MSXdev08 - results

by viejo_archivero on 01-03-2009, 11:57
Topic: MRC
Tags: Challenges
Languages:

One month ago, the yearly MSXdev contest came to an end with twelve brand new games. What followed was a month of testing and judging by the jury members, and they have brought up the following ranking:

  • 01. Deep Dungeon (WINNER)
  • 02. I Need Speed
  • 03. La Corona Encantada
  • 04. Danger Tower
  • 05. Peek-A-Boo
  • 06. Sp8 Invaders
  • 07. Tomb of Genghis Khan
  • 08. Bakerman
  • 09. PWND
  • 10. Formula Dice
  • 11. Limaribu
  • 12. Hose Diogo Martinez: The Bussas Quest

In addition, special attention goes to:

  • Deep Dungeon, for gameplay
  • I Need Speed, for music and polish
  • La Corona Encantada, for music and gameplay
  • Danger Tower, for gameplay and originality
  • Peek-A-Boo, for graphics

And so, the overall winner this year is Deep Dungeon, the dungeon crawler game by Arturo (ARTRAG) Ragozini, John (DemonSeed) Hassink, Richard (huey) Cornelisse. The winner, and the ones that have obtained other prizes offered by sponsors, will be contacted soon.

A little insight into the results: there are games that have obtained the best scoring in a specific category. Peek-A-Boo, the dvik&joyrex preschooler game, has been declared as the game with best graphics. La Corona Encantada and I Need Speed have obtained the mark of the games with best music, demonstrating that homebrew can reach a professional level regarding music composition. For the gameplay section, there are three game that gave the jurors the best gameplay experience: Deep Dungeon, La Corona Encantada and Danger Tower. The never before seen run-and-avoid-enemies concept of Danger Tower did catch the attention of the jury at the originality section. And finally, the most polished game goes to I Need Speed, the racing game with a huge amount of options to configure, rich menus, saves features, and so on...

And with this, MSXdev'08 is now officially closed. High time to start the preparations for MSXdev'09. Perhaps one more more rules may change, perhaps nothing changes. We'll keep you informed once it's there!

Relevant link: MSXdev website

Comments (18)

By PingPong

Enlighted (4137)

PingPong's picture

01-03-2009, 12:26

Congratulations to the winner ;-)

By Metalbrain

Expert (67)

Metalbrain's picture

01-03-2009, 12:46

Congratulations to the winner, indeed!

I'm very happy about my second position.

There's a new version ready at CEZ GS webpage. This time it's ODO compatible, does a deep memory search for the extra 16k in page 2 instead of assuming the BIOS will put it there, detects the 8k RAM models and shows a message before hanging on them, uses the VDP ports read from BIOS, and fixes 2 minor bugs and a huge one: there's a speed table in ROM that should've been in RAM, so it wasn't properly overwritten and the speeds were always the same (JUNIOR speed) for all categories. Yes, it's true, KARTS, GP2 and F1 categories should be even harder than what you've played so far (unless you've played the Spectrum version too). Tongue

You can get it here:
http://computeremuzone.com/ficha.php?id=752&l=en

This version will be released in cartridge, first on RetroMadrid fair, and then it will be available on the online shop.

And answering a few comments from the jury:
"Each stage has its original music, fantastic!"
No, there's "only" 4 different ingame tracks, not 8 (it would have been overkill for WYZ :P).

"Conclusion: to play this game it's better to look all the time at the direction-arrow and the track map: what a pity..."
Believe me, that's only at the beginning. With some experience you'll start learning the tracks and won't need the direction arrow anymore (it's not there in GP2 and F1 categories), and you won't use the map that much either.

"On the other hand, there is a nasty bug which sometimes fails to count the lap even if I get past the checker line. It must be solved."
There's no such bug, I've played it long enough to know ;) . You just skipped some checkpoint by getting out the road or skipping some part.

"I think a feature to give up in the middle of the race is necessary."
:-? It's already there, just pause, A for the Abort menu, and T to abort the current track (or Y to abort the whole championship).

By Zezus

Rookie (28)

Zezus's picture

01-03-2009, 13:00

Peek-a-boo should have won.
But Deep Dungeon is the most fun to play, alongside Formula Dice.
There is a handful of games from past editions who would have sweeped first place easily.

By wolf_

Ambassador_ (10109)

wolf_'s picture

01-03-2009, 13:57

My top-3 would've been:

gold:   Deep Dungeon
silver: Danger Tower
bronze: La Corona Encantada

By cesco

Champion (454)

cesco's picture

01-03-2009, 16:55

Congratulations to the winners. I personally agree with the official ranking, even if I would rather push forward "La Corona Encantada" to the second place and "I need speed" to the third place.

