Reviews

Review by markr all reviews by markr

Xelda is a parody of Zelda on the snes. This is does pretty well.

Artistic: The graphics are very chunky but fairly well drawn, particularly the main character. The animation is minimal but effecitve. There is quite a lot of content in this game, for one weekend. If there was only one person on this team, this would be amazing, however as it was a team effort, I will give it 3/5

Technical: There isn\'t really anything technically amazing about this game. It\'s all there, it\'s fairly polished, but it uses quite a lot of existing libraries for its tilemap etc, and doesn\'t do anything REALLY revolutionary. There is a background which scrolls with parallax which is nice. There aren\'t any nice touches like explosions or particle effects. The sine wave is only present on the title screen, which looks like it was added as an afterthought. It\'s a Pikachu (or its predecessor) which moves around in Lissajoux figures, which is nice but hardly part of the game. 2/5

Genre: This is where this game\'s going to win a lot of points I feel. The parody is exactly right, with the right amount of sillyness, the twist is also rather nice. The troll appears in a very entertaining fashion which enhances the game a lot. Full marks 5/5

Overall: The game is probably better if you like this sort of thing. I did laugh out loud at the parody, but I didn\'t find the game itself very amusing. A few particle fx or at least some explosions or something would have improved it. 3/5

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 5

Review by Eric_Love all reviews by Eric_Love

In this game Martijn shows the strength of his own libraries. AlSPC is used to play music from Zelda III (sounds exactly the same as the SNES - I played Z3 a few months ago), and Tegel (the tile system) has enabled him to design large areas (with different layers and parallax) which would be impossible without it.

The control lost accuracy on the slow PC (which has my gamepad plugged in - I hacked the code to use the gamepad), a problem which plagued the 3D entries to SpeedHack 03 leading to my article \"Maintaining accurate player control at low frame rates\".

Scores: Overall None Artistical None Technical None Genre None

Review by Kaitlyn all reviews by Kaitlyn

Xelda is my pick for this year\'s best game overall. It is fun, creative, and stylish. The controls work well, and the game\'s presentation comes across as very polished.

Artistical: The graphics in Xelda may not seem impressive to many game players, but given that this is a parody of an NES title, I felt that the graphics fit perfectly. Everything on the screen comes across as pleasing, if not somewhat professional. The music and sound also work well to set the style of the game. A little more could have been done with the troll, however.

Technical: Overall, the engine functions as it should. There are some problems with attacking while jumping, but overall, amarillion implements this game well. However, the use of the sine wave requirement seems a little lacking if maybe just not obvious, although I can not blame amarillion for not wanting to implementing impressive 3D effects due to its genre.

Genre: As a Zelda parody, this game comes across as extremely hilarious. Everything from the story to the game play made me laugh.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 5