First impressions?

[_wb_]

Maybe it would be nice to start a thread where everyone can give his or her first impressions on the compo entries?

I'll start with just some quick personal thoughts for each category:

Applications:

Very diverse range of entries here, ranging from relatively small projects like EasyTag (music file tagger) and Xplanet frontend to huge projects like Code::Blocks, LibreOffice and SOLEIL and even a completely new OS (RISC OS). Mostly ports but also some neat self-made stuff. Lots of good stuff here, but in my opinion the most impressive and useful are LibreOffice (this has been requested for a very long time in a PND, and p'titSeb finally did it!) and SOLEIL (extremely useful tool for system administrators, for recovery, and to basically hugely boost the power of your Pandora).

Emulators:

DraStic is a clear winner here, bringing amazingly good (and still improving) DS emulation to the Pandora for the first time. PPSSPP and arcem are also interesting in that they bring new systems to the Pandora, but they are both "just" ports and need improvement. apkenv is quite cool - it's nice to play Android games without having to boot Android - but has only a small number of working modules at the moment. Finally, I haven't tried 8Blitter yet but although it doesn't emulate anything new, it seems to some offer interesting features (rewind! nice interface!), which is quite cool.

Ported games:

Haven't tried the entries yet, so I won't comment for now.

Original games:

I participate myself in that category, so I'm not going to comment on my own entry . Just a few words on the other entries:

• The two games by iprice are nice and polished (I like AquaVenture most because of its originality, but it's damn hard ).
• I haven't tried Chav Fighter yet because it's not on the repo and for Android.
• Earth Invasion is promising and has nice graphics, but it's quite unfinished at the moment.
• Escape from Castle is also not on the repo so haven't tried yet, looks like it's more of a proof-of-concept at the moment.
• EvalMaster, well, not bad for a bash script but I don't think it's going to win .
• HexGEM seems quite nice and already reasonably polished.
• Muon: couldn't really try it out yet because it's multiplayer-only atm.
• Number Mind: haven't tried yet, looks like a decent remake of master mind, and I guess a text interface is nice for something like this.
• Puzzletube: very nice and polished game, has participated in a compo before, so not completely new, but it's good that existing games get improved and polished

 

[sswam]

Comment on your own entry too, and don't be modest!
Modesty is a sin, and pride is a virtue - if you don't respect, love, praise yourself, how can you respect, love, praise anyone else??

• Microbes: an awesome, winning, original tower-defence by the great _WB_, set in human blood vessels, coded on the Pandora keyboard!!
  I and my son have had many, many hours of fun playing this game, and now it's even better...

Now, allow me to lead with exemplary immodesty! My three competition entries are awesome too, although perhaps unlikely to win anything ...

• Cz - a wonderful programming language, devised by me, based on C, looks like python, with libs, many examples.  Uses code::blocks gcc. Somewhat half-baked. Ridiculous abuse of global variables in my libs, will continue until I implement pythonic namespaces.
  My totally awesome, challenging, addictive game "Rescue" is written in Cz.  See, no modesty! 
• PSP-Maps - view a wide variety of maps on your Pandora.  Nice port of a very nice and useful PSP app.
• ArcEm - Acorn Archimedes Emulator, early port, can run old 26-bit ARM RISC OS games, the port is not very good yet.

I have not looked at everything yet, but here are some personal favourites so far.
(I'll edit this later to include all entries):

• code::blocks, Very Useful to compile and develop things!
• Microbes, mentioned above, _wb_'s awesome game. My son Sean (5) loves it too, and made 28 levels for it!
• RISC OS, I really love this operating system, and did lots of coding on it. BASIC with an ARM Assembler? WIN!
• AquaVenture - a great and funny original underwater puzzle game, enjoyed getting through some levels
• ArcEm, mentioned above. My port is not very good yet, but ... play Zarch and Conqueror, run Sibelius on the Pandora, etc!

 

[comradekingu]

I thought the microbes intro was glorious, but the text over the video didnt work quite so well. And the sprites/artwork was fantastic, but it didnt tie in with the polygon level of the maps themselves. It had a very arcade feeling i loved.

 

[ekianjo]

Emulators:

Drastic is a clear winner since it already supports so many games, PPSSPP is OK but too slow so far to be usable so maybe in a later iteration, and apkenv is excellent in its principle and the few games that work work very well. I may well vote for apkenv after all, not that I do not appreciate the work on Drastic, but because I also want to recognize the effort/idea behind it and hope it will go on and improve. 

Applications:

Code::blocks is probably the one I would like to recognize, especially since LibreOffice still has some issues to display graphs and all at this stage. I have not tried SOLEIL yet. 

Ported Games:

I have yet to try them all. But eduke32, well configured for Pandora, is certainly a serious contender

Original Games:

Did not try them all yet (and did not try Microbes very recently while I have played it a lot last year) but i like aquaventure and puzzletube a lot so far. 

 

[sswam]

"I may well vote for apkenv after all"

Yes...

Voting is bogus, and the only "correct" way to vote is to rate how much you like each entry, add up all the ratings, choose a random number from 1 to that total rating, then count through the entries giving one count to each rating point, until you get to your random number.  Then vote for that entry!

i.e. make a weighted random choice over the entries, where the weights are your ratings.  I guess I will do this, since I said it!

 

[sswam]

My SDL-fu is weak, so I'm improving it by reading microbes source (in the PND).  Thanks again _wb_, for making your game open source.

 

[TrashyMG]

While I need to look at everthing more closely.. My impressions.

Applications:
Libre Office is a big contender for all.  Codeblocks is big too, but perhaps to only people interested in development. Also the utility that SOLEIL has could be big and also GMU is a pretty awesome audio player... 
 

Emulators:
I don't plan to use it as I don't have a method to ripping my own DS games over, but DraStic is huge.. 

Ported Games:
Personally by far my favorite has been Stratagus the ability to play Warcraft II and Starcraft(Sort of, no campaign) without stuttering and odd touch screen issues, while eDuke32 is a very welcome.. it was something available prior on the old repo although wasn't being maintained anymore. I still need to look at everything here too.

Original Games:

This is where I need to do more research, Developing a game from scratch takes a lot of work and I need to sit down and play them all to accurately judge these and give these projects the respect they deserve.