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Showing 5 reviews for Pulp Training. all reviews

Pulp Training
by Darksoll
all reviews of Pulp Training

Review by Onewing all reviews by Onewing

Good: Odd enough for me to like it!
Bad: I doubt anyone else will?
TINS award: Funniest game available.
Comments:
What a hoot! It?s worth going through more for the hilarity than the actual game play. There are some great moments that are Napoleon Dynamite-worthy. However, judging is based on game value, rather than comedic value (which is a shame).

Overall: There?s not much point or purpose to playing this game. Time would be better spent ripping the code and reading the script than actually playing. That equals 2.

Artistic: Very ripped and not very consistent. Another 2 for you.

Technical: Ah heck, make it a third two.

Genre: 3 for giving SOME purpose to this game.

Scores: Overall 2 Artistical 2 Technical 2 Genre 3

Review by miran all reviews by miran

Playing this game for long enough to be able to give a competent review was an extremely painful experience. This alone tells a lot about the game but let me explain why I really couldn't give it more than 1/5 in most categories.

The gameplay is very simple. You use the arrow keys to move a sprite from one part of the map to another. That doesn't sound like a fun way to spend a few minutes and indeed it isn't. But then it's made even worse by the fact the the sprite you control (which by the way looks like a toy steam powered train engine) insists on getting stuck at every obstacle. Also the fact that you control a train engine has no impact of gameplay whatsoever. The engine can be freely rotated and moved around and there's not even a hint of railway tracks that can usually be found under trains. It could just as well have been a picture of a squished tomato instead of that train engine.

Speaking of graphics, the sprites in this game are rather good, but as I understand from the readme they were not made by the author of the game for this competition, but instead were taken from some internet site, so I think their quality shouldn't count towards the final score. At least not in a positive way. By the way, the MIDI music is also very good, even though it doesn't really fit the theme. But I suspect its story is similar as that of the sprites. It was probably taken from the internet or a commercial game or something.

ASCII art seems to have been artificially stuffed in this game just for the sake of complying to the rules. As I understand it's a small photograph of the author's face, converted to ASCII art, presumably by an external bitmap-to-ASCII converter, and displayed in the middle of the game for a second or two for no apparent reason.

The in-game help screen is equally minimal. When you press enter, the screen turns to black with a couple of lines of text in the middle that attempt to explain how the game is played.

Time is an important part of the game, because the goal is to reach your destination before the time runs out, and that's where the only mark higher that 1 comes from. However there's actually no real explanation about why the time runs out so that's a very generous 2/5 in the genre category that I gave.

Overall this game is not very good. Thumbs up for making an actual finished game, but a lot more would be required for me to not want to forget it as soon as possible. There is one good aspect of this game though - the mildly humorous in-game dialogs. But all the positive points those bring in are cancelled out by the fact that they can't be interrupted and you have to sit through them every single time you want to play. But then on the other hand, that won't be much of a problem.

Scores: Overall 1 Artistical 2 Technical 1 Genre 2

Review by guilt all reviews by guilt

The game has some gorgeous 3D graphics :) and a great lookin' engine and the music also sounds very pleasant and good!

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by FalseMasterJ all reviews by FalseMasterJ

Pulp Training is a strange game that after playing it three times there's not much left to do.

The artistical score got a 3 because it has nice looking graphics, but no railway. plus driving a train like a car is just weird.

There's some things in the game that don't work, and the ASCII art and help menu won't help here. So the technical score got a 2.

In this game you go around town doing jobs for people. It's fun to play all the way though just to see what happens next, and the ending just made me want to play it again, but after the second time it gets old.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 2 Genre 2

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

In this game, you control a taxi locomotive. Your goal is to get to various spots on the 2D map in time, and enjoy the dialogues in between.

Well, the start menu, the help screen, and the credits when you complete the game are rather minimalistic. Indeed, I ain't quite sure that about two dozen characters of help are enough to satisfy the in-game help technical requirement. Furthermore, the ASCII art shown somewhere between dialogues was too abstract for me to understand (I even had to use my text and image editors on the source file to understand what it really is) and doesn't seem to have much in common with the gameplay.

The game involves chatting with some people and moving them around the map. The uncontrollable dialogues are a bit cheap, a bit humorous, mostly in an odd philosophical sense which is expressed to you when the game is finished. They are fun as a whole but boring to read one by one, at least for me.

Apart from the dialogues, you drive a pretty looking vehicle in a pretty looking city... but sudden clashing at the air and jamming at the corners contrast terribly with the nice graphics. If you don't get to the next stop in time, it's most probably the result of the awkward collision detection. Luckily, you can retry it over and over again, without any penalty.

One could expect a game with dialogues to make the most use of the `time' genre requirement... unfortunately, here we only see `time', as in `in time', but not the theme of a story or a dialogue.

The graphics and music fit well in the game; although they are reused from other people's projects, a sharp eye for what to reuse is an advantage nevertheless. The simple prerendered 3D model of the locomotive is also nice. But looking at the code, you see something in between the procedural and automaton programming paradigms - a vast number of cases having quite similar bodies, with only a few actions organized as functions... not to mention the strange collision detection algorithm. It seems that there could be no goal crazy enough for 70 copy-pasted cases to be better than a couple of functions... but then again, I ain't very good at automaton programming :) .

To summarize, what we have here is moderate gameplay with some extra fun for those who enjoy reading dialogues, nice graphics and music, and shallow care for the competition rules. Sadly, linear dialogues nearly kill the replayability of the game. Personally, I liked it... but I could not guarantee that YOU will.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 3