zigfried's One Chance review

You did a great job of making this game sound over-inflated. I was going to play it to experience the awfulness, but I think reading the review was enough. Count me out.

I'm noticing a theme with your recent reviews. And I like it.

I played this game a couple times and agree with your review. It's a neat concept and all, but completely underutilized to becoming, as you said, a "work all the time or everyone dies...even though working all the time only seems to save two people" game that also runs at a slow pace.

Not entertaining. Of trifling diversion games, I'd pick Lucky Tower over it 7 days out of 7, even if its only real hook is "walk in every room to see how you die". At least a good number of deaths are worth a chuckle.

Yeah, probably not. It's not like it'll cost me anything. Maybe I will try one day.

The best part is that you can just check some option in how your flash settings work and you can play the game as often as you like.


Still a an over rated game that will garner to the douchy demographic.

Yeah, but I didn't bring the Flash setting thing up as a flaw because we can play most any game "the wrong way" and intentionally ruin the experience for ourselves.

The difference with One Chance is that it would have actually been better if you were meant to replay it. Not a lot better, but a little. The creator's concept was screwed up from the start, and videogames with poor concepts deserve to be called out and criticized for having poor concepts.

Actually it's more than "deserve" to be criticized, the noble reviewer will criticize.

//Zig

I like this review a lot. You have a snack knack for making it difficult to imagine any other take on this game making sense.

Great review. I felt very cheated and insulted after playing that game.

The score could probably be debated, but on the other hand I am quickly coming to the belief that a game is either a 10: go fucking play it or a 1: don't bother. And One Chance falls into the latter category for sure.

It reminds me of way back when, when I reviewed Linger in Shadows, which was essentially an unfinished demo reel you had to pay to check out (genius marketing, that). When I bashed it as such, a bunch of my friends got pissed off, saying that I didn't get it and that the artistic value of the game outweighed the fact that it wasn't a game and didn't have any clear idea of what it was trying to say (like One Chance).

The moral of the story is: choose better friends. Oh, and read Zig's reviews.

My one complaint about this review is that you don't mention that people think slapping ambient emo music over something makes it deep.

It sounds like you've realized that the real commodity in life is time. Hence the "go play it" versus "don't bother" distinction, with nothing in between. That's a player's mentality.

For reviewers, the value in assigning numerical scores is that it encourages us to think about how a game compares to others, and to what degree it's better or worse than others (ie, a score system encourages us to write as critics instead of players). It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to thoroughly critique a game if all the website asks for is a straightforward "buy" or "don't buy" judgement at the end. So really, the ideal scale would go from 1 to 50,000 or so, but ten will have to do!

//Zig

Yeah, I feel it'd be more effective to rate a game 43,928/50,000. It really separates the game from something I'd rate 43,929/50,000.

From the writer's perspective, that would be more effective. The decision between 43,927 and 43,929 would be a tough decision to make -- and tough decisions encourage more thorough evaluation (unless the pressure is just too much to handle). I'm assuming here that some game already occupies the 43,928 spot and the writer is trying to decide if something is better or worse than that. If we're just picking arbitrary huge numbers for each new review, that would be dumb and pointless.

Obviously, readers would just laugh at such scores no matter what kind of reasoning went into them. That would make it all worthwhile.

//Zig

Wow. Sounds horrible. Never heard of the game and definitely won't be playing it! Thanks for the review :)

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My favourite thing about this game was the awful writing. It pretty much read like what a child thinks a dramatic adult movie sounds like. The spelling errors don't help.

This game is basically what happens when a 12-year-old boy has an idea for a game, but instead of planning the whole thing out in a notebook to make "someday," he learns how to make crude flash games. It's almost admirable.

Did Starflight really not let you start over your game after it ended? How did that work?

IIRC, it did something to the boot disks that locked them. Of course if you made spare boot disks, you could avoid that.

If you recall the hype around the Nintendo 64 DD, a lot of it was based around the ability to save lots of data so that you could have truly interactive sandbox worlds that "remembered" everything you had done in the past.

Starflight accomplished the same thing 10 years earlier by actually over-writing game code as you explored the universe. This was necessary because there was so much stuff that needed to be saved (even down to the exact location of minerals on each planet... since you could mine hundreds of planets, they had to find some way to prevent players from re-mining planets they had already scoured).

The flipside was that if you died, you were dead. Hope you made backups of your disks!

//Zig

That's crazy. It's both an excellent idea and a terrible reality! Especially if you die, like, right away. I was looking at your Starflight review for mention of it, but you didn't choose to explain it there, which is why I asked. Sounds like it's an awesome game, regardless.