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Reviews

Showing 2 reviews by Mankarse [2012]. all reviews

DrachenVeer
by inde
all reviews of DrachenVeer

Review by Mankarse all reviews by Mankarse

Artistic
The hand-drawn graphics were well made and animated beautifully. It's unfortunate not all of the graphics were implemented. All of the elements fit with each other artistically, being greyscale pencil drawings.
There was no sound.
The dragon requirement was clearly in the game (player character).

Technical
Parallax scrolling was implemented, but wasn't quite set up properly (different layers at different depths moved at the same rate, and layers between them moved at a different rate). The bonus rule was invoked to swap the progress saving rule for a rule requiring hand-drawn graphics. The prime number rule was implemented by making all the attacks do prime number quantities of damage. We did not notice this until we read the readme, but it seems like it was a fairly popular way to implement this rule.

Genre
There was clear anachronism here, although it was really just an artistic feature (cavemen in the foreground, and a high rise building in the background).

Overall:
The game was not particularly fun, because the hit detection was so poorly implemented that your attacks would fail have any effect most of the time. The animations and graphics were well implemented, and were the main redeeming features of this game. The number of libraries required to get the game running was enormous.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 3 Genre 4

Wael the Wheel Whale
by SwitchPulse
all reviews of Wael the Wheel Whale

Review by Mankarse all reviews by Mankarse

When we saw the design document for Wael the Wheel Whale, we were instantly convinced this game would be the winner. Nobody could possibly stand up to a concept like this. This story would surely provide much needed insight into the secretly vengeful nature of whales.

Artistic
Wael's graphic and animations were very well implemented. The walk (or wheel) cycle matched up to the ground perfectly, and was very amusing to watch as well. The overall look of the game was simple but worked well together.
There was meant to be music, but unfortunately the .OGGs were corrupted and didn't load (not sure why).
There were some dragons here, so that covered the requirement.

Technical
There was parallax scrolling.
There may have been saving, but it wasn't persistent -- upon death you would go backwards to a point you had progressed to, rather than repeat the level from the start. There was no real way to control where or how far you would go back to though, and no way to load progress.
We could not see any implementation of the prime number rule.
There were several small bugs in the implementation, the most annoying of which being a flawed collision algorithm that would result in an out of bounds exception causing the game to terminate when a particular enemy was killed.

Genre
It looked like the anachronism requirement was halfway implemented, judging from the tanks littered around the level. Perhaps Wael's incredibly futuristic technological augment (the wheel) was meant to provide the genre requirement when combined with the tanks and dragons?

Overall
It's hard to fault a game that contains a wheel whale, but still there are issues with game length, and the generic nature of the gameplay. There was no real way to progress, other than killing everything in your path.
The game was not particularly fun, but it was still playable.

P.S. Please complete this game, we would like to see the president.

Scores: Overall 3 Artistical 4 Technical 2 Genre 2