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-Image thumbnails are currently disabled. Sorry. -Friday, March 27 2009 Edit: Fixed the thumbnails.

Reviewing games I tell'ya

I've been itching to begin a journal of game reviews for BYOND, and for this first post I will include a template of how I will review the games, as well as go over some of my personal standards* as to what makes a good game. I will be reviewing mostly exclusively, meaning, games that DON'T completely suck and I've found to be of overall quality and give the BYOND community a good name. I may choose to look at a gay game or two just to show people what to avoid.

Heh, I can already see people bashing my intelligence and experience with games, so I will briefly describe why I think I'm fit for the job. I've been developing games for about a year now, although that isn't a substantial amount of time, I feel as though it is enough to understand the challenges that come with designing. I won't compare your games to games to ones made my companies in the industry. I'm aware that developing for most people on here is a hobby; very few teams consist of more than 2 or 3 members.

I consider myself a novice gamer with limited gaming experience, I'm not a hardcore gamer who owns a library of countless games. I don't believe this makes me less able to review games, as I will represent a vast cast of casual gamers.

This is a quick ''rubric'' of how I will score games.


...

Gameplay



Quality of play experience, user-friendliness of interface
...


This is a biggie. In my opinion a big part of a good game is one that ' is easy to play. Crowded interfaces, redundant options, unclear controls, are all unacceptable. When designing games ''Achieve depth through simplicity'' is my ultimate goal and will expect this from the games I review. I'm not a fan of games that require extensive reading of manuals to play. I feel as though you should be able to firstly judge the game by just jumping in and playing, and then decide whether or not to expend your understanding of the game depending on initial game play.


User friendly Interface
Self explanatory, it needs to be easy to use. The games I find enjoyable don't feel like Flight simulator to someone who isn't interested in that type of thing.


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Here we have an example of what I think is a messy interface, and Plunder Gnome, an example of clean user-friendly interface.




Game goal
A game isn't a game without a goal, the goal of a game must be obvious and easy to achieve at first. This shouldn't take much reading.


In PMUR, the darkness, closed doors, and Enemy monsters make the immediate goal Obvious without having to read anything.



Fun
Usually, when a game has the above two categories, it makes some type of fun. Lasting fun or ''addicting'ness as I like to call it is defined by more than just those two.



...

Presentation



Quality of graphics, sounds, etc.


...



I'm very critical about this. Most of you know me as an artist, and because of this, I will normally refuse to play a game that looks like dung. Don't be quick to think I'm unfair, what I expect from the Presentation of a game is fairly simple.


Graphical Priority
In Illustration, the most important part of your piece has to stand out from the rest in some way. The same is for video games. Characters and items you interact with NEED to be easily distinguishable from the background elements of a game. This is what I mainly expect from the graphics. I understand not every team has a good pixel artist, but you don't need to have a high quality base to get this right.


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A mock up by Adam Atomic displays good use of Graphical priority. This allows the player to easily discern another Player, Enemy, or Interactables such as ladders.




Audio and Graphical representation
Essentially what the role of art in a game is, it's using, at times symbolic (art is actually nothing but symbols), images to interpret what's going on. When a group of characters are being damaged by an enemy, usually every single one affected goes into a ''flinch'' state. This is what graphical representation means, using images to make the game easy to understand. Same goes with sound, hearing an Alert serves the same purpose.


Click for Full View

In this Fighter game, it's easy to tell the attack was successful and who's on the receiving end of that massive blow.




Sound
Graphics aren't the only things that make game, sound sets the mood of the game. Unfortunately this is '“very- hard to come by with the indie games on BYOND. It's VERY hard to find someone capable of composing good music. I won't penalize a game for not having background music, but I -will- give it high props if it does.



...

Originality



How original is the concept or style of play? ...


The way will measure originally is kind of simple. I don't like replicas of other games. If you're going to make something that's been done before, bring '“something- new to it. Really, what'â„¢s the point of playing a BYOND version of Age of Empires when I can just go out and buy an older version for 15 bucks that will probably be 10x better than whatever a 3 person team can come up with. No, no.. Just no. GAY, that's what it is. GAY. Even If it's a casual game, look at Kajika's Duel monsters, he separated Shadows games from normal games and restricting a good number of cards from normal games and adds a very cool sense of originality to the game, since I can now play with a cool warrior theme deck and not get totally pwnt by Hybrid Decks in a normal game. You can't do that with other Yu-gi-oh games, making a '“fan- game original isn't impossible**.


Originality of Concept

Highscores for those games that make something completely new, I won't penalize games that try to remake an existing type of game.

Originality of Style
Always bring something new to your game. In most cases it's absolutely stupid to try and port an existing game to BYOND, since I could just go out and play the other game which will most likely be of better quality.


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Foomer's Tomb Explorer Is an Awesome example of an original game.





...

Overall



what is my general impression of the game? ...




This averages all the scores and ad a total of 1-2 points for replayability. Let's look at what the numbers for the scores mean to me:


Scoring a 0

Game does not include aspects of the category, or subcategory.

Scoring a 1-2
Game includes limited number of aspects from the category and does so poorly. In other words.. It sucks ass.

Scoring between 3-4
Game includes a good number of things I'm looking for the category, but doesn't really ''master'' or execute them cleanly.

Scoring between 5-6
Game includes a good number of things I'm looking for the category, and execute them cleanly.
Scoring a 7-8
Game includes all of the things I'm looking for the category, and execute most of them cleanly.

Scoring a 9-10
Game includes all of the things I'm looking for the category, and execute them cleanly.




So yeah, that's how I will be scoring the games. I'm thinking I might do video reviews as well as Interviews with the developers of the games if I really like it. If you want to make sure you don't miss anything, add this blog to your favorites, this way it alerts you whenever I make a new blog post.




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I'd like to hear what, in your opinion, are some of the better games of BYOND so that I can check them out and possibly review them. Just comment with a list!



* Reviews are always opinions. The differences between a good review and a bad one, is whether or not you agree with the makeup of the reviewer's opinion. If my opinions don't align with your own, do not take offence'¦ we are all different. It would suck if all the flowers in a field were the same color.
**I won't be reviewing fan games much, since I feel as if it doesn't add much to the BYOND community as marketable product. You can't have Sprite edits in a portfolio when trying to score a freelance job, same goes for Fan-games.

It must be fun having to repost this 9000 times.
Keeth wrote:
It must be fun having to repost this 9000 times.

I was just telling Verm I must of spent more than 8 hours writing/posting/editing this.

So I'm not even going to bother fixing the links for the thumbnails. lol.
Fix the broken images fella!

Nice though ;)
Chris-g1 wrote:
Fix the broken images fella!

Nice though ;)

Fixed the thumbnails. But now all of the Unicode stuff is broken. Even though this was all edited and made on notepad. How fun.

Oh well.

If anyone doesn't find this helpful, mind explaining why?