Score: 6
"RNG, with the 2 tricky bastards"
date: December 10, 2006
+++ Great main-game tune.
+++ Upbeat theme, of present-making.
++ Spangly stars
+ Fairly impressive transition animation.
+ Drawing and dragging provides some variation...
---------- RNG plays way too big a role in determining difficulty. Most games take 4-9s to complete (generally 5-7). Green dude and thing we need to buff take around 25s though. So success is mainly caused by the RNG not picking those games.
The difference between having to drag 2 pieces (mouse), drag 7 pieces or do the buffing/green man guantlet is too much.
Either have them all uniform difficulty, or ensure they come up an equal amount.
Also, when draggable pieces pop up, they sometimes come into existence already in place.
---- When drawing the limbs for the green figure, doing it or not seemed overly hit and miss.
---- Buffing game is too hard to work out. Everything else is fairly uniform, only requiring dragging or 'drawing'. In this game, I knew I must have to use the rubber-majigie somehow, and it was only after a while of waving it about, to see what it reacted with, that I noticed the slight change in brightness.
What's that thing meant to be, anyway?
--- The way the games are presented in the practice session, I thought there'd be 27. Disappointed to see so few.
-- The custom cursor seems a tiny bit silly when most the games centre around dragging.
!!!!!--- After playing a game, if we try to replay, it just takes us to the end screen, where we may resubmit our score (hence my two identical 300-something scores). So, if I was so inclined, could have submitted the same score 11 times, just for the sake of it.
Surprised no-one mentioned this and it wasn't spotted before submission. Has no-one else tried to replay it?
==
Played 3 times, got a score of 300-ish. Played a few times, quitting if I got the 2 difficult pieces too often. Eventually got 500-something, with the tricky bastards only appearing twice (once as I was finishing).
How many games are there? I saw 8. Mouse, Red soldier, train, jack-in-box, gameboy, pop-gun, green guy with hard-to-draw limbs, thing we buff.
It's good to see the microgame format changed around, with a focus on thematic consistency and the switcharound of no actual time limits (replaced by an overall one).
I did enjoy working out the gamerules after the buffing thing, but the difficulty being so affected by the RNG, with the 2 tricky bastards, just seems game-breaking to me.
Author's Response:
Heh, awesome review :P.
The green dude was supposedly an elf, but yet it kinda messed up.
The arms and legs are really about which order you go (star closest to body first or star furthest from body first?), it's tricky, but you have to get both stars i the right order with no more of a delay than half a second (I didn't program to do that at all, that's pretty much how it turned out :P).
As for the buffer thingy, I was confused as to what you meant, until you referred to the pink thing (which I admit was way to basic for anyone to figure out), was a sponge and the end product was a sleigh (sp?).
There were no bugs on the file I finished, but I uploaded the wrong one and when I went back and uploaded the right one, some freak bugs that weren't there before start happening >_<.
Thanks for the incredible review >_<!
