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[Rock Rock Rock by SSH]

Here's a quick review of all the contestants. Might contain spoilers.

Rock Rock Rock by SSH
This had a good idea, but the game was too simple and short, even for MAGS game. It was also bothersome not to get any feedback when done something wrong. Eg. trying to interact with the crocodile. Even a "ugh!" sound would have been better.

Magical Whatever Girl by Eggie
The music were good. The setting was quite different and thus good. Vulgar humor worked really well (dinosaurus part), if the game would have more of that, this entry would be no. #1 in my list. The default interface sucks as always. It's also good call not to try to fill all the plot holes with overly boring dialog.

Erk - Adventures in Stone Age Real Estate by OneDollar
Someone should hit OneDollar for using installer. When I got over that, it turned out the game was really good for a MAGS game, the drawing part crowned the game. It was kind of funny when given the chance, of course I drew a dirty picture and the family that moved in seemed to like it also, even tough they admitted it was kind of strange picture. Player speed slider was a good addition also. The puzzles were conveniently easy.

Either I'm a really slow player or most authors do not follow anything like the one hour rule. :o To say a few Infinity String and 5 days a stranger took me a lot longer then one hour, probably four five and those are rated as medium length games. If you ask me, I would say less then half an hour is a short game, more then 4 hours is full length (first time played.)

If the idea, story and puzzles you have in mind just add up to a short, ten-minute quest, that's fine. It won't make people any less keen to play your game. (In fact, I'm often grateful to games that don't require many hours of commitment.) And if you keep it short and sweet you'll be able to focus more attention on each detail, so the quality will be higher.

Agreed very much, at least I value my time and if the game can make use of every second I put in to playing it, the value of the game increases greatly. It's probably one of the key factors to make a superior game. Some games really waste the player's time and even worst if it has been intentionally programmed to make the game longer.

This is just my experience, so don't take it as the gospel truth, but I've found that if people don't find a game noteworthy, they simply don't vote. Only if the game is really terrible, will they take the trouble to give it low ratings, and most of the time the games aren't really that terrible. Hence Chris's point about games with few votes.

I can back this up. Because I want other people to leave critical but constructive reviews of my work, I make sure that I leave a review on every game that I finish (aside from a couple of games that I've skipped over because they already had a mile-long list of comments). The flaw with this is that if I don't particularly care for a game, I don't tend to finish it, and therefore don't feel qualified to vote on it.

Admitted, I'm bit of a idealist here in believing that cheated votes would be ran down by masses of honest ones. At least my own sense of justice screams when the rating is too high for a game I dislike.

Smumm; you're simply wrong.

(Blah blah..)

Andail, what you said was in no way disagreement in what I said, seems like you are also wrong or you didn't understand my message. If you want I can clear up my points, otherwise I'd rather not quibble over semantics. Only part that really differed was my opinion that ,"people are going to cheat without caring if it's possible to sort the games by their rating or not".

Since the matter is quite insignificant (and since SSH is providing external interface to DB), I'm not going to go in any greater details, I'll take the author's word if he has seen current way the best.

Wow SSH, nice page, I didn't know about that. This really answers to my prayers!

I understand the worry about the public rating being vulnerable to corruption, but the few scumbags that are gonna cheat will do it nevertheless if or if it's not possible to sort by the rating and only thing that can be done is to hinder them with technical limitations (ie. limiting one vote per IP, one vote per user account.) The less people there are voting, the more influence the cheaters have. Even if the sorting would have an effect to cheating, I think it's a self-repairing process. More people will notice the game at the top with high ratings, try it out and will disappoint in the game's low quality and in great disappointment probably give even lower ratings then they would have given otherwise.

But it's not like the AGS panel rating is free from being biased to one way either. We can trust that that they try to do their best, but sometimes their own personal preference differs too much from an average opinion. In the end it's a good thing to have both public and critics rating.

The "best" games are supposed to be reflected in the AGS Awards. The Pick of the Month is supposed to be to bring attention to good games that many people might have missed. Therefore you shouldn't expect every good AGS game to get a Pick of the Month, because they should be rewarded by the AGS Awards instead.

This is a good point that I didn't take in account. In that purpose it really serves well. Speaking of AGS Awards, seems like this AGS Awards page is not updated anymore, is there a replacement for this?

Hello everyone, here's a few things that have been bothering me for some time. Since there were no feedback box on the main page, I was forced to register here on the forums.

#1 - Sorting by player rating

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=digest

In addition (or instead) to sort with the AGS panels rating, it would be great to sort with rating given by players. This would give more accurate sorting and thus make it more competitive. Also con of the current sorting by panel rating is that opinion of a few is overrepresented.

#2 - Pick of the month

This is just something that came to mind when I was writing the previous suggestion. There have been some cases that I really doubt the pick of the month, don't get me wrong here, the games picked are at least avarage, but it's really shame when there's a lot of greater games without recognition. In the long run, the pick of month loses it's value when the game is more or a less just a random pick (with some exaggeration.)

It's really great publicity to the game and to be fair to everyone, it would be better if the game is voted every month from few to ten choices. Or possibly people could suggest games to be the game of month. (Or something even better?) As a concerned gamer and possible future adventure game maker, I think it's too much authority for one man! :o