Summer 2011 Dualstream Day of Zeux Scoresheet: Kuddy

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- Summer 2011 Day of Zeux ----------------- Kuddy's Scores -
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Sorry for the delay in getting this out; if I weren't such a
terrible writer with such a short attention span, it prob-
ably would've surfaced sometime on Wednesday or Thursday.
Even though I say every Day of Zeux I host will the be last
I host, since they all seem to end in some kind of minor
disaster or controversy, this one really will be the last,
because I'm tired of holding people up like this. I'm also
dismayed with the fact that Anger is now officially the
worst Day of Zeux topic of all time, because absolutely no-
body who submitted a game used it. I guess this is just a
by-product of so few games making it in, though, since I'm
sure at least one game would have had it were MZX anywhere
near its prime. Anyway, I've bitched and mumbled enough;
let's just get on with my scores and crappy comments so we
can put this sad week to rest and start looking towards get-
ting the ball rolling again.

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- 41356 --------------------------- Nightmares of a Knight -
- Topic: Nightmares -------------- Scoresheet: Theme-Light -
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Theme: 10/20
The meat of the game, between the intro and outro, takes
place in a long nightmare... which is being caused by a
magic spell. It's the most phoned-in use of the theme I can
think of, but whatever, it works.

Gameplay: 25/120
Just your basic hack and slash against mindless ASCII crit-
ters with the most primitive of MZX sword engines. Not
exactly what I'd call nightmarish, but nothing too enthrall-
ing, either. The last board was a bit more fun than the
others, since it switched things up a little by having you
focus on a single strong target while having to either avoid
or nullify his minions. Still, the majority of the game was
a bore, and I had to struggle to keep interest until the
end.

Graphics: 10/90
Here we have the bare basics of MZX graphics, with very lit-
tle deviation in the char set... the only edits I could see
were the skeletons, the textures around the window in the
knight's room, and the space mushrooms (lolz). The gameplay
itself takes place entirely in large boards that are empty
save for the enemies and the occasional Tree or Web. Not
much to say about that.

Technique: 10/80
Yeah, the game doesn't break anywhere, but it never has
taken much effort to code a sword engine like this one in
MegaZeux, and it's hard to screw something like that up. Ku-
dos for at least having the sword's range be greater than
just one tile (even though it's not immediately apparent due
to the graphic).

Story: 10/50
You're a knight who goes to sleep after having just killed
an evil wizard or something, and his escaped lackey casts a
spell on you that puts you into a nightmare that turns into
a fight for your life against various monsters. Small, mind-
less story for a small, mindless hack and slash game.

Sound: 15/40
The sounds were mostly inoffensive, and the music was pretty
standard MZX cliché fare. I don't really think the overused
halucin8.mod fit most of the game as well as it was intended
to. The effect of you getting hit sounded too similar to
what was used for the death sound of the monsters; they
should have either been complete different sounds, or you
getting hit should have been accompanied by you or the
screen flashing red or something. Also, points definitely
need to come off for the three seconds of pure ear rape that
was the yellow border scenario. Couldn't the walls have had
dedicated PC speaker sound effects or something, so that at
least that didn't happen?

Overall: 80/400
This has all the hallmarks of that one DoZ game we end up
with every time around that the author probably had too much
else going on to dedicate a lot of time or effort to. weasel
mentioned in his scores that this was the worst non-joke DoZ
game he's ever played. I wouldn't go that far, since I'm
sure I've played far worse in that regard. Still, it was a
pretty mediocre game, and obviously doesn't even hold a
candle to the other two entries.

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- 78977 --------------------------------------- Retrospect -
- Topic: Nightmares -------------- Scoresheet: Theme-Light -
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Theme: 15/20
Again, we have a game where all the gameplay is entirely in
nightmares. This game, however, was actually a battle
through your subconscious, which was a better use of the
nightmares theme than just "a wizard is doing this".

Gameplay: 80/120
This game was fun, but frustrating. Most of the gameplay
takes place in four maze-like levels where you have to first
find four pieces of a door, then walk through the newly
unlocked exit. Along the way, what looks like white ghosts
and green goblins spawn randomly throughout the level and
attempt to impede your progress. Though you are capable of
fighting these nasties off, combat against them seems to be
slightly biased against the player; not only can they shoot
diagonally (while you can only shoot in the four cardinal
directions), but whereas their attacks seem to come in near-
ly a thick solid line, your attack is scattered in random
squares in the direction you fire in, and sometimes seems to
make a deliberate effort to miss your target. With these
monsters constantly spawning, it is suicide to take your
time in this game, or play through it without saving fre-
quently; if you don't make it through each level as quickly
as possible, you WILL be overwhelmed and annihilated. Oh
yeah, and there's also a small endurance round between each
level. The less said about those, the better. Thankfully,
the game has the courtesy to max out your health afterwards.

Graphics: 55/90
The graphics aren't perfect, but they work. Everything out-
side your subconscious represents what it's supposed to,
except the windows, which I thought looked nothing windows
at all. The levels themselves are well-contoured and made
out of randomly-generated gradients that pulsate, which just
barely look nightmare-worldy enough to fly. However, I'm a
bit disappointed that the elaborately-drawn twisty borders,
which can be seen clearly in the editor, don't come out so
well after fed to the random tile generator, but I guess
that's to be expected.

