The Results

This is what you have all been waiting for, the list of winners and losers.

THE WINNERS

WINNER: Complete Useless Machine Simulator (Dr. Beep)

Although the top six places were a very close contest, this game stood out in its bizarreness and simplicity.  At first you don't "get it" but then it becomes more funny each time you come back to it.  It just shows that you don't need to spend loads of time (please tell me you didn't spend loads of time on this Dr. Beep) to write a real corker of a crap game.

So, to the master of the one-liners, I name you, Dr. Beep, winner of the 2010 comp.sys.sinclair Crap Game Competition.  Commiserations!  Please stand by for your questionable low budget prize!

Runner up: baron – aces high (AYChip)

Although AYChip did not win the competition, he did get 2nd and 5th place and some of his other entries would have moved higher up the ranking was I not so much of a meany!  This game contained all the hyped-up bulls**t that you would expect from a crap game but at the same time provided no indication of the keys.  Unlike most games where you can go "oh, its QAOP", with this, if you don't figure out the right combination of keys, you never get to take off (hint: press e to start your engine).  You need to work on your instruction sheet AY!   For that, you get 2^nd place.

Runner up: Spectrum Blind Flight Simulator 2 - Flying The Plane (Firelord)

Many of the games submitted this year had fantastic comedy value built into them.  This is one of them!  Although a sequel to an previous game, the finesse of attempting to fly a play, by text adventure, blind really does take the biscuit.  Despite those setbacks, completing the game is not that difficult.

Runner up: JSW Fixer (Iceman)

Iceman really did try hard right at the end of the competition.  Whether one was supposed to actually play JSW with all the promised fixes and it was just my incompetence of getting a modified JSW code block saved correctly, or whether it subtle genius from Iceman, this bleeds crapness all over.

THE LOSERS

And so it is that we look at the opposite end of the crap-spectrum.  All the loser bunches were similar in their general quality.  If the Cascade Cassette 50 contained 50 versions of these three games then we wouldn't even have this competition.  They all did very well on the comedy value too.

LOSER: Homeless Horace (Mulder)

This game snuck in quietly into the competition in the spring and I surprised myself when I pitted it with the other losers.  Smooth physics and reasonable platform design could have made this game publishable – maybe!

As ultimate loser of the competition Mulder will to work out how to host the next year's competition.  Suffice to say, I am sure The Mojon Twins, Digital Prawn and Apenao will be able to offer some help with this.  Congratulations!

Loser up: He had such a big head that if he were a cat he would have to toss the mice from under the bed with a brow (The Mojon Twins)

I actually thought that this game by the Mojon Twins would lose this year's competition.  Not only was it very playable but it had me in stitches when I first played it.  Despite the solid implementation, many colour rooms, little extras like the buzzy gnat thing and the scrolly at the top of the screen, its animation was character based and this let it down a little.  Still a fantastic game with huge comedy value.  I am sure this one was a favourite amongst many.

Has it goes, the Mojon Twins won the 2008 competition with the brilliant "The Ultimate First Communion Simulator".  I didn't realise how hard judging this competition would be because a paradoxically a game can be both crap and uncrap, if you know what I mean.  This game could have been at either end of the crap rankings.

Loser up: Smiler in Arrowe Land (Digital Prawn)

This game is very addictive and fits into those Sokoban type genre.  To be honest, when a game actually gets reviewed in a national magazine as this one did, then all hope of winning a crap game competition is going down the pan.

Well done DP for such a successful game and such a poor crap game condender!

Loser up: Apenao's Avatar: Enter the World (Apenao)

Our Avatar rip-off also just made it into the losing group.  Much work must have been put into this and it was amusing trying to interpret the Avatar-talk going on in the background, even if you weren't quite sure what the hell you were supposed to do in the game.

THE RANKINGS

So finally, I come to the game rankings, with the crappest at the top and the worst (best quality) at the bottom.  Top of the list gets the questionable low budget prize and the bottom of the list gets the dubious task of hosting next year's competition.

And so it is....

FINAL WORD

Thanks to everyone who has been involved with the competition this year.  Thanks especially to all you who have entered their crap, funny, pointless, quality efforts.  Also, thanks to the comp.sys.sinclair community for maintaining the competition for so many years.  Thanks also to those who have simply enjoyed playing the games and commenting on them at css and World Of Spectrum.  It has been a pleasure hosting it and I have really enjoyed it.  Good luck to next year's host – I promise you, the judging is the hardest part!

Safe!

Yours,
Chris "BloodBaz" Walsh
https://csscgc2010.zxlife.net
11 January 2011

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