David says:

Over the course of playing this game, I realized that it didn't actually have anything to do with Christmas. The graphical theme of it is icy, and there are a couple of coniferous trees scattered around, but it's about fighting giant wasps and could have been released any time of the year. The game is a turn-based strategy of sorts, and this entry is mostly comprised of a set of tutorials explaining the mechanics of the game (which often seem thrown in and rather disjoint from each other). Some stages are rather slower than they need to be, too.

It's not all bad - it was one of two submitted games to use an isometric viewpoint, which is a nice touch, and the turn-based engine isn't anything to complain about. One last note - the application is still called "Grid test"!

David says:

This game contains no instructions, and though it isn't exactly difficult to work out what to do, some extra introduction would have made things a bit better. As it is, it's one of those games involving sliding from one block to another and collecting tokens (that happen to be presents, to get into the Christmas theme) in order to advance to the next level.

The execution of it seems a little odd - you are given a limited number of moves per level, denoted by a slightly out-of-place looking counter. There isn't a mechanism to restart a level, and instead you have to run out of moves to begin again. One odd bug is that you can't move down as your first move - this never makes the game impossible, but it is a little annoying.

The sound also had some issues - on the third level, a new music starts up but the old one doesn't stop playing first.

David says:

This is rather a basic game, definitely the quickest effort submitted to the competition. It's a basic present-collecting game with boxes randomly appearing in grid spaces, a time limit, a report of how many presents you collected in each game, and that's about it.

The counters used are just default GFactory red numeric ones, and there hasn't been any special effort made on the graphics or presentation - the gameplay is very basic and the result is determined largely by how many presents actually appear rather than any skill on the player's part.

The author said that this was written in the last hour before the competition deadline, and I'm afraid it shows!

David says:

This is a great effort, and I think I mentioned before that it's a vast improvement over the author's last Christmas entry. The gameplay is a collect-em-up at its heart, but is different enough to stand out from the rest, and the whole thing is well presented with an intro sequence and extensive list of options. In fact, it's tempting to say that there's too much menu in it - you spend a long while setting up the game and reading about it before getting close to actually playing it (though I appreciated the in-jokes along the way).

The whole thing seems to be very Jonny Comics-inspired, both in terms of graphics and of the tone of the game in general. However, it's well put together, the retro-styled theming is consistent throughout, and even though the Christmas theme isn't quite as prevalent in the game as it is in the introduction, it's deserving of a decently high place.

David says:

This is another present-collect-em-up, though I like the slightly more humorous tone of it, with the simple story and Christmas theme kept with cutscenes between the levels. It's a basic "avoid enemies, collect bonuses, get to the exit" game, but what's there is well done. The sound is rather irritating and the arrowed tiles seem strangely rushed compared to the rest of the graphics, but it's definitely not one of the worse games submitted for the competition - the presentation of the storyline saves it from a lower score.

David says:

If there was a "Makes the least sense" award, this game would get it easily - it's completely unclear what's going on from the moment it's started. The entire contents of the zip file is a file called "sc.exe", and there are no instructions or title screen. It just feels unfinished.

I did gather that the idea was to collect presents and get to the chimney on each level, though it's still unclear to me what the rest of the items do (and what "Pounched!" means). The engine is quite good as it handles multiple levels, and it's nice to see another isometric-styled game, but the scrolling is over-the-top and is a bit disorienting for the first few minutes. It always crashed for me after the third level, too.

David says:

Of all the genres to be entered in a Christmas competition, I think that a volleyball game was fairly low on the expected list. This game has a decent engine, and getting the AI to work with it isn't a bad achievement either. It falls down a little while actually playing it - you need lightning reflexes and mouse-keyboard-eye coordination in order to return the ball if it's being aimed at the front row of your team, and if you're using a laptop touchpad (as I was the first time I tried it) it's totally impossible.

The graphics and presentation are decent (with the exception of the horribly pixellated Christmas tree at the start), and even though it's not one of the standout games, it has to at least get some points for originality.

David says:

I'll let you into a secret - part of the reason for choosing this year's theme was to discourage platformers, as there were so many of them last year. But managing to crowbar a platformer into a grid-based engine is quite a decent achievement in itself. The disadvantage of doing a grid-based platformer, though, is that inevitably it feels quite slow-paced. It's not a huge problem, and it gives the game more of a puzzle-platformer feel, in a similar vein to The Lost Vikings. New elements are introduced to the game regularly, both in terms of obstacle features and abilities that you're handed out every couple of levels, which offsets the slowness of it somewhat.

As you'd expect from the Peasants, the graphics and sound are excellent - the music for the main levels is a sort of wobbly demented rendition of Greensleeves that reminds me of my music teacher in high school who was convinced there was a voice up his sleeve named Jeffrey.

The ending of the game is very sudden, and one weakness of the engine that got annoying in a couple of places is the way that you can't turn around without stepping a space in that direction - but otherwise this is a very competent entry.

David says:

I like the idea of this game - it's about getting things to work in much the same way as The Incredible Machine, and in this way was fairly unique in the competition. A large help section is given, but strangely, it still doesn't quite convey the message of what you're actually supposed to be doing. A playthrough of the first few levels sorts this out, though. The object is to lay down tiles that eventually cause Christmas trees to be lit and toys to be packed, completing each puzzle. The Christmas link is again largely graphical, but it's there.

