Glorious Trainwrecks - website devoted to awesomely bad game design

[Segataritensoftii]

Anyone ever go to this website? This is a whole website devoted to creating shoddy and barely playable, yet awesome games, mostly using Klik & Play, which is best for that sort of thing. The thing about this website, however, is that most of the games on it have been designed in under 2 hours. These guys come up with some truely hilarious concepts most of the time, like a shooter where a giant Garfield shoots at lasagna. I recently got an account there. My screen name on the website is .KKliker. Who knows, I just might try my hand at one of the 2 hour game design contests. I've already got some ideas, like Duck Bombers, a game where you play as a duck trying to ram into various boats and planes (and sometimes corporate headquarters) to defend his pond, and Al Khan vs. the mob, where you play as Al Khan, trying to escape the disgruntled fanboys and defend a once mighty 4Kids "entertainment".

[Impaler_26]

Funny Site! I guess this is the place where i should post my first bB-projects...

[Segataritensoftii]

Funny Site! I guess this is the place where i should post my first bB-projects...

Sorry, they only take projects that will run on Windows.

[Impaler_26]

Funny Site! I guess this is the place where i should post my first bB-projects...

Sorry, they only take projects that will run on Windows.

Drat!

[+batari]

Funny Site! I guess this is the place where i should post my first bB-projects...

Sorry, they only take projects that will run on Windows.

Well, you could, in theory, build an emulator from source with the bB binary hard-coded in.

[+Random Terrain]

Talk about train wrecks. Did they ever hear of padding and margins? What's with the text being right up against the picture?

[Segataritensoftii]

Talk about train wrecks. Did they ever hear of padding and margins? What's with the text being right up against the picture?

The rest of the website isn't too bad, actually. If you want to see a trainwreck of a site, look at some of the pages on Platypus comix. The images actually COVER the text sometimes, making it impossible to read unless you turn the images off! Edited February 15, 2008 by Segataritensoftii

[+kisrael]

Hey!

 

Nice to see someone else pimpin' out the 'Wrecks site.

 

First off... it's funny how striking the margin problem is on the front page, innit? Should be a small little thing but it really stands out, and kind of echoes the site's theme of bold ideas gone kind of wrong. (Tee-hee, not to be TOO much of a jerk but I think putting a color changer on every page kind of falls in the same category )

 

And I would say Segataritensoftii is incorrect...... Attempts at Glory on the 2600 would be MORE than welcome at Glorious Trainwrecks! You should just plan to explain what emulator folks should use. But they'd LOVE it....

 

So there's a Klik of the Month where everyone has 2 hours to make the best worst game they can, but other projects are welcome to be posted there, no matter how long they took to make, as long as they meet the criteria of trying REALLY hard if not quite succeeding... and I think Batari BASIC games tend to fall in this category

(I'm tempted to relearn batariBASIC and see if I can't do a new game in 2 hours for the KotM event (I wouldn't want to relearn bB AND do a game in 2 hours though, that'd be too tough))

 

Anyway, I think the regular event is the 3rd Saturday of the month, 7PM Eastern time (though it has people all around the world there)

 

So a lot of the people there do code in Klik and Play, which is that game kit from the 90s. I've been doing about 2/3 of my stuff in Java/Processing, and a few people do stuff in The Games Factory, which is more powerful. So bB would be weclome... even stuff for the C=64 in Gary Kitchen's Gamemaker, as long as you could tell people where to grab an emulator and run your masterpiece.

 

It's kind of tougher to describe the spirit of the place. I mean, it's not JUST a supportive place for homebrews and attempt to get people's creative juices flowing, but it is that; there is that whole mid-90s "shareware" vibe of doing crazy stuff on screen just because you can. Hang out there for a bit and you should get the idea. I wrote some of the FAQs you see when you click on Wiki on the left side...

[+Random Terrain]

(Tee-hee, not to be TOO much of a jerk but I think putting a color changer on every page kind of falls in the same category )

Yep, we wouldn't want to give users a choice. We should have learned that after all of those years of playing games that had no options. What was I thinking? I've learned my lesson and I know exactly what to do. On each of my pages I'll add loud music that can't be turned off. That's extremely retro, so everyone should love it.

