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Irrelevant reviews of Competition games

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2017 11:20 am
by Punch
Hi, since the most joy you can have after creating a game is having people play it and have fun, I'll try to play and 'review' all games submitted to this year's coding competition. Of course this has no official capacity, is not related to the compo's judging process and is solely my (bad) opinions.

#1 - Filthy Kitchen - https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=14936

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This one's a pretty interesting game. You go around in a gigantic kitchen avoiding poltergeist kitchenware and throwing your boomerang fly swatter into pesky flies. The main protagonist reminds me of Filthy Frank (pictured), wonder if it was an inspiration for the character + game design? :lol:

Overall this is a solid game, all game mechanics work as you would expect, and you even get to play with an interesting combo system: when you toss your flyswatter, it will eventually try to fly back to you... however you can dodge it with no trouble, and as long as you keep dodging it, it will fly back and forth, killing any flies that happens to be in the way. Dodging it while simultaneously trying to make it hit flies is a fun little challenge. The end boss was an unexpected but nice touch!

Graphics wise it's ok, the kitchen tends to look a little bit empty at times and the perspective employed is a little bit confusing but it's not much of an issue. Most sprites are OK and some are very good (the grape and broom sprites, for example).

This game is simple but fun, and the only reason why I didn't try it again is that there might be a bug somewhere that always prevents me from getting into level 3. In almost all my playthroughs I never got to trigger the broom at the end of level 2, not sure if I missed a fly or two but it's impossible to know since you cannot backtrack once you go past the kitchen sink. A counter showing the # of flies left would have been nice. Also, in the boss level I felt like collision was a little bit off, but since I've got to it only once I'm not going to comment much on it.

Overall, this game is rated GOOD.

Playthrough video showing all levels (I think?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHWzBxOS-qU

Re: Irrelevant reviews of Competition games

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2017 12:37 pm
by Punch
#2 - Flappy Jack - https://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=14961

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Mamma mia! I'm just assuming that the chef from Flappy's Diner is italian. Maybe french? Anyway, this is one of those arcade style games that repeat the same scene over and over, only with slight difficulty increases. I probably made it sound like this game is bad, but au contraire, mon frere, as this game is quite addictive. A chef tosses pancakes over the counter and it's up to titular Jack to get them before they hit the ground and serve it to their clientele. Sometimes the chef also throws stuff like maple syrup and a white thing that looks like butter (sorry, I don't really know how americans/canadians eat pancake even though I stayed a year in the US, so correct me if I'm wrong about the butter thing :lol:) that you can optionally get on top of your pancake stack for bonus points (but you should try to catch them anyway as they make you slip if they're on the floor and you step on them). There are some nice touches like having the pancakes not snap into a perfect stack when they fall on top of it and the music speeding up when stuff gets serious.

There's nothing much that can be said about this game really. The graphics are good, it controls well, the music is also good, and while things get very fast starting from stage 20 it never feels like it's unfair when you lose. The game gets a little bit old after a while so it's a pretty fun game to pick up and play casually but not for very long sessions. When you get 100,000 points you get the ending (animation pictured above), but since I'm bad at it I never got close to it... thankfully there's a built-in cheat if you're bad at it but still want to see the ending.

Game's rated GOOD!

A small playthrough from level 10 to 19, got almost half the required score for the ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBpMmxobPy4

Re: Irrelevant reviews of Competition games

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2017 12:56 pm
by lidnariq
Why not include links back to the forum posts of the games?

Re: Irrelevant reviews of Competition games

Posted: Thu Feb 02, 2017 2:14 pm
by Punch
lidnariq wrote:Why not include links back to the forum posts of the games?
That's a good idea. Done :)

#3 - Karate Kick (カラテ*キック) - viewtopic.php?f=32&t=15476

This is also a 1-screen arcade game just like Flappy Jack, which also focus on player reaction time, but the implementation is totally different. You play as a shirtless, long-haired karate master who seems to have grown so skilled in the art that he handicaps himself by using only his legs and feet to fight wanna-be challengers that come in droves to the center of his dojo. Unfortunately, so much focus on the leg part of karate has made him quite vulnerable to side attacks, not to mention attacks from behind. The challengers can be dispatched easily since they cannot handle one hit of your awesome karate power, but they're dangerous when attacking in group from all sides.

This reminds me of an earlier competition game called Slappin'. You turn the character into four directions in order to dispatch the baddies, you get hit if you're not facing a karateka. This is actually a very charming game, with graphics and music that fit the "asian" theme, and I specially like the DPCM samples employed. Sadly, unlike Flappy Jack, I feel like the game eventually gets too fast to make gameplay viable... again this is my opinion and maybe I'm just bad, but it doesn't feel fun at all to press diagonals at very fast speeds. I got to 199 points and I don't know if there's something like an ending.

Outside of that this is a polished, charming game so it gets a GOOD rating.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seqRlR1xXAI

Re: Irrelevant reviews of Competition games

Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 11:12 am
by Punch
I've decided to stop ranking the games I review for many reasons. I'll just post my impressions of the competition games for now on.

Next is Cheril the Goddess! I'll do a write up once I can but here's a playthrough in advance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veMJzuuMdG4

Re: Irrelevant reviews of Competition games

Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 1:23 pm
by dougeff
unlike Flappy Jack, I feel like the game eventually gets too fast
Try starting Flappy Jack on level 51. It's fast. Really fast. Levels go up to 99. I've tested level 99. It's technically beatable...but it's much faster than level 51.

Re: Irrelevant reviews of Competition games

Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 1:34 pm
by dougeff

Re: Irrelevant reviews of Competition games

Posted: Wed May 17, 2017 9:02 pm
by Myask
Neat stuff.

Jupiter Scope II was graphically wowing, having that "3.5th gen" look, but had little beyond that.

Re: Irrelevant reviews of Competition games

Posted: Wed May 17, 2017 10:05 pm
by Punch
Wish I had time to finish writing these small reviews, most of the games are well deserving of one.