There's a misapprehension that, just because something is easy, it must not be very good. This isn't true--some easy holds here on the forum are probably somewhat underappreciated, but you can look at
DROD Tutorials by Nillo (three brains, 7.1 rating) or
Zonhin's Tutorial (1.5 brains, 6.3 rating). And I can name a number of games--computer games, board games--which are extremely simple design, but are still excellent as introductions, or even sometimes interesting beyond their introductory quality, notable for their elegance or aesthetics. But some people believe that "
easy"
is the same as "
boring"
.
This hold is why.
The first room of this hold contains unnecessary scripting, awkwardly written dialogue that repeats if you re-enter the room after clearing it, and a handful of monsters contained in a small area with lots of empty space around them. That's more or less all that this hold contains, except that there are another 49 rooms of it (plus 25 "
walk through to the exit"
rooms with floor numbers written in tarstuff, in a lopsided manner). The scripting was rarely unpredictable--annoying in Level 2, but most of it is "
clear the monsters and the door will open"
or "
get near the door and it will open"
. (That's what makes it unnecessary; the former is usually called a "
green door"
and the latter a "
pressure plate"
.)
But really, in the end, there's just not really anything
here. There's a 116-step "
maze"
that's really just walking through a short path; half the room is literally left empty. There's an "
insane roach level"
in which the first room has a roach queen who manages to spawn twice, one roach each time, before you kill her. (The next room has around 60 brained roaches, which comes closer to qualifying as "
insane"
, though that also gives you an idea of how thematically well-connected the two rooms on any given level are.) There's hardly even anything interesting from an optimization point of view, though a handful of the horde rooms might accidentally qualify.
Enthusiasm is welcome in architects. But that's all this hold has going for it, and it's nowhere near enough.
[Last edited by Tahnan at 03-31-2013 08:23 AM]
