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Reviews

Showing 3 reviews by Gassa [2008]. all reviews

Entry of allefant
by allefant
all reviews of Entry of allefant

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

I\'m not obliged to write a review on this, so it will be short.

First, I\'d like to note that this is my favourite entry from TINS \'08. Second, amarillion already covered the game in his review in much detail. So, instead of explaining why I like it, I shall use the review system for feedback - to put a few suggestions that can make it more playable.

1) Some quiet time at start (one minute?), to be able to build some structures before the first meteor can fall on your land. That can be no meteors, or no land destruction from already fallen meteors.

2) Improved pathfinding and target assignment, at least for defenders; right now, these two are the causes of stupidly losing the game.

3) If the issues 1) and 2) are somehow dealt with, the game will become too easy, so maybe increasing the meteor rate and/or the destruction speed with time would be nice.

4) Some text hints on what to build at start, to make learning the game pretty easy.

5) Different levels with more than one piece of land and different starting locations.

Thanks for the game, I really hope to see a more polished version of this entry!

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 5

All Yar Bits Arr Belong To Us
by codnik
all reviews of All Yar Bits Arr Belong To Us

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

When you run the game, you are instantly put to control a schematic ship, after a slight movement towers around you start to shoot at you, and pretty soon you die, getting some 8-digit score which makes you suspect that someone forgot to initialize a variable. After that, the game ends. Duh.

Well, give it a dozen tries, and you start to get what\'s going on there. Your ship should move almost all the time, or the towers kill you easily. You, in turn, shoot at them from your side guns and eventually destroy them. You can also destroy the yellow blocks to get more room for shooting, and loot the brown squares which are guarded by guns; when destroyed, the squares let out a bunch of colorful binary numbers, some of which should be caught, others avoided. Reading the readme.txt file helps to determine their effects.

Towers, blocks and squares all repair when certain time has passed, so you should destroy and loot the squares really fast. Your life ends when either you have no guns (a pair of guns is destroyed by each hit from the towers) or run out of torrents (the blue binary numbers which you should beat out and catch). That\'s not at all easy; after trying again and again for about 30 minutes, I only managed to completely loot one base out of six. So, I don\'t know if something good shall happen if you manage to destroy them all, which is kind of un-probable, given the fact that they repair fast, and you usually run out of torrents even faster.

All in all, this game is much fun once you grasp the rules. Often lasting less than a minute, it is very intense and keeps the player alert and active all the time. Graphics are rather simplistic, but the music, sound and the tower guards shouting text messages at you contribute to the active spirit of the gameplay.

The ratings follow.

Artistical: 4.
+ The insulting takes place in text messages. That\'s not exactly a dialog since you can only answer with your guns, but it counts for the artistical rule requirement.
- Graphics are a bit too simplistic - well, you don\'t have much time to look at them anyway.
+ However, music and sound make a nice game atmosphere.

Technical: 5.
+ atan2 is obviously used by the towers.
- As for the world domination rule, you can just find a simple storyline for it in the readme.txt file.
+ Hmm, actually, losing so fast, you do get the feel of being dominated.
+ The game runs smoothly, all parts are well integrated.

Genre: 5.
+ With that shooting sound and the torrents popping out of the bases, you actually get the destruction feeling.
+ Conforming to the genre rule, it is all about destruction, and fast.

Overall: 4.
- The game is a bit hard to start with. Some introductory level or in-game tips would have been nice.
+ Besides that, once you get the rules, it is very fun, fast and addictive.
+ Graphics (simplistic but sufficient), music and sound are all in place and serve their purpose.
- Other things to wish for are some menu and a scoreboard; a score without a scoreboard doesn\'t make much sense.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 5 Genre 5

The Road to World Domination: Made Simple
by BigBrain
all reviews of The Road to World Domination: Made Simple

Review by Gassa all reviews by Gassa

The game starts with some lines of text coming very slowly into existence, which is just ugly when you expect some action. Fortunately, it can be skipped by pressing ESC key.

Then, you see a level with four small blue spheres, two of which occasionally shoot tiny bullets, producing a sound. At first, it is kind of difficult to get what is going on, since everything is so small.

However, after playing for a while or reading the readme.txt file, you realize that two other spheres can be controlled by two players, and that\'s when the game starts to be fun. Single player however is not much of a game since the AI players don\'t move, only shoot. On the other side, playing with a human opponent can be very entertaining.

What you can do in the game is move, aim, jump and shoot, causing damage to your opponents and destroying inner walls of the level. Sometimes you can move or jump through walls, and moving to vertical walls lifts you to the top. These physics twists make the game even more challenging.

On the downside, mastering the game is hard and not very convenient since everything is just so small, and understanding the physics also takes quite a bit of time. Some better and bigger visualization, as well as visualizing the recharge time, would have been nice. Faster terrain destruction depending on the level should also be considered.

Well, to the rating part.

Artistical: 4.
- There seem to be no insulting dialogs in the game. Just slowness of the introductory scrolling text, which is not bad enough, and the text for winning or losing the game.
+ However, this is more than compensated by an excellent readme file, with a storyline, playing instructions and FAQ.

Technical: 4.
+ atan2 is obviously useful for the AI players.
+ Five different levels bring more strategies to the game.
- However, the game characters, i.e. spheres, are just too small to get a good feeling of them.

Genre: 5.
+ Having picked the genre, which is a game in the spirit of Scorch or Tanks, the obvious destruction part is, of course, to make the terrain destructable. That is well implemented.
- That might seem a bit too simple and worn, but fits the game well.

Overall: 4.
+ The game is actually fun, playable and replayable with two players.
+ The physics twist is sufficient to make it an interesting variation of an old plot.
- On the other side, trying it in single player can get you bored quickly.
- Also, characters are too small to get the good feeling of them.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 5