I gave this game a try after admittedly having serious misgivings, and I'm disappointed to say I was correct in my hesitation. The screenshots are very misleading; the game is slower than molasses on a TI-84+SE, and while the gameplay mechanics are certainly solid enough, it's not an original idea or a particularly good implementation. Other than the painful slowness, my biggest complaint is that every time you die (which you will often, because the controls feel sluggish and awkward), you have to press ENTER to the "You Lose" message, wait for the main menu to render (slowly), scroll down to the map you were playing, press ENTER, and wait for the level to slowly render. A much better solution would have been to return the player to the starting position in the map without leaving it, erasing and redrawing it, or going anywhere near the main menu.

Anyway, on to the quantitative metrics:

Gameplay: 5/10 You move left and right, and you jump. Much to my confusion, jumping causes the dot that is your character to both jump and move sideways, which killed me several times. I eventually gave up.

Graphics: 6/10 The main menu is nice, the levels are functional enough, nothing amazing.

Speed: 3/10 Painful.

Replayability & Originality: 2/10 Once you beat one of the eight maps, there's nothing particularly fun about returning to it at any point. If you have the patience to play through all eight, I can't imagine anyone not promptly deleting this program to free up the 6KB of RAM and 4 Pic variables it occupies.

Overall: 16/40

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 11:46 PM, Rhett Langseth <rhettlangseth@hotmail.com> wrote:

I just read the artical you wrote about me back in Febuary. You were right, I chose to make games that were popular... and that I love in real life. Yet being in basic my expectations for them weren't that high. (Although rating Mario 16/40 because its a bit slow seems a little harsh... It is in basic you know)
Oh and the screenshots are messed up because I dont have a proper tool to make them with... Got any suggestions?
Any way, great job with Doors! It's an epic, epic tool! Keep it up!

Hiya Rhett,

I gotta be honest, a lot of people in the programmer community got quite annoyed at you for naming your programs things like Mario, so I was speaking on all their behalf to some extent. A lot of us spend a lot of time on projects (nine years for Doors CS, for example), but the public at large is generally less than intelligent. A keyword like Mario can net you thousands of downloads regardless of the content, so many of us felt you were gaming the system by choosing popular names for all your programs, which is frowned upon. And I did indeed take into account Mario's BASICness; I looked at your code and there was a lot of optimization you could have done. As far as screenshots go, WabbitEmu is a great tool for emulating and screenshotting. Cheers for the Doors CS comments and for following me on Twitter.

I'd recommend that you stop by my website, Cemetech, and give us a shout on the forums. I'll warn you that there will probably be some angry people at first, but depending on how it goes I feel like we might be able to teach you some better programming practices (and hopefully what we feel are more ethical marketing practices).

Cheers,
Kerm Martian

I frankly didnt like his stupid friend "bill frost"

good to see the actuall guy is a decent human though

Troll.