Reviews

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

For years the possiblity of colonizing mars has been studied by scientists. It will not be easy, themartian environment poses huge problems. On earth, there is always
enough oxygen to breathe and water ispretty easy to find. Waste is recylced by bacteria in the endless circle of life. All these conditions are not present on mars
and have to be created artificially before any attempt can be made to sustain life on the red planet.

Toni's entry is a simulator of a future martian colony. It keeps track of the storage and flow of important nutrients and other molecules, and you can build processing
plants and other facilities to help convert molecules that power the cycle of life.

This is a great idea for a game and could be a lot of fun to play. However, such a simulator is very complicated and needs a lot of tuning before it works properly.
Therefore this entry is based on a cool idea but has a lot of gameplay problems.

First of all the screen is very static. You see nothing but a big map of the planet mars and some numbers that change every second or so. It would be much more
interesting to see graphs instead of figures, because that is prettier and also easier to interpret.

As said before, you can build plants to produce certain types of molecules. For example, you can use a chemical plant to produce CH4 (methane). There are some
balancing issues here however. For example, there doesn't seem to be a way to use Carbonmonoxide (CO).There are plenty of ways to produce CO though,
which means that the CO storage is a sink where everything will end up eventually. Or is the goal here to avoid CO production as much as possible? Unfortunately
the readme.txt is not clear on that, or possible strategies.

Another prolem is that there is no clear goal. You can set goals for yourself e.g. to try to keep the colony alive as long as possible, but I haven't managed to starve
the colonists yet before I had enough of watching a bunch of numbers.

implementation of the rules, and scoring:

genre requirement - 4 Mars theme pretty obivous. The gameplay fits really well with this genre requirement, one of the few entries that is not just
pong/pacman/tetris set on mars.

technical requirement - 3

artistical requirement - 5

overall - 3

cool idea, technically interesting but not enough gameplay to be entertaining.

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

Perilous Peregrination is a puzzle game similar to mastermind - with a few twists.

As the story goes, the main character 'Bob' needs your help to create an antidote
because he used a bad drug (KTHX) and is now in a permanent hallucinating state on the planet mars.
You can help him by finding the right combination of atoms that form the antidote.
In this way you need to deliver a series of antidotes - each time more and more complex.

In each level you have to try combinations of atoms and the game marks the atoms as correct,
almost correct or completely wrong. Sounds easy? Indeed it is. All you have to do is try out each atom at each position in the sequence and then you
can find the correct atoms in each position in the sequence in the history of your guesses. The only thing
that makes it more difficult is the very tight time limit. You get only 15 seconds or so to find the right
combination. In this game you don't need to think hard but you need to think very quickly.

And there is more. In addition to the antidote, there is the possibility of creating a bonus Gel molecule.
This bonus is harder to make but has a 10 times higher score than the antidote. Without this gel bonus
the game would be probably too easy, but especially at higher levels, getting the gel bonus is quite
difficult.

All in all, I think the gameplay is rather limited. In the end, the strategy is to try a sequence of
each atom,
then quickly look back at the red marks for the gel bonus and the green marks for the antidote.
The gameplay is not the strong side of this entry. The strong side, however, is the beautiful polish.
This game is arguably the most finished entry of the competition. The GUI consists of transparant animated
dialog windows. The game comes with interesting background music that fades in and out. The main menu has
a pretty particle effect going on in the background. There is a funny intro cut-scene. (I'm told there is a cut-scene at the end too, but I haven't got there yet)
There is a complete manual in html format.

Apparently Inphernic has taken the approach that it is more important to have a simple but finished game
than a promise of something that might be really great. "This would be really cool if it were finished"
is a line heard quite often in speedhack reviews (e.g. for my speedhack 2003 entry),
but this certainly doesn't apply here. This game

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None