Robix

[Heaven/TQA]

yeah the msx player is interesting... so next step will .YM player?

[Irgendwer]

Happy gaming and please, share here your comments, feelings, opinions, experiences, etc.!

 

Here my impression:

 

* Robix is proper game but badly balanced. I don't know if this changes very much in the two player mode, but the one player mode left me more than one time with the feeling that the game is unfair. When loosing a robot the penalty that you also loosing your fire-power as well as the ability to recover soon from damage is to hard. Often you need the fire power to keep up with the baddies - loosing a life then means that your unable to fight a wave and to recover that power. Additionally I find the stages to long to keep my motivation up. When getting only 2/3s of a stage (which means that I played not so bad in my case ) the boss is to much out of reach and the stages are to repetitive for me to be curious what's next. Think about the diversity and length of the stages e.g. in Gyruss or Zybex.

The progress bar at the end is a nice addition, but think about the necessity. Couldn't it be, that there is something wrong with the flow when you have to indicate the progress? To inform the user: "Yes, you played quite long, but there is something left." Shouldn't the game-play/diversity be interesting enough, to keep the user playing?

 

I find also, that some little brush-up for the presentation is missing. Small things which could be done in 5 minutes, like setting the background colour to black when leaving the play field, do no good to the visualization (especially when there is the gradient dithering to black and then the hard switching to the blue sky background). Sorry, I can understand the ranking. The game seems to be suitable to left the player angry.

 

* I think the problem with "Milk Nuts" is the mood of the game. When inspecting the NES version, the overall mood is positive, candy colours, happy music. I don't felt that this mood is transported to the player by your conversion. Colours are subdued, music lugubrious, score font to hard. There is maybe a little problem with the speed too, but I think the recognition that the game is so slow, is also due to the not matching (to fast) music and the missing SFX. (IMHO chapter music and presentation is good & matches!)

I don't find the NES original very sophisticated or challenging - just another platformer - but there is a lot saved by the cute presentation.

I can imagine, that the result was very hard work, but sorry - I like your "Swapz" & "Mind Blast" (independent of the genre) more.

 

Thankfully I hadn't to vote. If you don't like what I'm saying, please remember that my sole game submission reached in 2007 also only the 5th place: My impression could be wrong...

[+JAC!]

OK. Raster is not going to do that so someone else have to. .. it scored the 4th place) but even authors or Ocean Detox (1st place) and h3x0r Deluxe (3rd place) know that results are joke and real winner is Robix

 

Hi,

When i read the descriptions in the mag (before playing) I thought, Robix is the clear winner (and yes, I loves hooters).

But some things spoilt it for me. So what I'll do is I'll sum them up and addresse them to Raster directly (as I will do to the other authors). I really hope we can get updates which fix the shortcomings.I know how much work goes into something like this. I will post about that in the contest thread as it also applies to most other entries.

 

Regarding the 4th place:

We had 11 entries this year, more than in most of the past 25 years. And this time (for me for the first time) ALL of them were worth getting more than 3 points. And this year even the 11th place got 272 points (more that the half of the 1st place) and the difference between the 1st and the 4th place is less than 80 points!!!! So you have to read the results correctly and not just have a look at the rank:

 

We had a dozen of good programs in the contest. The is very different from the past years, and everbody should be proud of it.

Edited October 31, 2010 by peter.dell

[+MrFish]

OK. Raster is not going to do that so someone else have to. .. it scored the 4th place) but even authors or Ocean Detox (1st place) and h3x0r Deluxe (3rd place) know that results are joke and real winner is Robix

 

Hi,

...(and yes, I loves hooters).

 

I can't agree with you more.

Edited October 31, 2010 by MrFish

[ThomSW]

yeah the msx player is interesting... so next step will .YM player?

 

Yeah, it's nice indeed. But actually it's Windows-commandline-based app for making standalone demo's and SAPs and IMHO shouldn't take part in ABBUC Software Contest. Walking this way further, a program like G2F or RMT could take part too...

And regarding YM-player, it's on very early alpha stage, but still: http://atari.fandal.cz/search.php?search=AY+player&butt_details_x=

[Creature XL]

OK. Raster is not going to do that so someone else have to. .. it scored the 4th place) but even authors or Ocean Detox (1st place) and h3x0r Deluxe (3rd place) know that results are joke and real winner is Robix

 

Hi,

...(and yes, I loves hooters).

