Hard Core Hangman - Etch A Sketch - Jamie Bradbury

Well, this is a surprise, not even officially started the job role and there is an entry in my mailbox. I suspect poor Jamie has a year's worth of pent-up crap to purge. No doubt in a year I'll be in a similar position. 

The game needs no explaining, it is Hangman. The game that provided hours of fun as a child, arguing about how many parts the hangman's scaffold should have. My sister always insisted on four, base, upright, arm, and a rope. My friends were more accommodating with extensive bracing and fancy additions.

Jamie's version was accompanied by an email which will help to just the crapness or not of this game. The opening is very promising "This is an adaptation of an example program - think it is in the Spectrum manual.". Stealing someone else's code is a great start on the journey of crapness, but admitting to it? Not so much so. How does this game measure up to the four criteria I'm using to judge.

Technical Ingenuity - 75%

The game is written in basic, this to my mind is the language that is foremost in producing crap. However, Jamie goes on to say in his email that he has added a routine to get the correct length of each word in an array as otherwise they are padded with spaces. Already he shows signs of caring about this game, a true crap author would ignore the issue and let the end user guess which letters are letters and which are spaces.

He goes on to say there are clever sub-routines at line 2000 that use CHR$ in a pleasing way. I'm all for authors hyping up their games and I expect phrases like 'clever' and 'pleasing' to be thrown in. What I expect is for them to actually be true.

Achievement - 50%

So how far towards the stars has Jamie reached? The game has a loading screen which is masked before the colours appear on screen. Oh dear! It looks like he has taken pride in producing a nice-looking screen. I would have hoped for an indefinable mess with oodles of colour clash. 

Once loaded the game launches into an endlessly repeating piece of beepola music. The screen stays on the loading screen with no instructions to press any key to continue. This is at least a little promising. Having pressed the correct key to continue (I would have liked this to be wildly obscure, not just space). You are presented with the Hangman game.

Jamie told me the crap part of the game is that he has selected 12 very hard words and urges me not to break into Basic to find out what they are. I would love to see that line in the blurb for a game. I didn't need to break in, I managed to get 9 of the 12 words first go, admittedly getting very close to death. The other 3 were easy enough due to a fundamental flaw in the gameplay. The same words are played in the same order. If you get a word wrong you are presented with it on your next go which means you can start with the letters you know are correct, avoid the ones you know are wrong, and play from the pool that is left. This is a big boost to the crap factor.

Fun - 20%

Maybe it is me, maybe I like Hangman, but I actually enjoyed playing this one. The words are tricky enough to be interesting, but not stupid. I feel a truly crap game would have thrown in foreign words, misspelt words and words that even a technical expert in that field wouldn't know. With a bit of tweaking it might have been a fun woot entry to exercise the brain cells after Xmas lunch.

However, this game has zero replay value. Once you have guessed the 12 words the game just loops around and presents them all again in the exact same order. I had at least hoped for a congratulations screen. Except for this and being presented with the word you just lost on, it would have been a high 80-90% fun rating.

Crap Factor - 50%

This one scores down the middle for crap factor. The author obviously cared enough to do a halfway decent job, but not enough to make the game replayable or significantly challenging.

Take away

This game could easily be made more crap. The tune are the beginning could be more irritating. The key to start could have been more obscure. The words could have been impossible to guess. The hangman scaffold allows 8 chances to get letters wrong, my sister would argue that is at least 4 too many.

This game could also be made more enjoyable. A wider range of words. A random selection of words. Not being presented with the same word you just got wrong. Maybe a concept of lives.

As the first game to be reviewed, this currently has a strange duality of being both the best and the worst game in the contest. Don't let it stay there rise to the challenge!

Download the game here.

P.S.

The email contained the chilling line at the end "My son enjoyed using the spectrum to add his own words, and we even saved it to tape.". I fear where this is heading, I thought the contest would die out with the last of the old geezers. To learn that youngsters are going to perpetuate this into the future is worrying. In a thousand years will there be a cult of crap game producers? Will there be a temple to Rich Pelley?