Sunday 26 July 2009

The 8 Minute Trial Test #2

As a continuation of the previous 8 minute trial test, five more point and click adventures get the treatment.

Colour Key: Green = pre v1.0 functionality, Orange = post v1.0, Red = unlikely to be implemented.

1) Emerald City Confidential

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The Good: Polished, HD graphics, excellent audio. Single-click interface is very user-friendly. Lots of hand-holding to ease in casual players. Parallax scrolling intro.
The Bad: Slidy-walk animation. Playfirst DRM (didn't actually seem too intrusive). Objectives were clearly laid out but there was no real explanation as to why - not a lot of real plot exposition within the first 8 minutes.
Not yet possible in XAGE: GUI customisation, Speech, Various GUI effects.

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The Good: Fun concept, well introduced and setup. Impressive dual view technique on tutorial. Swearing in binary.
The Bad: Some minor clipping issues. 'Groovy Greg' seems to suffer from a mild form of Parkinsons.
Not yet possible in XAGE: Text input, Y axis scrolling, GUI customisation.

3) Time Gentlemen, Please

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The Good: Finely crafted, plenty of attention to detail. Entertaining and colourful introduction. Irreverent humour. Plenty of witty banter between protagonists.
The Bad: Some very minor flickering as walking & scrolling not synched.
Not yet possible in XAGE: GUI Customisation.

4) Heed

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The Good: Very distinctive art & audio, along with extremely simple user interface. Smooth, clean animation. Intriguing room-by-room development. Existentialist musings.
The Bad: No narrator with a tophat. The fly is a little slow.
Not yet possible in XAGE: GUI customisation.

5) Five Days a Stranger

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The Good: Player character is a criminal.
The Bad: Visually has not aged especially well. Interface is particularly clunky and old-school.
Not yet possible in XAGE: GUI customisation.

1 comment:

Ben304 said...

I knew I should have kept the narrator =D