Project X & O

Intro

"Project X & O" is Liberty's first completed game. Sadly this game is a strictly two player experience since there isn't a way to set one of the players to be controlled by an AI opponent. So if your someone that plays games alone in the comfort of your own home like I do then this game really doesn't have much to offer since all you can do is endlessly tie, beat, and lose to yourself.

Admittedly this project does try to have some advantages over playing tic-tac-toe using pen and paper by including some additional features like changeable background images and music, but these features aren't enough to make this game worth playing if your by yourself.

To make matters worse the ability to change the background is entirely useless in this project since the game board completely covers it up. As such you can't see any difference between the various backgrounds.

On a more positive note the ability to change the background music actually does function as advertised, but I'm not sure the various musical selections really go along with a game of tic-tac-toe. I suppose some would argue that's a weird comment, but I say it's just as weird that background track 01 for this game is the opening theme song for The Adam's Family in midi format. In fact, the game includes midis for a few songs like Eye of the Tiger by Survivor. Though I'm guessing one of them is misnamed since one file is named "George of the Jungle" but plays Surfin' U.S.A. by the Beach Boys. Or at least it plays a midi version of the song. And not necessarily the best midi for that song either.

Another issue I have with this game is that the text the appears on screen is more difficult to read then it needs to be in a lot of places.



This is because the green and blue used blends into the red background too much in my opinion. This isn't to say it's impossible to read, but I think the white used for options menu would have been better all around.



As you can see yourself it's a lot easier to read since the white contrasts way better against the dark red color Liberty went with.

On a nicer note the coin toss to determine who goes first was definitely a nice touch, but regardless of who goes first it's pretty easy to ensure games in tic-tac-toe end in a draw.



In fact, this is so easy that it was used in a movie to teach an AI why starting a nuclear war would be pointless since everyone would lose in the end. The only way to win is simply not to play as the AI put it. And sadly that's true about this game if your playing it alone. As such, I really don't recommend playing this one. And I imagine most people would argue there are better party games out there now a days like "Mario Party" and so on as well.

Getting this game to Run

And if your still determined to take a look at this one after reading my review your going to need to do a couple of things to get this game to launch. For starters your going to need to change the name of the exe file since it's default name is RPG_RT.exe.bak for some reason. You'll need to change this to RPG_RT.exe in order to get this game to launch.

Secondly you'll need to get a copy of the harmony.dll file for this engine. Thankfully I was able to copy the harmony.dll file over from "Chase for Divinity" but any game using this engine would probably work.

Thirdly you'll need to create a shortcut for this game and set it to run the game in compatibility mode. Or at least I did since the game gave me a DirectDraw Error upon launch after I had fixed the missing harmony.dll issue. Albeit there are other methods for fixing this error as well, but my preferred option is using a shortcut and setting it to launch the game in compatibility mode for Windows XP Service Pack 2 since it's one of the easiest to implement in my opinion.