2008 Competition Results: (4:A Game For Helen)

7th Place – A Sliding-Puzzle For Helen – Total: 213

Ian:

I love puzzle games. I really love puzzle games. I’ve created and recreated numerous puzzlers myself, including B’lox!, Sokoban, Guru Logic Champs to name but three. In fact, puzzle fans, I even included a sliding block puzzle game into my B’lox! Easter Edition game for the RR Easter mini-comp a couple of years back.

The basic gameplay here mimics those little plastic games you probably played as a kid – you’ve got a grid (usually 4×4) of plastic squares with numbers or a picture on, but one square is missing and the numbers/image tiles are mixed up. Your job is to rearrange the sliding squares until order is restored to the galaxy errr… numbers or image – in the case of this game, there are a selection of images to choose from, with several grid size options available, from 4x4upto 10×10. You can even add your own images to personalize the game a bit.

Now sliding block puzzle games aren’t the most interesting of puzzlers, and this one reduces the “fun” further by offering only a “one key” control system, which to an able bodied gamer are soul destroyingly slooooooow. Now, not berating this as it’s an excellent gesture, but not everybody is disabled and some people might actually want to play the game via mouse, keys or joypad to speed up the gameplay a bit.

I also can’t help but feel that, as the game was designed specifically for less abled gamers, showing a small image of the completed picture would have been beneficial, although reducing the main image size slightly. I know the completed image is displayed on the title screen but not everyone has a photographic memory. Luckily the image squares are numbered to aid with completion of the picture,   but I’d still rather an image than numbers.

But still, this entry was created in only a few short hours on the final day of the competition and shouldn’t be derided as what it does, it does well for a very worthy cause. It’s just that the original game isn’t much fun and this version doesn’t make any great strides to improve the situation. While the ease of use scores highly, the playability, as a result of only using one control method, is somewhat lacking.

70%

Geekay:

Oh Joy, a sliding puzzle.  I earned 3 of this shite from my Xmas crackers.

Everyone knows this and to be honest, how can I write a long review on something everyone has in their junk drawer?

It works.  It has an annoying tune.  The default pictures suck.  The only redeeming quality is that you can add your own pictures. When I got a Currah u Speech, it was obvious I was going to make it swear. With this, I added hardcore pr0n just because I could.

Nowt else to say apart from, “I need to shoot something”.

25%

Spray:

It’s good to see some of the site staff join in the compo goodness here and there. Caff, as I’m sure most of you are aware, organised the vast majority of the prizes for this here competition and a damn fine job he did of it too.

He’s also been on hand to offer advice, praise and general banter in the compo forum, the moderator extraordinaire as ever.

What I DIDN’T expect from him was a bloody game!

The Games For Helen category, it seems, tickled Caff’s fancy and ‘A Sliding Puzzle For Helen’ was born.
This is a one-switch conversion of the little plastic sliding tile puzzle games that you get in crackers and the like and actually works quite well too. The main issue being that accessibility for anyone who doesn’t want one-switch control is non existant.

You can skin the game relatively easily by sticking in your own piccies and music if you want to and change the size of the puzzle board to contain up to 99 tiles if you’re feeling REALLY sadistic.

The one-switch control couldn’t really be much simpler, basically bashing the space bar when the correct tile is highlighted causes said tile to move into the single space on the board until all your tiles are in the right order (theoretically).

Unfortunately, the readme file clearly states that you shouldn’t make naughty puzzles, so my vast collection of booby pics has once again gone unused. If only I wasn’t such a stickler for rules

66%

Oogy:

To be honest, I was never good at those sliding puzzle thingies. I usualy ended up with the top half finished, and the bottom two rows all mangled up and could never get things to be placed correctly. Which is probably part of the reason I’m not too fond of this game.

Although the presentation is good, the game itself is a bit too hard. Just sliding blocks around, how hard can it be? Well, look at the pictures and see for yourself. In my opinion, using photographs make this game alot harder than it should be. If you have no idea of which puzzle piece goes in what position to begin with, it gets maddening hard to solve it. I wish the author had taken a bit more time to solve this issue by using simpler images. But nonetheless, it’s a game that was written within a twenty-four hour timeframe, and that’s a feat in itself.

52%

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