Score: 10

"Certainly novel--that's rare"

submission: Epic Battle Fantasy

date: May 6, 2009

I can't said I've played any other RPG with quite that feeling of tension that comes from going from fight to fight to fight, etc., with no surcease. Goku (Undead Goku?) is a disproportionately difficult boss (used about 90% of my items on him, 10% on everyone else), but I was relieved to find out the he was the final one, so it was okay ;p.

Score: 5

"Not user friendly"

submission: Sudoku Omega

date: May 6, 2009

This is about the least user-friendly implementation of sudoku that I could imagine. For one thing, no notes are possible, which becomes more than a little tedious for the later levels (*you* try aligning all those numbers in notepad...). Also, often when I clicked on a square, the possible numbers would flash and then disappear again. It seems that there is a magic sweet spot that you have to hit to get it to stay.

Just a few modifications would alleviate these issues: the ability to add multiple numbers to a square, and keyboard controls (arrow keys and/or tab to navigate and entering numbers directly singly or multiply).

It appears that there is at least one bug left in puzzle generation: the solutions to puzzle 15 and 16 were *exactly* the same (rotated 360 degrees, apparently).

273651894
419823567
586794123
641378259
798265341
325149678
167982435
934516782
852437916

I was so happy to finally get bonus points on 16 ;p, though it took me one third of the time just to enter all the numbers I had in my scratchpad from the last puzzle using the mouse.

As an example, I include an intermediate state of my notepad workings on the above puzzle. It looks aligned in the preview box, though sadly I have little confidence in it remaining so after I submit.

*************************************
***********
*27 27 39 *6 5 1 *8 39 4
*14 148 69 *78 2 3 *5 679 679
*5 18 36 *78 9 4 *1 2 367
*************************************
***********
*346 34 1 *39 7 8 *2 359 359
*2367 9 8 *23 6 5 *37 4 1
*237 237 5 *1 4 29 *6 3789 3789
*************************************
***********
*13 6 7 *29 8 29 *4 135 35
*9 13 4 *5 13 67 *37 678 2678
*8 5 2 *4 13 67 *9 1367 367
*************************************
***********

That is a bit much to keep inside my head at one time...

Score: 6

"I like the puzzle aspect..."

submission: Rainbowsphere

date: May 5, 2009

But repeating a whole puzzle over and over because I miss some series of jumps onto a platform less than the width of the ball is incredibly annoying, and I don't think making me land on such platforms in series really adds anything to the gameplay experience--especially considering the very unnatural feeling ball physics, which can make jumping rather frustrating. Also, it seems that the minimum distance that you can roll is such that there is only one valid position that you can roll you over them.

Rework the physics, and this game might not make me want to do violence against the authors in the later levels.

Score: 7

"It's okay..."

submission: Generic Defense Game

date: April 17, 2009

This game is alright for a laugh, but it is rather poorly balanced as a defense game. The turret defense is ridiculously hard compared to the shooter defense (ultimate turret defense was the only one where I managed to get any sort of decent upgrading going, got to day 6 on normal); that could be rebalanced fairly easily by making all of the upgrades/purchases much cheaper in the turret defenses.

Score: 9

"Not really winnable, but very enjoyable"

submission: Azul Baronis

date: April 17, 2009

The farthest I managed to get in this game was a seventh battle (The fifth battle was rather closely run, I had to destroy the station with my only ship, a destroyer with 2 shields...), score of about 60k; it seems that often the outcome of the battles are not really in your control at all, especially since you can't direct the tetsudons, to keep yours from getting into trouble.

As everyone else has said, it might be nice if you could issue general strategic directives (e.g. "attack the red!" "Avoid the tetsudon!" etc.), to make 4-way melees a little less random. Of course, if you could attack the enemy intelligently, the enemy fleets would also have to be upgraded in AI so that they didn't destroy each other while you waited to mop up the remnants.

Long live the psychotic emperor!

Score: 8

"Fun Maps"

submission: Besieged

date: April 16, 2009

The five "scenario" maps were quite enjoyable, and required diverse strategies to clear. The time trial (sixth map), on the other hand...the difficulty ramps up radically around 10-11 minutes--the blocks of cannon, they do nothing! Splash damage weapons seem to be conspicuously missing from this defense game, although the separation of gold from production was a nice fairly original touch.

Score: 7

"Hints are pointless"

submission: Tower Core

date: April 16, 2009

The game was pretty enjoyable, although there were a couple points didn't like.

First, the hints were almost totally useless, the few I saw seemed to amount to "interact with the environment in this room." The only hints that would have been useful at the beginning would have been "You can't solve this puzzle yet, try a different tower."

Additionally, after the (very early) realization that each puzzle has to be solved in a different tower, the puzzles themselves lost all challenge, it was just a matter of finding the location of each solution. The logic aspect of each puzzle was fairly trivial, and solution was mechanical. My only real frustration was at the very beginning: trying all 63 valid subsets of the 6 initial gems correctly sited before realizing that it just wasn't going to happen without finding additional materials elsewhere. I thought that after I had successfully brute forced it (which was, of course, impossible), the logic of the puzzle and presumably additional puzzles would suddenly become clear to me. If only I had tried the tower of spirit first, it would have been immediately clear that brute forcing over 78,000 combinations wasn't going to be productive ;p.