'title', which probably isn't actually the title at all, counts because it doesn't even suggest a story. There's nothing here to show that theme was used at all. From the rest of the game I can guess there was probably some idea in the author's head but it never got into the submission. Overall: 51/400 Why do you do this every DoZ, old-sckool? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #54188: "Indiana Smiley and the Orb of Immortality" by "Cute Bounty Hunter" (Baby Bonnie Hood) Theme: Immortality / Scoresheet: Theme-Heavy Gameplay: 40/90 Can't say this is exactly brilliant stuff, although it certainly works for the theme, see below. You finish one short level of low difficulty and mostly-builtin hazards, and for the rest of the game you're invulnerable and can just sail right through it, which is pretty hilarious really. It was short enough to not get boring, though. Graphics: 30/70 Only alterations to the defaults was the use of water chars, but the lack of modification doesn't really hurt this game. Technique: 10/60 Can't really say this game exemplifies 'technique' but there is SOME code. The game plays from start to finish and I observed no bugs, minor or major. Story: 30/50 There is no backstory- the game simply places you in the context and it's up to you to fill in the blanks. The story itself is told mostly by your actions as you play through. There isn't much here but what's there complements the theme, which is the main point of using the theme-heavy scoresheet anyway. Sound: 15/30 Two ripped mods and a lightning sound; the rest of the audio was built-in effects. I never really noted the music as being lacking or unfitting so what's here is sufficient. Theme: 90/100 Well, what can I say? Implementing 'immortality' throughout, in your story and gameplay is not something that's at all easy to do and it might have damaged the Gameplay score a bit, but it works, it's hilarious and, well, it's Immortality. What more can you ask? I can't really imagine a more thorough implementation of this theme. The game even concludes with the obvious 'unending immortality would actually suck quite a bit'. Overall: 215/400 I liked this and would like to have scored it higher but it lacks the production values, technique and storytelling to actually be a good game. You won't see a better implementation of the theme this DoZ, though. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #75946: "Mina and the Quest for Immortality" by "Team Frost Muffin" (commodorejohn) Theme: Immortality / Scoresheet: Theme-Heavy Gameplay: 5/90 All you can do is wander around and talk to a person, who only delivers a single line. Practically nothing here at all. Graphics: 25/70 160x50 display with four colours; black, white and two shades of grey. The player sprite looked alright, as did the NPC, but everything else was too indistinct. The way this game would look in the end would be entirely dependent on the quality of the tile art, and even then I have a hunch that it wouldn't look particularly wonderful. I know the Nintendo Game Boy had similar graphical capabilities but it had nearly three times the vertical resolution and a much higher DPI to its credit. This looks like a bit of a blocky mess. Technique: 25/60 Undoubtably this game's strongest component; unfortunately what is there isn't particularly impressive. The viewport shudders as you walk north or south, the text in the textbox is far too big (the author was planning on having us read an adventure game's entire script this way?) and there's simply no game beyond walking around and talking to the one NPC. Story: 0/50 None, and it's an RPG/adventure game. Sound: 5/30 An original song? Excellent. Unfortunately that's the only audio there is and it's totally out of place. Theme: 1/100 Only the title screen. Overall: 61/400 8 hours is enough time to implement a game in. Maybe more time megazeuxing, less time sleeping next DoZ? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #95763: "denis" by "ヽ(・ω・)ノ" (coda) Theme: Immortality / Scoresheet: Theme-Heavy Gameplay: 5/90 Truly bizarre. You basically walk from left to right across a psychedelic screen of colour that changes from green to purple and purple to green each time you wrap around, being hit by arrow-shaped projectiles, but you're.. immortal, I guess, so you don't need to worry about them. Graphics: 20/70 Looks sort of pretty, I suppose, but there isn't much to look at. Technique: 15/60 Code basically just used to shoot the arrows and to reverse them and change the colour each time you cross the board. Story: 0/50 Hm. Sound: 15/30 Two tunes, one is a Kuddy-BKZX-level obnoxious piece and the other which is actually pretty catchy. Were they both original? I guess they are since this game is by a well-known tracker. Theme: 5/100 You're immortal so the arrows don't hurt you. Overall: 60/400 ??? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Final ranking: #24560: "^255 nano robotz(?)" ( 51/400) #95763: "denis" ( 60/400) #75946: "Mina and the Quest for Immortality" ( 61/400) #19798: "One Tower, One Life" (128/400) #8724: "Nanofighter" (180/400) #54188: "Indiana Smiley and the Orb of Immortality" (215/400) #7494: "Immortal Nanomachines" (236/400) #22677: "immortality" (298/400) #22625: "King Yu's Tower" (310/400)