Chutup reviews all the PGC entries

That's right, I played 'em all (except the ones that didn't work)and now I'm gonna say what I think about them. Hopefully this won't turn out like it did with Nightshade at the VGNG compo... Lips Sealed

I've tried to give constructive criticism where I can, and just remember that it's all my opinion Grin

. In no particular order:

1. Crime City
I couldn’t really get to grips with this game. I never managed to catch a single killer. Nice presentation though.

2. Night Raveler and the Heartbroken Uruguayans
I didn’t understand exactly how the game works, but I figure you have to cut the weak lines to make more strong lines? As a Passage-style art-game it works pretty well. Nice graphics too.

3. The Last Colonists
I couldn’t get this one to work.

4. Metal Gear: The Roguelike
I… I can’t play Roguelikes. I just can’t.
Also I just discovered that this wasn't finished anyway. So I could have just ignored it and never revealed my secret phobia. Oh well.

5. A Punnett Shooter
Although this was obviously not complete at the end of the compo, I still find a few flaws in it. The actual shooting is too easy because of the lock-on feature. And the punnett square doesn’t really work. The idea is ‘Whatever you kill, you’ll fight more of.’ But as far as I can tell, you have to kill everything, so you have no control over the evolution of the enemies.
Keep working on it and it could be good!

6. My Digital Self Expression
This game was unambitious, but accomplished what it intended. The flowers were interesting to look at for a moment or two.

7. DropTD
This was a good game. Nice abstract graphics, and the frenzied dragging of files is lots of fun. I kind of broke the game eventually when I found a file that made a turret with no blocks around it. But that’s half the fun, isn’t it? Hunting for better and better files to use.

8. Dyson
This game was excellent. The graphics were beautiful, the strategy was simple but involving, and the Katamari Damacy-style increase in scale was great. But for such a long game, I think it should have a save function.

9. Enelin 10
The abstract graphics looked quite nice, but the game lacked direction. There was no objective or even a score. If you judge the player by how long he survives, it’s quite easy to just run away from all the enemies. I also found a weird glitch, which was either an invisible enemy or bullets that spawned out of nowhere.

10. Faith, to a certain degree
This pen, paper and card role-playing game was quite fun! It obviously had more development time than Super Mario vs. Programming in China. The gameplay was well-thought-out and despite your constant apologies for its complexity, it was actually quite easy to understand.
I did think it was too hard, though. It's very easy to get a dangerous event early in the game when you've had no chance to build anything, and you're screwed before you know what's happening. I guess that's the roguelike style, though Angry

. In the end I ~~cheated~~ used my Ring of Limited Wish to escape death a few times. It got a little repetitive because the floors progressed slowly and I was getting the same events over and over. The points system is also rather weighted toward you being a righteous ruler.
Funny how I don't want to play a game where the player is an @ symbol, but I'm fine with a game where the player's minions are all ace cards.

11. KrebsWelte
I didn’t like this as much as some of cactus’ other games, but it was still pretty good. The atmosphere was excellent, and reminded me a lot of Dr. Seuss. The rampaging elephants were the best part for me.

12. DragonStabber
This game was simple, but awesome. The animation was slick and the Conan vibe was cool. It didn’t have much depth but who cares? My only real gripe is that there wasn’t much procedural content to be found.

13. Laser Bunny
This game was fun at first, but got repetitive. However, the graphics were very slick, and the new enemies helped to give it a bit of variety.

14. Large Hadron Collider
I couldn’t work out how to play this game. The drums certainly affected the objects in some way, but it was too esoteric for me to understand. I couldn’t beat a single level.

15. Loboton
This game was a lot of fun. The music was great, and the procedural faces looked really good. The only thing that pissed me off was the way the faces would explode as they died and spray shit all over you. Maybe I’m just too weak though.

16. Legend of the Tomb of Fate
I have to admit I don’t go in for textual adventures much, never mind textual RPGs, but I gave this game a try and the PG elements seemed pretty good. Comissioning items was especially interesting. I couldn’t enjoy the battles though. I was raised on the N64, I need GRAPHICS, dammit!

17. Madah’s PG Game
This game was fun, and the PG was quite impressive. The graphics were rather uninspired though… as is the name.

18. Minus
This game was fun, with great graphics, especially the hand-painted (?) title screen.

19. MMORPG Tycoon
Somehow I couldn’t get into this game. All the different options were just overwhelming, though it didn’t help that there was a bit of lag on my old computer. There seems to be a lot of depth though.

20. Mujakwi
This game was great. The combination of shmup action and Metroid-style exploring was very addictive. Some of the planets were also hellishly difficult, though at least I was warned, right? If you wanted to improve this game, it would be good to give it some kind of objective other than earning more money.

21. Public Transit
This game was pretty fun at first. However, the random encounters were very difficult, for me at least, and soon I had lost most of my money to tigers, lawyers and such. I also couldn’t work out how to deliver messages. I would go to the designated shop but nothing seemed to happen.

22. Rescue: The Beagles
This was fun. At first I got annoyed at how easily you could die from falling, but ultimately that made the game much more interesting. Leaping between the three planes/levels was fun. And the graphics were really cute.

23. RND Game in Space
This game felt unfinished. In particular, the way the enemies just disappeared made the action feel rather hollow.