By muffie

Paladin (933)

muffie's picture

01-03-2009, 19:34

Sirs, I believe there's a terrible mistake on the list. It's upside down. Please, correct it as soon as possible to avoid eventual confusions.

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6935)

ARTRAG's picture

02-03-2009, 16:44

About the jury's comments on originality:

To those how told that this game is inspired to the one by DOG/Square, I have to ask to have a closer look at what is the DD they mentioned...

http://kingmike.emuxhaven.net/Deepdun1/index.htm

The two games (sadly, i must add) have nothing in common. :)
BTW I agree that this game is not original in the sense that it is inspired to WHACK for Vic 20 that in turn is inspired to net-hack.

About gameplay:
"It would be perfect if there is any sign to indicate whether I am damaging the enemy correctly."

True, but IIRC there are sfxs when you hit an enemy (different sfxs according to the enemy type), a different sfx when you get hit and no sfx at all when the an attack fails.

Said that, thanks a lot to the jury from all of us for the great work done in evaluating all the msxdev stuff - I would have not survived in running and commenting any minimal aspect of all the cr.. games we produce.
;-)

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

dvik's picture

02-03-2009, 17:37

Each year there are always some smaller comments that aren't entirely correct, but over all I think this jury did a very good job. One small thing that I don't agree on is the game play for our entry, I actually think its the only game that will still be played 3 months from now, of course the game may be slightly too easy for hard core MSXers, but thats really not the target audience so I can only laugh at the comment. On the other hand I'm sure that every author have some things that the jurors think that they don't agree on. So over all a big thumbs up for this years jury !

By Imanok

Paragon (1200)

Imanok's picture

02-03-2009, 19:26

Congratulations to the winners!! Smile

I hope to see all those new cartridge versions soon!! Wink

So over all a big thumbs up for this years jury !

One of them should have been 'disqualified' because of his negative about doing an in-depth scoring Tongue
Seriously... why does a person join the jury if he has no intention of judging the games?? Question

By pitpan

Prophet (3155)

pitpan's picture

02-03-2009, 19:57

In pure Spanish, "buen rollo" policy. That I could roughly translate as "be cool" policy. Wink

One does not become a jury in anything just to make friends. On the contrary, it is a matter of responsability. But I cannot judge a jury without becoming one, so skip the whole reaction Sad

By muffie

Paladin (933)

muffie's picture

03-03-2009, 00:18

"I actually think its the only game that will still be played 3 months from now"

Todler games were never popular on any time neither on any platform. Why would you thought it should be the winner?

...and... Admit that you're upset with the results! Just calm down and relax with the fact that your emulator is used by 99,99% of us. Smile

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

dvik's picture

03-03-2009, 00:51

I'm actually quite happy with the results. The top 5 is what I would have picked too. I'm especially happy that the jurors saw the quality of I Need Speed. Talking about the peek-a-boo game in particular, it got higher marks than I was expecting on gfx and sfx and lower on game play and polish, but if you average it I think the score is ok.

By Huey

Prophet (2694)

Huey's picture

03-03-2009, 14:15

Lovely weather ain't it? Eek!

By wolf_

Ambassador_ (10109)

wolf_'s picture

03-03-2009, 14:29

?

They're all at the status page (scroll down)

By wolf_

Ambassador_ (10109)

wolf_'s picture

03-03-2009, 15:25

err, editing a post makes replies look obfuscated, and thus editing should be used merely within the context of editing typos or fix broken links or closing tags etc.. So plz don't edit the actual body of the text like this. Just accept the fact that you thought the 2008 entries were gone. Wink

By lionelritchie

Champion (439)

lionelritchie's picture

03-03-2009, 18:28

to me, peek a poo ultimately sux, sesamo street sux even more.
la corona encantada is the best one, very fast and difficult game.

By [WYZ]

Champion (451)

[WYZ]'s picture

03-03-2009, 18:33

I like specially the DD music intro by John Hassink (DemonSeed).!

By ARTRAG

Enlighted (6935)

ARTRAG's picture

03-03-2009, 19:42

IMHO what has penalized I Need Speed is the reduced size of the window on the racing area.
My first impact was OMG, where am I going, where are the track boundaries?

Maybe the possible solution would have been:
1) scale down all the cars and the tracks in order to get a wider perspective of the race
(the side effect could have been that, at low speed, this increases the visibility of the scrolling based on tiles)
2) have a full screen view of the track
(but this is limiting for the 2P mode...)

In the end life is made of choices.
There is no "one fits all" solution.