Minigames Galore!

  • Muninn
  • 07/09/2012 05:36 PM
  • 1714 views
Maximus Jones is an RPGMaker VX Ace game created by thatbennyguy. Though made in RPGMaker, the game is a series of minigames.

Summary
There's a MacGuffin in a chest, but spikes prevent you from reaching it. Pass the five minigames in order to lower the spikes and clear the way to the chest. The minigames are as follows:
-boulder puzzle: Push boulders to reach the other side of the room.
-trade sequence: Examine objects on the map to gain items or trade them for other items
-haggling minigame: Work as an item-shop owner, trying to make a net profit of 250G
-collected items: Pass by collecting items found in other puzzles
-blackjack: Win 3 rounds of blackjack

Story: No more than is necessary
There's really no story to this game, and it does fine without one. Not much more to say here.

Presentation: Average
The game looks decent enough, I guess. The boulders in the boulder puzzle could stand to have their movement animation slowed down a bit, since as things stand it almost looked like they were teleporting from one square to the next.

Gameplay: Positively Excellent, with a few minor quibbles
Maximus Jones is a game that focuses on selling itself entirely based on gameplay, so it's quite good that it manages to succeed in this field. Some thoughts on each of the puzzles:
-The boulder puzzle is a bit on the long side, but not overly so.
-The item-trading sequence is more or less impossible to fail, though a good memory will help players remember where they should take their new item without having to re-check everything on the map.
-I had a lot of fun with the shopkeeper game, though there might be a bit too much randomness to it: My last customer wanted to buy a 1000GP item with an initial offer of 1500GP (The minigame requires you to make a net profit of 250GP, though I only needed ~15 more at the point I was given this deal. There's also not a lot of room for the player to get to know the values of the items that they're selling, since you only learn this after completing a sale and the minigame is short enough that it's unlikely that you'll end up selling the same item twice.
-The fourth puzzle was a little weak, since it was just using items collected in the first two.
-Blackjack was a little fun, although the game uses some weird rule variant where you have to declare an Ace to be either 1 or 11 at the time that it's played, and aren't allowed to change it later. It also seemed odd that the win condition was just "Win three times, eventually", and not to earn a target amount of money.

Final Verdict: Quite the Success
If there were one thing I would want changed with Maximus Jones, it would be that the game could stand to be a little longer, and that only the 3rd and 5th puzzles have any sort of replay value. It's still good, though, because of the short amount of time that I was playing the game, I was having fun for pretty much all of it.

Posts

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Thanks for this informative review. I was quite joyful to see that my game had 2 reviews in a single day! Your review was very congratulatory, and I thank you for the glowing score. You have also encouraged me to work harder to make my next project a great success.

Cheers!
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
author=thatbennyguy
I was quite joyful to see that my game had 2 reviews in a single day!


I suspect our two reviews bumped this game into the buzzing section. Having a four-star average should get people to play this, and leave commentary/reviews of their own, thus causing more buzz, possibly making more people come, etc. It's a vicious cycle, I tell you!
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