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Showing 2 reviews for Entry of Jeff Bernard. all reviews

Entry of Jeff Bernard
by jbernard
all reviews of Entry of Jeff Bernard

Review by stevenvi all reviews by stevenvi

The Life and Times of the Sexy Panda:
Journey to the Center of the Death Core

This is a cute little game, though the concept is a bit simple. It begins with the \"cuddlegators\" explaining how the game works. You walk around a room and collect the alligators, while viruses move around and destroy floor tiles. If one hits you, you must start the level over. Some of the alligators will babel about \"The Doctor\" and other things. They also will occasionally insult you. I personally ignored these messages, because they didn\'t really affect the game one way or another.

After a few levels, you will encounter a new type of character, the repair droids. These replace the tiles that the viruses remove. Waiting around for them can be a nightmare, and really isn\'t particularly fun. It is very common that you will get trapped by the viruses either by isolating you from the rest of the level, or isolating an alligator, rendering the level unbeatable. Pressing Tab will restart the level if this happens.

Eventually you will come to a level which requires ten alligators be rescued. I could not beat this level no matter how many times I tried. Then I accidentally hit Esc and it closed the game without confirmation. Doh.

Artistically, I thought this game was cute. The panda\'s eyes were a little strange, but I suppose that can be overlooked. The art isn\'t just scribbles made with mspaint, so that\'s always a plus. There was definitely some insulting going on, though I didn\'t really get any feeling of world domination. There was something about \"The Doctor\", but since no readme file was provided I didn\'t understand the story.

Technically, the game works. The check for interaction with an alligator is a little strange in some places, so perhaps that could be fixed. Was atan2 used? This is rather hard to tell from just playing a game. After glancing, my suspicion was correct: the enemies use atan2 for an angle, to make them point towards a \"target\". Unfortunately, the target is completely random, thus the use of atan2 is also just a mostly random angle. Kind of against the spirit of the rule in my opinion.

I wish that there were jumping in the game. That would have made it much easier to avoid the empty tiles. This is the game\'s major technical flaw. As was stated above, you can get trapped and must start the levels over. That really isn\'t fun to me.

Genre. Well, tiles are destroyed. They talk about \"The Doctor\" wanting to destroy the world or something... I think. So the theme is at least present. However, it is not particularly at the forefront of the game. The game is more of a race against time to get the alligators, and destruction is the reasoning used to collect them. Since it isn\'t really explained, at least not as far as I was able to get, I didn\'t see much of any of the TINS themes expressed.

Overall, the game is cute. It is not interesting to play more than once, however, because you must play through every level to get back to where you left off last time. This was common in games many years ago, but the feeling of this game is different. It isn\'t like advancing through the stages in Pacman, where you try for the highest score each time. It\'s collecting the same alligators for the sole purpose of advancing to the next level.

With some touch-ups, this game could turn into a fun little pastime, however in it\'s TINS state it still needs a bit of work.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 3 Technical 3 Genre 2

Review by Alvren all reviews by Alvren

Here we are put on control of a super sexy panda (?) with a mission to the center of the death core, as stated in the fun, good-looking title screen. Right in the beginning nothing of that seems clear, of course, but as the game progresses and you rescue the cuddlegators (a version of Alex the Allegator with added cuddlability?) you get to know little by little about the story of the mad scientist who wanted to conquer the world and then... well, let\'s not spoil it here!

You need to rescue the cuddlegators before you leave each floor by stepping in the blue tile, avoiding the viruses that are destroying the death core . You don\'t want them to mistake you for death core.

Interesting game! I\'ll make it a list of positive and negative points to make things more clear.
Negative points first:

- Can\'t skip dialog; this is not a big one, but it gets to you when you restart the game for the Xth time and already memorized the lines.
- Walking vertically and horizontally is perfect, but the diagonal walking is not parallel to the isometric tiles. It does generate some confusion since a lot of the time you\'ll need to move as fast as you can and avoid all collision.
- No readme; the controls are basic and beyond intuitive, but it\'s nice to have something to read about the game at least.

Now for the positive points:

- Particles, they add a lot to the otherwise not-full-of-movement look of the game. Particles should keep eyes happy and not make the screen a colorful mess. These are a good example of both qualities.
- Good-looking dialog; the \"typed-in\" effect always makes it more interesting than a single blit of a message to the screen. Also, the dialog windows have nice transparency and are not always in the same spot on the screen, all adding
to the movement and making the whole experience less boring.
- Obscure story: actually I should put this under both negative and positive, but I\'ll keep it to this since it\'s much more positive than negative after all. The game plot is obscure and makes no sense in the beginning, but since it\'s revealed little by little by the rescued cuddlegators it can be forgiven. This kind of story-telling gives it a better feel and even adds a tiny bit to the replay more than a story-in-the-readme-only kind of thing (which is exactly what I did).

Conclusion: it\'s a nice game, but the gameplay consisting basically of playing a level and dying until you memorize the correct order to rescue the cuddlegators makes it kind of boring. Adding a few more elements to gameplay could change that drastically, and I guess that\'s the usual damage lack of time causes on games. At least it\'s exactly what happened to mine as well... ;)

Rules: destruction is nice and happening all the time. The sound and particles help transmit the feeling, as opposed to a simply disappearing tile. World domination and mad scientists are the plot of the game. The insulting dialog is delivered by the very-grateful cuddlegators in a fun way. Atan2 was used in the particle generator effect (from what it seemed to me after a few Ctrl+Fs given the lack of a readme.txt), but not like I really understand what it does anyway. All the rules were implemented well enough in the game.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 2