Well... I'm going for Dominetris, so that it gets some representation. Purely objectively, there's no way it can be Bob's best game - as I remember it, the description on Bob's website from circa 2016 said that it was his first re-foray into Z80 coding after however-many years away, and there's a bit of slop in the controls. But, it's the one I keep going back to - any kind of Tetris variant (that isn't ridiculously unfair like something with seven blocks per piece) is going to have that effect, and it's a very clever variant on the theme. Better still, it's also available for those who like their Sinclair games in black and white, with no sound, and using a keyboard that's akin to performing open heart surgery wearing gardening gloves.
I suspect SplATTR is going to win this poll, but I'd kick myself for not sticking up for a game which, if it was a human being, would be eligible to drink, smoke, vote and watch porn this year. That's the same age as Meteor Storm, Space Intruders and similar early Quicksilva arcade conversions that used the ROM font and UDG-style graphics were in 2000, the year we all thought was "The Future!". Nothing quite illustrates the march of time, other than the onset of grey hair and/or baldness.
bobs wrote: ↑Sun Feb 26, 2023 10:09 am
@PeteProdge U-bend is a ZX81 game BTW, so probably shouldn’t be in this poll?
Ooops!!!
Okay, nobody vote for U-Bend, that's probably included because I got home late last night and not had that much sleep. I'll discount any votes for it. (And one day I'll turn my attention to the ZX81, but not on the scale of the Speccy.)
Incidentally, the U-Bend screenshot has colour in it (which is another factor in mistaking it for a ZX Spectrum game). How's that possible for ZX81? I admit to knowing very little about the machines, only played with them a few times at the Cambridge Centre For Computing History and I thought they were all black-and-white only?
PeteProdge wrote: ↑Sun Feb 26, 2023 10:30 am
Incidentally, the U-Bend screenshot has colour in it (which is another factor in mistaking it for a ZX Spectrum game). How's that possible for ZX81? I admit to knowing very little about the machines, only played with them a few times at the Cambridge Centre For Computing History and I thought they were all black-and-white only?
U-Bend, and a lot of my other ZX81 games (either directly by me, or later patches) support the Chroma interface, which adds joystick & colour support (amongst other things) to the machine.
U-Bend is ZX81 only ?
Its using the Chroma thing for colour on a zx81, i couldn't find the Speccy version.
edit // ok, i've had this thread open for an hour and missed all the posts
I don't have anything cool to put here, so i'll just be off now to see a priest with yeast stuck between his teeth and his friend called Keith who's a hairpiece thief...
Had to go for Hedge Monkeys myself. Harvest Havoc is a brilliant looking game, but there's one tiny control niggle that gets me killed. If you move just a few pixels past the edge of a map tile left or right, then try to move up or down, it completes the movement right across the whole tile left/right, and only then moves up. It'd be far more intuitive to align you to the nearest whole tile left/right (even if that involves backing up a bit) before moving up or down.
In Pac-Man, where you're constantly moving, if you miss a turn, that's it, and you either have to turn back yourself or wait for the next turn. But in Mr. Do, this game's inspiration, it will back you up a few pixels if that's the nearest tile to line you up to, when you change direction.
(And even though they don't force you to walk on a tile grid, 2D Zelda games do this subtly all the time, so you rarely bang into doorways or the edges of narrow passageways even if they need pixel-perfect alignment to slip through. If you're running along near the edge of a tile, it just jogs you into alignment automatically).
You'll be utterly shocked that I'll be going through all these games on my Twitch stream at 8pm UK time on Friday, just like for the previous homebrew polls, so that I can vote with a conscience!
I mean, I really like SokoBAArn and Harvest Havoc, but I'd like to have a fully informed opinion on all of them, so you know the drill!
1 - Farmer Jack in Harvest Havoc
2 - Gem Chaser
3 - LumASCII
I find Bob's stuff really hard to compare - it ranges from polished arcade to inventive concepts. I want to give points to games like Factory Daze for originality, but in the end I went for the ones that I simply enjoyed playing most.
Well, you've taken a look at Bob's stuff and picked out an outright. Yes, this will Mr Do! It's Farmer Jack In Harvest Havoc in top spot, with 7 votes.
A close second place, 6 votes goes to Jilly's Farm Volume 1 - SokoBAArn!
Third place goes to W*H*B, 4 votes.
LumASCII and SplATTR both have 3 votes each, putting them in fourth place.
Farmer Jack And The Hedge Monkeys and Horace In The Mystic Woods reside in fifth place, with 2 votes each.
Sixth place, 1 vote each to: Dominetris; Gem Chaser; Gem Chaser 2 and X=Y=Z.
Over on the proportional results:
Farmer Jack In Harvest Havoc! 13
SplATTR 6
Horace In The Mystic Woods 5
W*H*B 5
Gem Chaser 4
Jilly's Farm Volume 1 - Sokobaarn! 4
Farmer Jack And The Hedge Monkeys! 3
LumASCII 3
X=Y=Z 2
Farmer Jack - Treasure Trove 1
