2009 8-Bit Games Contest

The 2009 8-Bit Games Contest has ended, with an impressive number of entries, several of which are incredibly fun. This is honestly one of the best OHR contest turn-outs I've seen in a long time, both by number and by quality. There were a lot of excellent games released, some of which did things and approached genres that had never been done on the OHR engine before. Not all of these games turned out great, but enough did that I can safely say this contest was a huge success and I hope Meatball Sub keeps up the tradition and continues it next year.

These are brief run-downs on my thoughts on all ten contest entries, in my own personal order of enjoyment. Aside from the top-spot, my list varies pretty significantly from the official voting results. If someone wants to argue about these games, write a review of your own for the next issue.

That said, let's get started. We'll be going from worst to best, though almost all of these games have at least one aspect that make them worth playing.


First of all, I just want to say that if you're using a nightly version of the OHR engine in your game, it's best to distribute the game.exe file with your .rpg file. Or, at the very least, let the player know in advance.

On top of that, if you're using a game with a non-standard control scheme, please either include a readme file explaining how to play or instructions in-game. It should take under a minute to write documentation for a game like this.

Three things caught my attention immediately in this game; 1- There's no title screen. Not even a simple line of white text. 2- The Escape key instantly quits the game instead of bringing up a menu or pausing. STOP DOING THIS, PEOPLE! 3- The color palette is extremely unique and the graphics are nice.

That said, this game is extremely buggy. It uses the Sidescrollers 101 scripts and controls nicely, but it feels very untested. There are pits you can get stuck in where you can neither escape nor die. There are health items that don't restore health. I got stuck in a room where I couldn't leave, where a copy of my dude appeared in the wall behind me, and where my weapon turned into another copy of my guy.


This game has a lot of style, and I wish it had been more fun, but as it is now, the bugs and design flaws are just too frustrating to deal with. I hope Blue Train keeps working on it, because with a few fixes it could be something solid.


This is the one review that's probably going to be the most widely disagreed with, but this game really left a terrible taste in my mouth.

New-Gen's Stranded is an extremely mixed bag. It looks great, it sounds great, and... it's remarkably dull.

The game begins on an airplane piloted by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Right off the bat, I was expecting a comedy, because otherwise, why is he here? It turns out the game's not a comedy, and our plane soon crashes on an island near South Africa where our hero has to cooperate with other survivors to build shelter/a radio or find supplies, based on the player's choice.

Turns out the only reason Arnold (and the song used in the credits) appears is to get bonus points for the contest, but it's so poorly executed that it hurts the actual game.

Unfortunately, the choices don't amount to anything interesting. No matter what you choose you're just walking around gorgeous but otherwise empty maps pressing Enter as you encounter the items you need. There are a couple of dialogue choices, but none of these seem to matter much as far as story or gameplay goes.


There's one "battle" in the game, using a custom-made first-person perspective. The interface is nice, aside from some awful lag when scrolling through your battle options, but it amounts to a lot of polish on top of a whole lot of nothing. The reason I put battle in quotes is that you don't actually fight anything. You choose "attack" and your hero (I named him Beef in my playthrough) stabs a coconut four times, and then you never see a battle sequence again.

The battle system's not interesting, and there aren't any puzzles that amount to more than "gather items." Unfortunately, the story's not a whole lot better. The dialogue has some ugly spelling and grammar mistakes ("must of crashed?" Periods mid-sentence?) and no one you encounter has anything interesting to say. I don't think anyone uses the term "riff-raff" outside of Victorian novels and Japanese RPGs, so it feels kind of out of place in a game that focuses on realism. Lazy Fat Woman, Spoiled Rich Woman, and Violent Black Man are not interesting characters.


I have to take a second to complain about the controls too, because they're needlessly complicated. Use Enter to talk to characters or examine objects, unless you're examining the edge of a cliff, in which case you have to use your Spacebar. Use A and D to shift through your command menu and S to execute a command, even though you can't do anything that couldn't be done easier (for both the player and the programmer) with a regular menu. Hold R to run, and by run I mean "move faster than the default snail-level speed," which causes you to occasionally pass out with no consequences. Just because you CAN do something in a game doesn't mean you SHOULD.

I will say one good thing about this game: I always love hearing sound effects used well in an OHR game, because almost no authors even attempt to do so. New-Gen does a great job setting the atmosphere through sound, especially during the plane crash scene and the use of bird songs on the beach. It's up there with Bloodlust as one of the best uses of sound in an OHR game. It's a shame the rest of the game doesn't measure up.


Okedoke shows a tons of potential, but has a lot of little things holding it back.

