All right, my vote is in. Vote, people, vote!
My needlessly opinionated opinions:
An overall thought: people have
argued that you should use the full 1-10 range. I noted at the time that there just weren't any holds in that contest that I considered a "
1"
quality: the lowest vote I gave there was a 5. Here, I felt the opposite way: the highest vote I gave here was 7. There just wasn't anything I looked at where I thought, "
This is the pinnacle of mazemaking."
Alas.
Arrows Everywhere:
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×Somewhat neat, except that:
(a) pathfinding made it trivial (and in fact found an easier solution: click on (3,0), go north to 1N, click on the NW skeleton key which gets you that and the green key on the way, click on (15,1) and go east into 1N1E, click the sword, click the key at (9,7), click on the yellow gate and head out).
(b) it's very hard to plan ahead on a maze like this, perhaps just because I don't visualize all those arrows very well, also because you can't see the next room (and there are some non-exit exit squares, like the western squares in 1N). Part of the fun of a maze is trying to determine where to go, and I had a lot of trouble doing that here.
(c) I was enjoying the fact that you can't get trapped, until I got trapped.
Overall: 6/10.
Crazy Maze:
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×The first half was actually kind of nice (and in contrast to the above entry, pathfinding was a huge blessing which cut out the tedium rather than trivializing; without pathfinding, I might have found it too tedious to complete). I liked the key-trading ("So I can use this green key to get two green keys, and then I can use two green keys to get a blue key....").
The second half was a lot less interesting; it was just a lot of walking around, without any planning or thought. What made the first half neat was the intermediate goals, which each opened up new pathways; the second half didn't have that.
Also quite frustrating was the "decoy" warp token. There's a scroll saying "you need a warp token", but the first warp token shouldn't be used there. I think maybe an entrance to 1S3E at (0,1) that leads to a dead-end, but allows you to see that you can get a new warp token in that room, would have helped immensely.
Still, all in all, fairly good. 7/10
Maze Generator:
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×It's a nice piece of technology, but there's not much special about the mazes themselves. 5/10
Suariga:
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×This is one of the two mazes that I didn't finish (well, out of the mazes that can be finished). The first level is extraneous, but that's not a big deal. What kind of killed it for me is that it's really just another RPG hold, one that happens to have a mazelike layout. Everything else in the competition was a maze: given a starting point and an ultimate goal and obstacles in the way, get from Point A to Point B. The feeling here was much more one of optimization and killing things in the right order and using your keys in the right places, and I got frustrated and a little bored. Alas.
3/10, for making something that at least is mazelike but merely not to my tastes.
Mazes of Thought:
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×This seemed surprisingly trivial to me. I kind of walked through 1W and 1N without really thinking about what I was doing. 1E might have had something unintentional going on, because I found it really easy to see the path to take.
So mostly I wasn't all that impressed, but the execution of it was pretty good. (With one exception: the anti-diagonal scripting was really irritating, because it's easy to forget and move diagonally. Which wouldn't be such a big deal if the game didn't, you know, have technology built into it to keep you from moving diagonally. My notes say "use fricking orthosquares", and there you are.) 5/10
Lost Woods:
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×Guess exit. Either get sent back to beginning and re-traverse to the point you got to, or enter a new room. Repeat until bored. And I got bored five rooms in, because it wasn't really a maze, it was a guessing game. 2/10.
Level 13:
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×Not as annoying as I feared it would be. Also not as interesting as I hoped. Again, the click-pathfinding and control-arrow movement simplified things greatly, but even so, it was mostly kind of a wander-around thing. Better than the original Level 13, because as in Crazy Maze there were some intermediate goals, like getting the sword so you could hit orbs, but not enough to keep me interested, I fear. 4/10
Trapped in a Maze of Death:
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×Trapped is right. Next time make something solveable. There may be good things in the later rooms (I looked in the editor to see what was there), but something unsolveable is an automatic '1' in my book. Also, poking at the editor, I'm not impressed by scrolls saying "save now" when you could just, you know, put in an autosave for us (again, see Crazy Maze for an example). 1/10
. That was pretty easy with Quicksaving and then when I saw the message at the end of the hold I realized the trick (and found the secret afterwards). Nevertheless, I hate this kind of mazes, whether hinted or not.
Can I take it back?
The second half was a severe let-down, though, after how good the first was; another thing that could be better was if the power gems were hidden in the maze rather than all in places you had to go for other reasons anyway.