March 5th was the first revelation date. Today was the EXTENDED revelation date… another week or two is getting unreasonable. I understand he’s at GDC but so is ChrisM and he managed to get his done way before the deadline… should we appoint a new judge? :-/
or, preferably, blah^3… give us an update?
[quote]Today was the EXTENDED revelation date…
[/quote]
Odd. I could have sworn he asked for a later date than today. For some reason the 16th is stuck in my head.
[quote]another week or two is getting unreasonable.
[/quote]
I’m probably exagerating the amount of time. I wasn’t expecting him to be done until sometime this coming week, though.
[quote]I understand he’s at GDC but so is ChrisM and he managed to get his done way before the deadline… should we appoint a new judge? :-/
[/quote]
What’s the hurry? There’s no prizes to give away (other than dukes) and no one that I’m aware of is being inconvienenced. So what’s the rush? The poor man’s busy enough as it is! He said he’d need time, and everyone said that was ok. As long as he gets the scores in sometime in the near future, what’s the big deal? Besides, it might give Chris a chance to go over some of the entries that he had to fail because he couldn’t run them. 
[quote]or, preferably, blah^3… give us an update?
[/quote]
Excellent idea.
[quote]March 5th was the first revelation date. Today was the EXTENDED revelation date… another week or two is getting unreasonable.
[/quote]
Um. I think you need to organize thinks a bit better before getting all excited about things like an unplanned, never-formally-decided judging date. I had, in fact, said it might take to the 16th - and the various problems with running some of the games (which I’d posted about) drew the judging out somewhat.
If you like. Bear in mind that one game so far doesn’t seem to run on OS X at all, one is unplayable on linux and OS X for different reasons on each, two won’t run without internet access, and several of the game websites were down so I couldn’t access them at all.
If someone had handed out one copy of each game in a big zip file with all instructions and verified them on each OS already, then I’m sure the results would have been much quicker to compile. But to do each game justice as a judge does take time, even more so when each judge has to wade through the problems of merely running them.
I’ve given jbanes the almost-complete spreadsheet, but I would prefer (in the intersts of fairness) to have a couple more attempts at the games that weren’t starting (preferably on a different OS for one of them).
PS: jbanes: the comments which are just numbers are recording which ones I played in-flight (altitude in feet); I thought some of the authors might be amused to know how high their games had been ;).
PPS: thanks, everyone, for providing considerably better games than the crap that Virgin Atlantic has on their in-flight system. Some utter drivel from some crappy excuse for a games company.
good to hear you’ve actually HAD progess. I was afraid you hadnt gotten anywhere at all. I don’t WANT to appoint a new judge, so since you say you’re almost done there’s definitely not a need for it.
if the game doesnt work on Mac… deduct some points and resume judging that game on a windows machine. The end of the contest was the end Feb, it would be fair to the participants to give them results BEFORE the end of March if possible!
by the way I’m leaving for a week on Sunday (highschool senior trip…) so if the results finally come in, I’m sure jbanes is capable enough to take the numerical average of each vote 
anyway, it would be nice to get the results this weekend… it’s been since the end of Feb since we STOPPED the contest o_o;
… well?
Since our judging/officiatig team is slow I’m posting my favorites:
Neb4k - this game is just fun. Probably the most complete game in the contest.
Hunters4k - most technically impressive. I’m not a big fan of the style of game play though.
T4XI - I realy like the fake 3d in this one; the controls are difficult for me though.
Honorable mentions: Trek4k, Robotron 4096, Combat4k ;D
I know this might startle a few, but I’d have to say I like Stardodger 4k and Shot 4k most - not because the graphics are the most impressive, or because the technology is the most advanced, but because they’re so addictive. The gameplay rocks.
Oh, and there are quite a few other ones I like as well, and a whole bunch that I haven’t tried. Neb 4k, Ball 4k, GridRunner 4k… ah, to hell with it, I like all of kev’s games >)
Final scores in - all execpt for Isolation, that every time I’ve tried I could find no-one else to play with.