[+kisrael]

(Tee-hee, not to be TOO much of a jerk but I think putting a color changer on every page kind of falls in the same category )

Yep, we wouldn't want to give users a choice. We should have learned that after all of those years of playing games that had no options. What was I thinking? I've learned my lesson and I know exactly what to do. On each of my pages I'll add loud music that can't be turned off. That's extremely retro, so everyone should love it.

well, we're getting off-topic, but:

A. too much choice is almost as bad as not enough choice.

B. you don't even offer a meaningful choice, which would be either A. light text on dark for people who dig that or B. changing the font

C. You've made an extremely visually distracting widget that has a prominent spot on every page, a little lego box of pastel colors - I can't imagine that's considered a plus for dyslexic or other wise challenged viewers.

 

I don't know why you brought the idea of music on every page up; although I would say it falls under the same category of things people thought were cool/useful in the mid-90s.

 

(It reminds me a bit of the UI tragedy that is PCAEWin - solid emulation, could record movies, but the UI to wire up control was horrendous, and then the options were like pages of pages of details about the display list of games.)

[+Random Terrain]

A. too much choice is almost as bad as not enough choice.

I doubt that a handful of colors is too much for people. It seems to hit just about every color people might want to use without providing hundreds of color choices.

 

 

B. you don't even offer a meaningful choice, which would be either A. light text on dark for people who dig that or B. changing the font

There are people would think that at least some of the choices are meaningful:

 

http://irlen.com/index.php

 

To add another option that changed the text color goes back to the idea of too many choices. A light text, dark background loving person should find one of the background colors to be adequate. Maybe the darker gray would make them more happy.

 

I used to have a font size changer, but since browsers are better now, you can easily change the font size or zoom in, so it became unnecessary. One less choice on the page.

 

 

C. You've made an extremely visually distracting widget that has a prominent spot on every page, a little lego box of pastel colors - I can't imagine that's considered a plus for dyslexic or other wise challenged viewers.

I could hide the background color changer at the bottom of each page, but then most people wouldn't know it existed. What would you do if you had a background color changer?

 

 

 

I don't know why you brought the idea of music on every page up; although I would say it falls under the same category of things people thought were cool/useful in the mid-90s.

Because it took years before games gave us the option to turn the irritating background music off. Speaking of music, there are people who still think that having slow-loading music that automatically plays is a great thing to put on their pages. Especially irritating when a small business owner wants to force their favorite music on you when it has nothing to do with their product.

 

 

 

Update:

I asked about my color changer at a web design forum and a few people there also didn't like it. I need to keep it for people who have Irlen Syndrome, Dyslexia or anyone who might feel uncomfortable reading black text on a plain white background, so I'm putting it near the bottom of the page since a space recently opened up. It will be there for people who need it, but out of the way for people who hate background color changers. This will also allow me to put an ad where the background color changer used to be. Thanks for bringing this up.

Edited February 25, 2008 by Random Terrain

[Devin]

On the subject of bad games...

 

Does everyone here know about the Angry Video Game Nerd?

 

[+kisrael]

C. You've made an extremely visually distracting widget that has a prominent spot on every page, a little lego box of pastel colors - I can't imagine that's considered a plus for dyslexic or other wise challenged viewers.

I could hide the background color changer at the bottom of each page, but then most people wouldn't know it existed. What would you do if you had a background color changer?

I might've considered making it a less distracting single text link, in about the same place, something like "click here to change colors"

 

Accessibility is a tough issue, you have to find the balance among mkaing good aesthetic choices for your core audience and making sure you don't too much exclude people with challenges while making a site that you can keep up and keep interesting. There's not always a clear answer.

 

Because it took years before games gave us the option to turn the irritating background music off. Speaking of music, there are people who still think that having slow-loading music that automatically plays is a great thing to put on their pages. Especially irritating when a small business owner wants to force their favorite music on you when it has nothing to do with their product.

 

Well, as people in general get more net-saavy, you don't see this very often. IMO. Maybe I just hang out on the wrong (or right) sites.