First of all, with the competition over, I've made the Awards pages:
https://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/csscgc2021/awards.html
A huge round of rapturous applause and a quick rev of the Patio Sprintette to Lee Prince, who won Most Crap Game Of The Year with "Advanced Adding a TXT File to an EPROM Card for a Z88 Emulator Simulator"!
https://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/csscgc2021/review026.html
And the keys of CSSCGC Towers for 2022 are handed to Andy Jenkinson, for the Least Crap Game Of The Year, the superbly playable and tuneful (if you like the Cranberries) "Zombie Dice".
https://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/csscgc2021/review033.html
There are other pages with commendations for those who deserved it, buckets of beans flung at those who committed misdemeanours, and some statistics, including the full final standings, and the reveal of what the six games were that I've had in the
website's title graphics all year.
Meanwhile... there are also BONUS GAMES! And these have been given special double-length accounts into the processes behind their programming, rather than a formal review.
The Minor Bonus is three remakes of Daniel Aguilar's "Magiapotagia" from early May. I thought that if this program had been made on the primitive micros of 1977, when nobody outside a computer lab knew what a computer was, it would have been treated as
if it was actual magic. But could any of the Apple II (with Integer BASIC), the Commodore PET 2001 or TRS-80 Model I (with Level I BASIC) handle the algorithm used to shuffle the cards? The short answer is "yes", and it works on all three, even if some
were easier than others. I call the package "Magiapotagia 1977".
https://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/csscgc2021/reviewbonus2.html
The MAJOR BONUS, the one that's the result of this competition breaking through 50 entries, is a heavily revised, improved and thoroughly debugged version of "The Ring Of The Inka", now known as the "Sir Clive Edition" after Our Revered Creator. Volker
Bartheld, one of the authors (and who still looks at these pages! Guten Abend, if you're there...), asked to do this midway through the year, but probably didn't bank on us both spending about a month testing, debugging, optimising for memory, and adding
new features...
The original version of the game, which was an official entrant for the 2018 CSSCGC, couldn't be completed as there were vital objects missing, and times where it would stop with errors. All these have been eliminated. The game can be completed - I
should know - but you'll now have to deal with a kleptomaniac Shaman, some undead guards that are very good at their job, a decreasing stamina level that will require finding some excellent survival food, a magic effect on the Ring itself... and to make
it look nice, there's a custom character set courtesy of Damien Guard's ZX Origins.
This is now a superb text adventure, and the only thing that qualifies it as a Crap Game in any way is that the parser is slow. It also now works on 128K models, which it didn't before, and in addition to the microdrive version, there's a (128K-only)
tape, and three different discs (+3, +D, Beta).
Happy adventuring!
https://www.rickdangerous.co.uk/csscgc2021/reviewbonus1.html
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