To start with the positives; the graphics are very nice. This game uses a very unique palette, and it's applied well. Everything looks right. There are some really nicely drawn textboxes here, too, which I really appreciated. The music is also very well chosen, and always fits.

The concept behind the story is entertaining, and for the most part the writing is pretty good, although I could do with less drug and fart jokes. Each of your heroes has a distinct personality, and they don't feel tacked on just for the sake of having more heroes.


The bad part: This game's horribly balanced. Both heroes and enemies are way too slow (especially Senor Rialgo), and you'll spend over half of every battle staring at the screen while turn meters fill and nothing happens. When you finally do get a chance to attack, you'll likely miss. I fought a battle with a single scorpion and missed four times in a row, turning what should have been an incredibly easy win into a loss through dumb luck.

The encounter rate is too high, especially considering the size of the maps. In their favor, the maps are well laid out, but it's hard to enjoy them when you're interrupted by so many slow, long battles. You won't see any variety until you get your second character; you can attack or steal, but stealing feels like a waste of a turn. On top of that, while your rate of gaining experience is fine, enemies, at least in the opening area, drop way too little money, forcing you to grind REALLY hard if you want to buy reasonable equipment.

The game's slow pace is really my biggest issue. Battles have no right to last as long as they do (neither did the "riding donkeys across the desert" scene, which felt like it would never end) and it really hurts an otherwise interesting game.


The good news is that Dark Blubber doesn't have to totally overhaul everything. All he has to do is change around some numbers and the game will instantly improve. There are no major design flaws, only mis-managed stats. I'm looking forward to an updated version.


My first though on playing this game was, "I like the Mega Man 2 parody title screen." My second was, "this feels kind of familiar."

In this game, you play as a law enforcement officer in a parody of a major American city. In this city, you can enjoy the pleasure of disco, or restore your health with fashionable energy bars. A goofy robot living in your headquarters teaches you the basics of gameplay through a custom menu. When defeated in battle, you are teleported back to a hospital and a fraction of your money is taken by a greedy doctor.

There's a jogger in the city that runs slightly faster than the player and doesn't offer much reward for being caught. The city's not entirely finished, but don't worry, there's a comical text box to let you know which buildings weren't done in time.

Those two paragraphs describe Nathan Karr's Maces Wild. They also describe my own Village People: The Videogame. I don't know how much of this was intentional, but it really struck me as a bit of a rip-off. The plot is very different (here, we're dealing with time travel nonsense instead of rescuing your bros) but so many little ideas feel stolen. My game also (thankfully) does not feature large-breasted animal people.

That said, this isn't a bad game, at least what's here. The graphics are simple but effective, although literally every graphic in the game looks better than the main hero's. The text is well written and is occasionally very funny.

Unfortunately, there's not much to it. You may run into a battle or two in the city, and there's one boss fight, but that's it as far as gameplay goes. Each character has a very distinct personality, and the story could turn out to be pretty entertaining if this standard of writing kept up.

This is far and away the best game Nathan Karr has released, but there's really not enough to it to recommend it yet. The only reason I'm ranking this above Okedoke is that the battles are way less frustrating.


Light Fight is extremely simple from a gameplay perspective, but to anyone familiar with OHR plotscripting you can tell there's something special going on here.

The game is essentially a one room beat-em-up, where you use your punches and kicks to beat the hell out of enemies made of brightly colored lights that appear faster and in greater numbers as you beat down their brothers. While this type of game has been done to death on other systems, as far as I know it's never been done using the OHR engine, and it's done very well here.

Hit detection is great, the music fits the mood, and the graphics, while simple, are well designed and feel like an old vector-graphic arcade game. Everything just fits, and it fits well.

I really disliked Spoonweaver's Terrible Games Contest submissions, so I was hesitant going into this one, but I was pleasantly surprised. This is a quality tech demo that I'd love to see expanded into a fuller game.


Listen to a wise sensei. Quote popular songs. Extort customers. Sift through garbage cans. Entrepreneur: The Beginning is the 80's.

In this game, your primary objective is to win back your girl from the city's Popular Hairy Man. To do this, you need money and ambition, and what better way to get rich quick than by selling coffee brewed with stolen goods?

This game has a lot of freedom, to the point that it's likely to overwhelm you when you begin. The opening scenes have a lot of text, the menus have a ton of options, and the primary manual is 30+ pages. I'll admit that my first time through, I had no idea what I was doing, and ended up wasting my money on crap I didn't need. I gave up and came back later, at which point I found out you could just steal whatever you want. If that's not the 80's, I don't know what is.