24. Diaspora
(My own game) It’s rather unpolished and gets repetitive pretty quickly, but it was my first game and I think I did pretty well.

25. Running Bomb
It took me a while to work out what I was supposed to do, but when I did, it was good fun!… until I repeatedly got stuck inside the wall, bouncing around on the outside looking in.

26. Self Destruct
Considering how quickly it was made, this game is very polished. It’s one of the fastest shmups I’ve ever played, but I’m not really a shmup connoisseur like some indies.

27. SinSurfing
Is this some kind of exx enn eyy??
Sorry, I couldn’t run it.

28. Space Cat on Mutant Planet
This game was good fun. The graphics were neat and the exploration was very intriguing, especially considering it was all PG. The jetpack made it especially enjoyable. It could have done with more sounds though.

29. Space Shot
This game was very amusing, but the core gameplay was fun too. It could have done with more of an objective, though, but I guess part of the story was how pointless it was.

30. Test Pilot
I liked it better when it was a demo called Ghetto Planes. Most of the planes I made couldn’t even get off the ground, and when they did, there was still a lack of objectives, though setting records was quite interesting.

31. The Germinator
I couldn’t get this to work.

32. Transport
This game was seriously weird. I had no idea what I was doing, even whether I was playing online or locally. However the music was good and the fucked-up creatures populating the world were awesome. Together they gave it a very creepy, surreal atmosphere which I liked.

33. Watson
This was obviously a rushed job, but it was kind of funny.

34. Wall of the Words
I liked this game a lot. It was easy to pick up but had quite a bit of depth as well. Toward the end of each level it got quite tense despite its slow pace. It could have done with some sound, but it’s not essential.

35. Everyone Loves Active 2
A very well-made shooter. The music and snippets of dialogue gave it a good atmosphere.

36. Apophenia
Quite good when it was good, but other times it would be impossible to win or impossible to lose. It was very ambitious to procedurally generate the core mechanics of the game, and it worked out pretty well.

37. Apples and Oranges
This game is great fun and very addictive. The different modes give it some good variety. My only problem is that there are far fewer matches for letters than there are for colours of types – or at least it seems that way. Maybe I’m just too dum to see them?

38. Artifical Nature
A fun shooter with excellent graphics. However, it’s not really in the spirit of the contest. The idea was to use PG to make the game different each time, but as far as I can tell, you’ve only used it to reduce file size. Still a good game, though.

39. Box Breaker
It doesn’t work for me… much. It loads, but nothing I do seems to have any effect.

40. Because it’s fun, Fay!
This game was great at first. The graphics were slick and the gameplay very interesting, although it was a bit easy. The final boss, though, I thought was stupid. I understand it was a joke of sorts, but I would have preferred a more traditional ending to the game.

41. Biocosm
It doesn’t work, probably because my computer’s too weak. Nice music though.

42. Sesame Seeds
I couldn’t get the final version to work. It downloaded as a single file, its file type described simply as ‘File’. Said file did not respond to standard game-start procedures such as clicking.

43. Bulletswarm
This game was obviously unfinished, but the graphics already looked quite good. I would have liked a better understanding of how the swarm reacts to my movement. I was mostly just waving the mouse around and hoping that the swarm would hit something.

44. Conway’s Game of Bigotry
This is one of my favourite games from the contest. I’d never heard of Conway’s Game of Life before and this game is a great introduction. I’ve only played by myself, and never actually managed to hit the enemy more times that I hit myself, but hopefully soon I will be able to abduct some more mortals and test it out with the full two players.

45. The Adventures of Charles Dumbbell (Demo)
This was a great concept, and excellent graphics, but weighed down by glitches. One glitch, actually, that would play the punching noise over and over again, causing terrible lag. There were also many niggling problems. By having two different types of block, you imply that only the weaker-looking block can be punched through, when in actual fact they can all be destroyed. The cutscene at the start is long and pointless. When you die, the game exits, which is annoying because it forces you to watch the cutscene again. Playing as a T-rex head and tapping shift constantly is very annoying.
Whew! That’s just about it. I’m only pointing these things out because I think the game could be really good when it’s finished.

46. Compendium
A very well-made game, but every level I tried eventually became way too hard for a shmup noob like me. The decision to only use quotes from the poem that were in quotation marks was probably necessary, but nevertheless it meant that all my favourite poems produced levels with totally silent enemies.

47. Darby’s Run
I think this game needs a lot of work. The graphics are nice, and I like the concept of shooting the apples to make them grow bigger, but right now the gameplay is very frustrating. It’s too easy to accidentally cause an apple to drop in a place that blocks you off, and you have to wait ages for the apple to disappear. It’s also way too punishing to send the player back to the start of the game after one hit.

48. Triagulon
I was missing a dll or something.

49. Maze Em Up
This game was insane. Did you intend for it to be procedurally generated IN REAL TIME or did it just work out that way? Either way it’s awesome.

50. ZICZAC
A very nice Tetris-like puzzler, with beautiful clean abstract graphics, and a unique (as far as I know) gameplay mechanic. It’s not really any more PG than Tetris, but it’s still fun.

51. K2
One day, I really will get XNA, I swear.

Wow, 51 finished entries? Can you believe it? How many were there at the VGNG? It was 40-something IIRC.
Congratulations to everyone, this was the first compo I participated in and it was awesome. Beer!