Technique: 60/80
My annoyance with your weapon's tendency to miss its mark
aside, the game's engines all run smoothly for the most
part; there aren't any major game-breaking bugs that I was
aware of, and it's fully playable from start to finish.
Though I didn't notice this until after I had finished the
game and fiddled around on the test board, the status bar
does glitch up if you're all the way at the top of the board
and near the left side. Don't really know why that is, but
for the majority of the game, it's not noticeable.

Story: 30/50
You're an everyman who has been suffering from horrible
nightmares every night for the last week, which in turn lead
to involuntary self-injury, so you visit a psychiatrist who
guides you through the nightmares to unlock whatever re-
pressed memories are causing them. The story makes sense and
ties in well with the gameplay; my only complaint is that it
was a bit too predictable. Following the first cutscene, and
especially the second, I could already tell which direction
the story was headed in, so the ending came as no surprise
to me. It reminded me a lot of a certain game from a past
DoZ, which I choose not to elaborate on here due to poten-
tial spoilers.

Sound: 30/40
Despite the use of the all too common depeche.mod and
bj-vte.s3m, I found all of the music selections to fit the
mood of their respective environs well enough. The sound
effects also served their purpose without being too loud or
distracting.

Overall: 270/400
In spite of its flaws, I enjoyed this entry a great deal.
I bet something like this could have easily gotten at least
third place in a more active DoZ.

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- 80741 ----------------------------------- Pandora's Gate -
- Topic: Nightmares -------------- Scoresheet: Theme-Light -
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Theme: 10/20
Apparently, some aliens landed on Earth and started twisting
people into monsters by turning all their dreams into night-
mares to generate energy or something, and the magical girl
team you control gets sent in to put an end to it. Not a
terrible use of the theme, but I can't help but feel that
this kind of game could have easily been set to just about
any DoZ theme ever.

Gameplay: 100/120
You walk through some linear dungeons (well, linear until
the end, anyway), getting in battles with twisted humans and
monsters along the way which play out like a turn-based
strategy RPG. Though this kind of battle engine has been
done before, I don't recall it being done quite as well or
elaborately as it has here; you have a variety of commands
and strategies to choose from, and the enemy AI as a whole
is remarkably stable. As well, the use of the mouse for com-
bat was a good choice, and felt more natural to manipulate
than any keyboard based system of this type ever felt in
MZX. To nitpick just a little, though, I would've liked the
option to control your overworld movement with WASD and/or
advance text boxes with the left mouse button, since the
whole setup of Space + Arrow Keys + Mouse felt awkward and
required what felt like constantly switching between two
controllers on a console. Also, I did find the game to be a
bit too easy on the whole, but I guess that's the price you
pay for only having 24 hours to construct the whole thing.

Graphics: 85/90
Considering who was behind this game, it comes as no sur-
prise that its graphics are top notch. The environments were
colorful and detailed, the sprites were well-drawn, the bat-
tle animations were flawlessly pulled off, and the SMZX
splash screens looked fantastic as usual (why there was a
spear on the title screen when there's none in the actual
game, though, I have no idea). The smileys and ASCII T's in
the last area, however, I really didn't care for, as they
clashed too much with the rest of the area. Even if their
presence was supposed to help convey a "glitchy" feel, there
would have been better ways to go about it than just throw-
ing them in.

Technique: 65/80
These teammates are definitely no strangers to MZX's confus-
ing extended feature library, and it shows in this entry.
Granted, there were quite a few bugs in the initial submiss-
ion of this entry, including one that could cause a hard
freeze of MZX itself. With those out of the way, though,
everything else worked flawlessly, from the pixel-perfect
mouse cursor engine, to the AIs of the enemies you fight, to
the weird strobe effect in the background of the last area.

Story: 35/50
A summary of what story I gathered from playing the game can
be seen above under Theme. Most of the plot seems to be con-
fined to a few walls of text which happen at the very begin-
ning and after the first and second bosses; the rest is all
filler dialogue between the protagonists. This wouldn't be a
huge problem, were it not for the fact that many of these
exchanges of banter felt very tacky and unnatural. Maybe
that was intentional, but whether it was or not, it rubbed
me the wrong way. I will add that even though I didn't exp-
erience it firsthand (only through looking in the scattered
files), the fact that the dialogues alter depending on who
in your party is still alive or killed off was pretty cool.
Doesn't change the campiness factor any, though.

Sound: 35/40
We're provided with a selection of six decent OGG pieces of
unknown origin for the soundtrack, which do a decent job en-
hancing the mood. The sound effects also match up well with
what's happening on-screen without being too overbearing. I
was, however, kind of annoyed that the music didn't loop
seamlessly; seeing how Lancer uses OGGs for every single
game he's made since support for them was added, I'd think
adding looping for them should be second nature to him by
now. Maybe the program he was using just flubbed up, who
knows. Aside from that, not much else to complain about.

Overall: 330/400
Once again, Random SJIS Team Name, Inc. manages to blow
everyone else out of the water with another splended offer-
ing. I guess I should mention that Lancer and Lachesis are
speaking of releasing a retooled version of this game with
new areas, a more balanced difficulty level, and less awk-
ward dialogue. Assuming it doesn't end up vaporware like al-
most every DoZ update does, I look forward to seeing it.

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- Summary --------------------------------------------------
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1st Place: 80741 - Pandora's Gate                    330/400
2nd Place: 78977 - Retrospect                        270/400
3rd Place: 41356 - Nightmares of a Knight             80/400