You can choose which ingredients to put in your coffee, which appliances to set up, what to buy, how to pay your bills, and more. There's a ton going on in this game, and it deserves a fuller review than this. Thanks to the sheer number of games to play through, I wasn't able to give this one as much time as I'd have liked, but it's one I'll definitely be going back to.

While I enjoyed my time with this game, it was severely taxing on my computer. Yes, I realize my computer kind of sucks. It's eight years old. I experienced more slowdown here than in any OHR title I've ever played, which both frustrated and impressed me, because there's a ton of plotscripting at once at work in this game, and it shows. It's incredibly well crafted, but it takes a lot of patience to get into. The music kind of rules, too, and it's largely original, which is a huge plus.


A brave young rock and roll fan is sent back in time to protect an 80's teen celebrity from hungry, hungry slimes.

I liked this game from the moment I read the tutorial. It chooses to be silly, and fully embraces it.

You have five color-coded combat stances, which can be changed using the 1-5 keys on your keyboard. Slimes bum-rush you at varying speeds and strengths, and if your color matches theirs, you deal damage. If not, you've been slimed!


The combat system is simple but very arcade-like and very fun. You can gain experience points and grow stats, but really, at its core, Slime Wars is an arcade action game. It fits the contest theme very well, and if it were in a real arcade, I'd have pumped way too many quarters into it.

Since it's so simple, there's not a whole ton to say about this game, but I highly recommend it. It's a solid arcade experience, and gets fairly tough, even on Easy mode. There were a few times when I'm pretty sure two slimes emerged on top of each other at the same speed, because I'd kill one and then another would be right on me, but this was very rare. I died pretty badly the first time I made it to level 2, but the gameplay was fun enough to keep me coming back.

Camdog's released a lot of brief, but well designed, "concept" type games recently, and I feel that this is the best of them so far.


Mr. Triangle's Maze is an expansion of RMZ's entry for last year's 8-Bit Contest, featuring eleven new stages and two new bosses, bringing the stage total to twenty-three, counting the fights with those two jerks as stages. Worthy jumped on board to help out with the update, and the two of them have produced a quality game. While I know that its authors are working on expanding the game even further, what's here feels like a very complete game already.

Each stage is a puzzle where the goal is to get from point A to point B without getting roughed up by possibly radioactive robots along the way. You'll have to push boxes, press switches, use a remote controlled buddy, and find MAGIC SHOES to reach your goal safely.


This game has a good learning curve. It starts out easy, lets you learn the basics, and becomes fairly challenging. Levels 10 and 11 gave me by far the most trouble; 10 has too many enemies, and requires too much precision control while wearing Super Go Fast Boots, and 11 involves pressing switches that open doors for exactly ten seconds. This stage is designed so that you'll get through these doors with exactly one second (or a fraction of one) remaining, which was extremely frustrating until you memorize the layout of the stage.

Most stages are fun, though, and I enjoyed the boss fights and stages 12 and 17 in particular. The Remote Controlled Buddy is my favorite tool, and I hope that most of the next new stages use him.


I'm looking forward to new stages, but as it stands now, this game is perfectly satisfying on its own, unlike Light Fight, which really left me wanting a more complete version. I'm kind of shocked that this game didn't do better in voting, but part of that's probably the fact that it's an update to an existing game.


This right here is my pick of the contest, as well as the massively dominant winner of the community vote. I'm a huge Bubble Bobble fan; it's one of my favorite arcade games of all time, and I always try out new sequels and remakes, most recently on the Wii, and am always crushingly let down by how poor they turn out.

Don't Eat Soap is a better Bubble Bobble sequel than any of its actual sequels.

This game uses completely new graphics and sound effects to create the same charming style of the game it's based on. We have OHR character cameos as monsters (Plips, Mr. Triangles, Tim of Timpoline fame, Steve the Dragon from Tim-Tim the Mighty Gnome), though I'm not sure what the horrible fleshy blob monster is from. I just know that it scares the hell out of me.


The visuals are great, the sound is great (love the noise that erupts from our hero's mouth when he fires bubbles) and the hit detection is near perfect. There are a few times when bubbles are harder to pop than they should be, but these moments are few compared to how well the majority of the game works.

I honestly can't remember the last time I've been this pleased by an OHR game. Aside from some glitches in multiplayer mode, this is probably the best free game I've played all year, and it easily stands above even the best entries of this contest.



There we have it. This contest was great in 2008, and even better this year. If this trend keeps up, I can't wait to see what 2010 holds! Maybe I'll even participate next time.