All right, having cobbled together some votes, here are my comments. A few notes:
* I'm not including numbers because my numbers tended to be impressionistic, not programmatic. (Except "
familiar places"
, which I gave a 1 based on Schik's post above, though really that opening "
KDD"
room was so misguided it might have gotten a 1 anyway.) My comments were mostly written in "
realtime"
, i.e. as I played through the holds. Ex post facto comments are in
blue.
* I tended to give lower votes to holds with unnecessarily difficult rooms. I also tended to give lower votes to holds where "
in the style of X"
meant "
throwing in as many elements from X as I could fit"
.
* I tended to give higher votes to holds that, in my opinion, really did capture the flavor of the four releases. There were some holds that I enjoyed, and where I thought the puzzles were very good, but which I gave lower votes to because they just didn't feel like KDD/JtRH/TCB/GatEB puzzles. (Also: just because you threw in rain doesn't make it feel like a GatEB room.)
Your mileage, and criteria, may vary. Comments:
Museum of Unnatural History - Hub Level
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×Personally, I found it a little too editorial for my tastes. Was Pearls trying to keep us away from "Through the History" by burying it in a level-13 style maze room? The snarkiness about "familiar places" might have been well-founded, especially given Schik's revelation that the entry ended up disqualified, but I think I'd still prefer a nod to disinterest from the contest compiler.
Sixth Level
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×This might be brilliant. But I'll never know it if I can't get past the first room.
...ah, the corner, but I don't remember anything so tedious in KDD.
Wait, what does "think carefully before leaving" even mean? And seriously, "I've never played JtRH, but maybe this is close"?
All right, definite style points for the tar/mud/gel triangle theme.
...but minus several million for good thinking. I have positively no desire to tackle this gel room.
I looked at the fourth room in the editor. Really, any rooms where the architect has to tell you how to solve them have gone wrong somewhere.
Museum of Modern Architecture
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×Kind of digging the curator's notes (in spite of some spelling/diction errors).
JtRH room was easier than I was expecting. I think it definitely gets JtRH in aesthetic, though I'm not sure how much it does in terms of gameplay.
GatEB perhaps somewhat better in that regard.
KDD room looked unapproachable until I caught the trick, and that's actually probably a decent approximation of KDD.
The Time Capsule
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×Hmm. Was this style around in KDD? And was this sort of "four small rooms" a KDD feature?
Lots of brained roaches while just waiting to exit...doesn't feel very JtRH.
TCB room feels somewhat more familiar.
Hm. Did GatEB even have rock giants? Throwing in rain (and water) doesn't make it a GatEB hold. Later note: yes, yes it does. I don't know why this didn't feel like a GatEB room at the time; it seems perhaps a decent approximation.
What Could Have Been
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×The TCB room looks kind of gratuitously awful. Fortunately, it can be skipped.
The Gunthro room seemed...I don't know, not quite right. And the scripted room endings seemed unnecessarily abrupt.
The Four Ages of Budkin
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×Hm. First room looks plausible.
Oh, very cute, making the door not leave an open gate behind. Credit for that. And it was a pretty boring room, so that's also totally KDD.
But the wrong slayer in JtRH! Shame, shame.
Fairly pleasant rooms, though, and passably authentic.
Nice level of difficulty, too: not obvious, but not painful.
Tribute to Major Release
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×First two rooms seemed to at the least capture the gameplay aesthetic of holds built during those eras.
Third room...at this point it doesn't really feel like a TCB room, it's just a room that has an adder and hot tiles and oremites and a (wholly unnecessary) mirror and a rock giant and gel and a conquer token and briar.
Fourth room kind of uninspired.
Memories...
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×The first room has various elements, sure, and isn't a bad puzzle, but it's not very KDD.
Similarly the second room (and what's up with Halph being a character for several turns?). And the guards at the end are just irritating.
!praW emiT
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×A black gate in the first room? The style might look right otherwise, but. And it looks so unnecessary, too, because you wouldn't be able to drop the red door if you still had any tar left.
Also perhaps Exhibit A in the "just because it's like KDD doesn't mean it's worth repeating" argument.
Wait, seriously? Having killed everything, I now have to go all the way back to hit the door just to get Halph to move? Feh.
oh, and room 3 is now just tedious.
And room four is...empty, like the architect just gave up.
A Christmas Carol
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×Kind of an unnecessary cut scene.
Bonus points for the ancient graphics (though minus those bonus points for, well, the hideous ancient graphics).
Plausible rooms, all told. Plus, hey, builders! Perhaps a little bit of Element Overload (builders and hot tiles and briar and aumtlich), but the style feels right.
But this fourth room feels...well. Hard to say the least.
4 Rooms
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×I've now been staring enough at this room to ask: were those giant silver balls actually part of the KDD decor?
This ended up being the entirety of my comments, because I never made it past the first room. I did look at the other three rooms in the editor, but all four of them seemed hard, perhaps gratuitously so.
History of DROD
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×It's...perhaps too ambitious? It's a clever idea, but it feels a little packed.
Plus, builders building the minirooms? It's kind of...overdone? Ostentatious?
In the end, I appreciated the sort of simulated abbreviated replay of the whole holds, but I didn't feel that it really hit the contest's criteria of capturing the feel of a room.
The Living Tar
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×Just because it's reminiscent of KDD doesn't make it a good idea. (But it is reminiscent.)
In the end, surprisingly tractable, and generally quite thematic.
DHM-[censored]-1L1
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×Surprisingly accurate-feeling. A little hard, but not at all unreasonably so.
Back in Time
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×I'm not sure how much these feel like rooms from the original, but I do appreciate the relatively understated nature, like the fact that the JtRH room had a wubba, but wasn't overloaded with hundreds of new features.
Though that's less true of room #3.
Fourth room felt quite elementary, though GatEB was also pretty basic, I suppose. (And, hey, a GaeEB room without rain *and* without shallow water!)
Through the History
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×I ended up not having any comments on this hold while I played it, in part because I never got past the first room. The first room was far less reminiscent of KDD than of, say, larrymurk; the guide-the-roach puzzle probably would have been just fine on its own without the added time pressure of spawning tar babies along the outside as well. The TCB room wasn't too bad, though it was a little gimmicky.
[Last edited by Tahnan at 02-11-2013 07:00 AM]
though duelling the rattlesnake was quite fun
Pretty good mini-rooms, though, especially the trapdoor one.