The game works well for the most part, but there are a couple of issues with the interface that get in the way. The smallest of them is that the object counter has been left in, giving the game an unfinished look. You also can't see the number of tools you have left at a glance - you have to hover the mouse around to see them individually.

One of the biggest problems is that there's no neat way to stop a puzzle once it's started and modify your solution - you have to restart the whole level and place everything again. On the more complex levels, this is a lot of trouble to go to just because you missed the right place for an object by one grid space.

Overall, this is a potentially very good game that's held back by a number of annoyances.

David says:

The presentation of this game is absolutely fantastic - it's clear that a lot of time was spent on the menu system and title screen. The introduction and entire premise of the game made me laugh, which is always a good sign, and the crisp, clean graphical style is definitely among the best of the entries for this competition.

The game contains a good, original idea that distinguishes it from many of the competition entries - clearing a path for Santa's sleigh so that he doesn't wake up and trigger the most terrifying Game Over screen in the universe. (You'll see.) The puzzle elements scattered around the play area are sufficiently varied to keep the game interesting. One minor criticism is that many levels seem to start too quickly - rather than have any chance at looking at a level first, you're often running maniacally back and forward trying to get to the other side of the level with a snowball or boulder or something before the sleigh gets there before you.

But this is certainly a highlight of the competition - it has an excellent use of the Christmas theme and is a good game in its own right as well. Also, it's yet another game to feature the option for custom levels.

David says:

As an engine, this is resaonably impressive, with the inclusion of a Bomberman AI that handles the randomly generated levels. However, it's very short, and doesn't feel fleshed out enough to be an actual game. The jerky grid transitions (no smooth movement between grid spaces) look out of place as well compared to the otherwise pretty decent graphics.

There are a couple of problems with the AI, involving it running out of the level and eventually blowing itself up at one point when I played, but the presentation of the whole thing saves it from scoring lower.

David says:

First of all, I'd like to say that this game made me laugh a lot - from the character voices (the David Hayter-alike goes in and out a bit, but they're otherwise dead on) down to the uses for the items that are found around the house, and the way that the music manages to combine MGS and Christmas themes.

For the most part, the presentation and controls of the game are excellent, but the way that you have to click to activate televisions seems very out of place in an otherwise keyboard-driven game. It's a small point, and I don't really see how else it could have easily been done, but it does stick out.

Much like the real MGS games, it sometimes feels like a continual tutorial because of the constant codec calls and the way that so many elements are introduced during the course of the game, but I don't think that this takes away from it too far. In fact I'd really like to see an extended version of this, as it has one of the best engines that appeared in this competition - the sheer cleverness of the approach of using an invented scripting language for level building goes far beyond what I expected to see in any of the entries. And I loved the authentically Hideo Kojima moment, as well.

David says:

Strangely enough, Radix's prediction seems to have been perfectly correct - I was expecting an avalanche of Sokoban-styled entries as well, but this was the only one that was submitted. And it's not even a standard Sokoban-type game at all, having its own unique elements to make it stand out.

The game is very challenging, getting difficult early on thanks to the wide variety of collapsing platforms, blocks, snowmen that can temporarily be transformed into pushable presents, and evil shooting eye things. One nice touch is the way that the controls allow you to face in a direction before actually moving.

The game is also extensible, with levels stored externally and an editor included. It's always nice to see these extras. The sound is a collection of chiptunes by Playtrip accompanied by a couple of blips and explosions, and I can't really fault the graphics or presentation at all.

David says:

This is a rather original take on the Christmas theme, being a game about beating people up to get their presents rather than just collect them in the innocent way featured in most games submitted for the competition. It's a side-scrolling beat-em-up in a similar vein to Double Dragon and so on from the NES era - the graphics are oddly stylized, but after disliking them at first I got used to them after a while.

Many games in the competition feel as if they're not making a lot of the Christmas theme. This one instead feels like it had to stick in a grid-based movement so that it could be included - having this type of game on a grid feels rather unnatural, and the gameplay is sluggish as a result. The snowballs thrown by the elves are difficult to dodge, and I think there's an issue with the object limit as well - snowballs stop appearing after a while.

It also seems to have an problem with crashing - it only happened a couple of times to me, but it was enough to be irritating.

David says:

I think that this game falls into the trap of being just a normal game that happens to have Christmas graphics so that it fits in with the theme - it's a basic collect-em-up with Santa, presents, and some evil gingerbread men.

There is no title screen or introduction, and you're just dumped straight into the first level. It's a fairly standard maze game, with the objective of collecting presents, and finding keys so that you can open doors to collect more presents, but to its credit, it didn't feel anywhere near as sluggish as some of the other entries. The editor and external level storage are nice touches, too.

David says:

This game would be nice as an engine test, but as a submitted entry feels a little awkward. I'm actually impressed by the increasing tendency to put pseudo-3D sections into Click games, but the Mode 7 effects are a bit flickery, with sprites appearing in front of each other when they shouldn't, and the gameplay feels sluggish.

Importantly, though, the 3D viewpoint is used as an essential gameplay element rather than just a gimmick, with the need to throw elves together to create platforms to reach your goal. Underneath the engine, though, it's really quite a simpistic game.