View source for Summer 2010 Dualstream Day of Zeux Judging Sheet:Lancer-X

<pre>
      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 "ãƒ½(ãƒ»Ï‰ãƒ»)ãƒŽ" (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)
</pre>