Scoring

Subjective is the key stand-out word to remember. Do not expect my opinions to match yours.

What am I looking for as I search for the true crap. In my opinion, a truly crap game is beautifully packaged, with plenty of blurb on the back about how great it is. The cover image should show boundless imagination in full colour. It is the game that I would select from the rack in the newsagents in exchange for my hard-earned newspaper round money. Once home no doubt there would be a little fiddling with tape volume levels and maybe even a tweak of the azimuth alignment before it would load.

A crap game might give itself away early, by having no loading screen, a loading screen that just placed text on the screen, or a perfectly crap game might continue the illusion with a beautiful loading screen just to keep the heart pounding.

The reveal should be later when you discover the game is tedious, extremely tedious like pressing M to mow. Even better should be the ending. Maybe the game crashes out just at the point where you achieve a victory. Maybe the game doesn't have an ending, you are forever stuck pressing M until you or the computer loses the will to live. Best of all sudden, random, and totally unpredictable deaths that ensure you will never get a feeling of victory.

The first game I wrote for the PC would have been a contender. A computer version of Snakes and Ladders. I spent hours designing the board and counters. At some point, I decided that instead of the player moving their playing piece after rolling the dice it would be much better for the computer to do it. The first time I presented it to my family they very quickly said "So all we do is click a button to roll a dice?" For all the work that went into making it, it was tedious and joyless to play. A game destined never to be played again.

A truly crap game should take you from the heights of expectation to the lowest of lows.

The scoring will be based on the old Your Sinclair system, ratings will be given for Technical Ingenuity, Achievement, Crap Factor and Fun. A final overall rating will be a measure of my overall state of mind after playing and whether I would ever load the game again.

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