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A Right Chip Off the Ol' Block

  • emmych
  • 05/21/2014 08:14 AM
  • 1357 views
HA HA HA HA GET IT BECAUSE IT'S CALLED "CHIP'S CHALLENGE" AND I SAID "CHIP" LOL

I remember playing the original Chip’s Challenge with my older sister back when I was just a wee kiddo. I remember the distinct style of the graphics, the variation and clever design of the puzzles, and the feeling of utter frustration when I couldn't get anywhere past level 10 despite playing everyday after school.

...baby emmych wasn’t very good at puzzle games, okay?

Anyway.

I don’t remember much of the specifics of Chip’s Challenge, so while I’m filled with nostalgia and was drawn to the Ace Edition because of that nostalgia, I can’t compare this to the original! I can, however, talk about the super fun puzzles I encountered and why you should play this! I woulda left this as a comment, but I wanted to stick a star rating on it in the hopes that it may attract more potential players.

This game was really fun to me because I actually had to engage with it! While lots of the puzzles revolved around simple ideas such as “avoid the thing” or “navigate the maze”, it was still complex enough that I found myself planning out routes and figuring out the most efficient way to avoid the things or navigate the mazes. The challenge came in linking together the solutions to the individual sections of the level to finish the whole level! Often times levels were divided up into sections: you could pick one of several routes to do first, and part of the puzzle was figuring out what the best order of completion was.

I also liked that failure wasn’t a huge deal. With the exception of a few levels, having to start over wasn’t overwhelmingly irritating. It made me want to try harder and do better! For the most part, you fail in this game because of something YOU did, whether that be hastily traversing a maze filled with fire or not paying attention to the routes of monsters, not because your hand slipped or the game felt like being mean. This leaves the player wanting to, as I said, try again and do better, instead of attempting to rip their hair out. Too often puzzles in games like this are unfairly difficult to make up for a lack of depth. Fortunately, this game avoids that!

The main reason I think you should play this, though, is this: it was really cool to find a game with engaging puzzles made in Ace. I dunno about you folks, but I haven’t played too many RM games with puzzle design that really stuck out, barring good ol' games like Kinetic Cipher.. This was really inspiring, and was chock full of great ideas for potential puzzles that could easily be implemented in other games. I mean, I’m not suggesting you directly lift stuff from this or the original Chip’s Challenge, but I am recommending you use this as study material. What did you like about the puzzles? What makes this game fun? Figure out what the essence of that is, and implement it in your own games!

This is a game with puzzles that work to engage the player and provide a decent challenge. For me, I had fun, killed a bit of time, re-lived a bit of my childhood, and was inspired to puzzl mak. And, really, who can ask for more than that?

I’m givin’ this 4.5/5 stars, since it’s very nearly perfect, aside from a few levels that were unnecessarily frustrating. They were in the minority, though, and the rockin’ background music more than made up for it, so defs give this game a go!

Posts

Pages: 1
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
Cool review. I see that you're very excited about various things. I wanna play this and design puzzles for that event thing. If I design 5 puzzles I will get reviews for 5 different games.

Yay.
SunflowerGames
The most beautiful user on RMN!
13323

Wow! I was surprised to get a review for this so soon (And a 4.5 / 5.) Well at least I'm on the right track. And I'm hoping to make some decent improvements on this game in the future.

I learnt a lot making this game. A lot of the events I did here I didn't know how to do before. This was a good learning experience on how to use the RPG Maker program. I definitely think that I will implement some of what I learned here in any future RPGs I make.

Thanks for the review :)


Pages: 1