 

I can't agree with you more.

The first thing which came to my ind as well

 

HOWEVER, more to teh point of Peter's post. Its not so easy Peter. The voting rules are a bit strange. People could give each particpent 5 or more points.

I really wonder why they didn't choose to "Give 3, 2 and 1 point to the your top three programs"

[+therealbountybob]

I made it past the rain, the mines and got to the end of level beastie but alas Must have another go

[+JAC!]

HOWEVER, more to teh point of Peter's post. Its not so easy Peter. The voting rules are a bit strange. People could give each particpent 5 or more points.

I really wonder why they didn't choose to "Give 3, 2 and 1 point to the your top three programs"

 

Every scoring scheme has its up- and downsides. I find the one we are using OK. I like that I can give same score to two programs. But please don't start discussing the scores too much. My point is that simply all entries were good that nobody should be disappointed by some ranking. It's a competition, so there has to be a ranking. But I find even the 11th place of this year much better than most of the entries of 2009! And I hope we'll get updates and I hope we'll get as good entries next year.

[Allas]

HOWEVER, more to teh point of Peter's post. Its not so easy Peter. The voting rules are a bit strange. People could give each particpent 5 or more points.

I really wonder why they didn't choose to "Give 3, 2 and 1 point to the your top three programs"

 

Every scoring scheme has its up- and downsides. I find the one we are using OK. I like that I can give same score to two programs. But please don't start discussing the scores too much. My point is that simply all entries were good that nobody should be disappointed by some ranking. It's a competition, so there has to be a ranking. But I find even the 11th place of this year much better than most of the entries of 2009! And I hope we'll get updates and I hope we'll get as good entries next year.

 

 

You right, there is a lot of types of scoring. Whatever is the method will not work properly if most of the people vote quickly without testing all the games in deep. So, maybe it would be a good idea to add additional comments for each software sustaining the vote. In this way, if there is a strange results again, we can read the comments in order to found what happens.

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

ZeroPage Homebrew is playing Robix on tomorrow's ZPH stream LIVE on Twitch, hope you can join us!

 

Fri Sep 22, 2023 | LIVE @ 12PM PT | 3PM ET | 7PM GMT

WATCH LIVE: https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew/
WATCH LATER: https://youtube.com/zeropagehomebrew/

 

Games:

• Druidarium (2018 | A8) by Krzysztof Kluczek @KK/Altair
• Mister Hoppe (2019 | A8) by bocianu @bocianu
• Robix (2010 | A8) by Radek Štěrba @raster/c.p.u. (Code, Graphics, Sound) / Zdeněk Eisenhammer @pseudografx (Graphics)

[+MrFish]

4 hours ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

Robix (2010 | A8) by Radek Šterba @_Fandal_ (Code, Graphics, Sound) / Zdeněk Eisenhammer @pseudografx (Graphics)

Tough shooter. Good luck with it. I always remember there was some Czech-language text-notification screen that I hated seeing. haha...

 

[+MrFish]

4 hours ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

Robix (2010 | A8) by Radek Šterba @_Fandal_ (Code, Graphics, Sound) / Zdeněk Eisenhammer @pseudografx (Graphics)

You've got the right name for the coder, but you've linked to @_Fandal_ (Frantisek Houra), who is a different coder (of many games in his own right, and has a major games site: https://a8.fandal.cz ). He just opened this thread to speak up on Raster's (Radek Šterba's) behalf (there had been some backlash after the ABBUC contest and criticism from a certain person/squirrel who was booted from this site in the last few years). Anyway, Raster's AA handle is: @raster/c.p.u. (unfortunately not alive anymore).

 

ABBUC Contest 2010

 

What Happened to Raster?

 

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

9 hours ago, MrFish said:

You've got the right name for the coder, but you've linked to @_Fandal_ (Frantisek Houra), who is a different coder

 

Thank you for clearing up my confusion on the handle for the developer and thank you for the additional information about Radek. Wow, what a prolific and talented person he was in the Atari community!

 

- James

[+MrFish]

His website is still kept online: Radek Sterba, RASTER / C.P.U.

 

Along with the last version of RMT that he worked on, there are some useful utilities, such as Dratex (line feed/character type converter) and Atadim (ATR viewer editor). I still use both of these utilities on a regular basis. Very useful.