Personal fave is Shot; very addictive. Although there are 7 or 8 others that really impressed co-workers a lot more (graphics, music, gameplay - each to his own).
And two never worked on any OS I tried it on (OS X, windows, and possibly linux too although I’m not sure) - Pang4k and JM4k. A few wouldn’t run on OS X, and a few were really really hard to get to run (they each got -1 for that…)
PS: the big delay for getting in the final few scores was because:
Sorry about that. On the other hand, if the games had been uniformly easy to run…
I was tempted to give up on 1 or 2 games that really made me, the player, jump through hoops just to run them, but I had a duty to at least play all of them and largely ignore that even if they drove me up the wall :(. note to self: include an explicit “ease of installation / running / exiting” category in all future comps
That sound’s like your endorsing 1.1 applets…
:o
;D
[quote]That sound’s like your endorsing 1.1 applets…
[/quote]
Technical reasons for not working:
I’m guessing clickrisk wasn’t very linux-friendly, since it’s fullscreen… don’t know about the others. Oh, and it depends on right-clicks to exit as well… Sorry
I think kartrisk, fetrisk and fifteen should been working OK though, haven’t had the chance to test them on other OS:s than windows.
/me makes mental note to get a “java cross-platform compatibility guide” going in near future
I think next year will have a “must be a self executable jar” rule.
[quote]/me makes mental note to get a “java cross-platform compatibility guide” going in near future
[/quote]
You know, there was a column to reward the entries that were self-executable. 
In any case, I’ve merged the scores, forwarded them to Woogley, and posted them online. You can find them at the following links:
The Winners sheet is the totals sorted by score, the Totals sheet is simply the tabulation in alphabetical order, and the other three sheets are the scores given by each judge. Go see if you’ve won!
Good work everyone, this was an excellent year!
Oh, god, I’m sorry guys. I also note I seem to have screwed-up the music column - it was demarcated 0 or 5 and yet I’ve put 3 for one game, apparently.
OTOH, some games were (sort of) self executable on some platforms but not others.
/me thinks he needs to issue an errata for his scores
FWIW, none of my corrections would have changed the positions.
I’d also like to add…playing these games was a LOT more fun than the multi-million-pound inflight entertainment sysetm on Virgin Atlantic’s planes (both ways across the Atlantic).
The fact that most of the 4k games were equal to or better than the stuff that someone was paid to put on an airplane, and a good 50% were a LOT better, says a lot for the quality of programming (bear in mind Virgin used to have complete SNES ROMs on their planes…so 4k is rather a long way below the limits of their systems).
PS: the 6-digit numbers in the comments column are for games played at that height above sea-level ;D
PPS: jbanes reckoned some of my scores were “harsh” and I agree. Where I rated stuff down I often didn’t want to, but was trying to be fair to all the other competitiors - for instance, seeing as some people had gone to considerable lengths to make the game easy to play (menus, instructions) I couldn’t fairly not penalise those who hadn’t yet whose games needed it.
PPPS: I loved all the 3D games especially. Everything from the ultra-cheap-hack neb4k right up to the 3d tanks and KG games
I got beaten by TETRIS!?
I mean… er, good job.
And definitly a worthy winner. =)
[edit:]
Premature w00ting. That was just a summary, not the official scores. (?)
[quote]OTOH, some games were (sort of) self executable on some platforms but not others.
[/quote]
That’s a new one. Sort of on some platforms? I’m thinking they’re either self-executable or their not. Their cross-platform ability to run is a separate issue.
Personally, I think you guys were putting WAY too much emphasis on cross platform ability. It’s 4K for crying out loud!
In any case, I thought you guys might find this entry into the Javascript 5K Contest to be of interest. I bumped across it the other day and thought it was pretty neat. See if you can spot why it will never be in color.