mxvladi
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 2505
Registered: 02-11-2008
IP: Logged
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Re: Loan Shark (+2)
I've started this a while ago, then got bored. Now, I decided to return to this hold, finally conquered it... and, surprisingly, I'm still the first one to do so. And that is despite the hold being pretty small and being published for almost a month by now.
Is it because this hold is fairly difficult? No, not really. The real problem with this hold, in my opinion, is that it's extremely tedious in a lot of places. What Larry said about repeitiveness is true – in most of rooms, I need to repeat the *same* manipulation trick lots and lots of times. Whether that is manipulating guard/slayer to cut tarstuff, or trying to lure slayer somewhere, or whatever else – if a room features some sort of manipulation trick, I have to repeat it lots of times while solving it.
By the way, just adding slayer in the room won't make a good slayer puzzle. There are very few rooms which are actually based on slayer manipulation. In many rooms, slayer just serves as "an annoyance while you solve an unrelated puzzle"(quoting hold description here, which claims that there *aren't* such rooms). In some cases, it's actually safe to just kill the slayer because it's totally unrequired to solve the room(for example, Larry's solution to 1N 2W involves killing the slayer before doing anything else). And finally, there're few rooms actually based on slayer manipulation(those were probably the most interesting rooms in this hold).
Quite a few rooms left me wondering whether what I did is intentional... In fact, there're some rooms where I'm *sure* my solution is unintended. Not sure whether to blame an architect(who waited for several months before submitting the hold, and still received no comments) for this, though.
...
However, this hold has a few rooms which I've enjoyed, and I'm looking forward to replaying them:
1N 3W – one of those rooms which are actually based on slayer manipulation. Fun.
3N 2W – a bit more annoying than 1N 3W, but still okay room and fits the theme.
3N 1W – I'm not really sure what you *wanted* me to do here, but I had fun trying to get my(most likely, unintended) solution to work. :P The hitting-conquer-token part of solution(which can't really be broken) is pretty fun, too.
3N – good puzzle. The goal is rather clear, so the player is left wondering *how* to archieve it. There're no filler elements here, I don't have to repeat the same trick a lot of times etc. Not straightforward, too: it's one of the few rooms where I actually had to think about the solution. It's a shame that in order to play this, player will have to get through all your tedious rooms. It also, sadly, has a speech bug: in some cases, slayer says "good" speech(aka "omg I lost how it's impossible", etc) even when I'm actually about to die in a few moves(didn't kill some golems so green door is locked). I'm not sure there was any easy way to fix it, but IMO it would be better not including that speech there it all if it doesn't always work properly.
2S – scroll in the game claims it's “decidedly poor room”. Actually, it is slightly less tedious than many of the required rooms.
I had a hard time rating this hold for difficulty and overall/fun. In a lot of rooms, the solution was just a matter of fine manipulation rather than thinking(and I don't want to give high difficulty rating for rooms like that), and as I said, lots of rooms are tedious... however, there's fine stuff here, too. In the end, I decided to rate it 5,5 for difficulty and 6 for fun/overall.
[Last edited by mxvladi at 08-05-2012 11:18 AM]
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