chuq@Apple.COM (The Bounty Hunter) (05/04/90)
Here's the results of the survey on favorite mac games. my thanks to all who participated. I got 70 responses to the survey with a total of 440 different game recommendations (or unrecommendations). The winners didn't surprise me a bit. What I did was this: if a game was recommended as one of the 'top five' it got five points. If it was an honorable mention it got 1 point. A 'turkey' got -1 points. (I'll cover turkeys in more detail later) This is a list of the games that got 5 or more recommendations and the number of total points (and number of disrecommendations, if any): 28 Tetris 120 26 SimCity 117 (1) 22 Strategic Conquest 85 (1) 16 Dark Castle 67 (1) 15 Crystal Quest 62 (1) 13 Fool's Errand 60 (1) 10 Falcon 34 9 Reach for the Stars 37 8 Uninvited 32 8 Solarian II 35 (1) 8 Shadowgate 31 (1) 8 Seahaven Towers 28 8 Risk 20 8 Colony 32 8 Beyond Dark Castle (see note 1) 32 8 Balance of Power 35 (1) 7 Pool of Radiance 29 (2) 7 Deja Vu 30 (1) 6 Shanghai 30 6 Pirates! 22 6 Might and Magic I 25 (1) 5 Klondike 17 5 Arkanoid 21 5 Ancient Art of War 12 (1) [note 1: Most of the folks mentioned "both dark castles" or something of that sort, but they were only counted under "dark castle" -- so this number is lower than it should otherwise be. Only a couple mentioned Beyond and didn't mention "Dark Castle" so they really ought to be ranked as a two-part single game] The winner is Tetris, although SimCity gave it a run for its money. Strategic Conquest is a distant third. What are the turkeys? I got 60 separate turkey nominations and as you can see from above, even the best games have their detractors. Only two real turkeys stood out: Universal Military Simulator, which got four turkey nominations and no recommendations, and Microsoft Flight Simulator which was 3 thumbs down out of three. Others with more than one disrecommendation include: Ancient Art of War at Sea (4+, 2-), Crazy Cars (0+,2-), Gauntlet (3+,3-), Pool of Radiance (7+,2-), Quarterstaff (4+,2-), and Star Flight (2+, 3-). ---- My thoughts on various games. I didn't include my ratings here because I knew I'd be kibbitzing at the end of the article. If you don't care what I think, hit 'n' now. I'm personally not a big arcade game fan: I enjoy Crystal Quest but don't play it a lot. Same with Solarian II: it wasted about a week and a half of my life and then I didn't feel like playing it any more. Dark Castle is nice but not my cup of tea. Tetris, on the other hand, got banished from the disk (a fate mentioned by a number of respondents on one game or another). I found myself sitting down "for just a minute" to look up hours later. ugh. Same with Pool of Radiance: I loved it despite the bugs -- it could have been a much better game, but flakes and typos, it was still something that I hacked on until I beat. Hopefully SSI's next release will be cleaner and more of a blow-away. On the other hand, I hated Shadowgate: there is a fine difference between being difficult and being obscure, and Shadowgate passed over many times. I grew up with Adventure and Zork type games, so difficult challenges aren't necessarily a problem, but this one just made me give up in indifference. Bard's Tale is another adventure game I like: I haven't finished it and probably won't any time soon because I find the way saved games are handled more inconvenient than the game is interesting: having to go back to the Inn to stop play is just too much hassle, especially when (like me) you like to hack on a game for 10 minutes or so and then go back to work. The games on my hard disk currently are: Shanghai, Forty Thieves and Montana (both solitaire), Solitaire Royale, MacMoria, Go Master and Might & Magic I (which I bought last night and am just starting; next is Fool's Errand). Over time, other things I've grabbed and put away include Lode Runner (great, but I'm not an arcade game fan), Archon (chess on drugs: okay, but nothing special), Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (fun if you think like Douglas Adams, boring if you don't -- not challenging, just arbitrary), Wizardry (there's more to life than bashing orcs and mapping mazes, although you wouldn't know from games like this -- give me some real strategy), Colony (another game with lots of arbitrary stuff; I'm not as impressed as many), Strategic Conquest (neat game. I hate it, but that's a personal feeling, not a complaint about the game) and ShufflePuck (oh, boy. yawn). chuq -- Chuq Von Rospach <+> chuq@apple.com <+> [This is myself speaking] I regret to announce that--though, as I said, eleventy-one years is far too short a time to spend among you--this is the end. I am going. Good-bye. -- Bilbo
garth@cs.swarthmore.edu (Garth Snyder) (05/04/90)
chuq@Apple.COM (The Bounty Hunter) writes: > Here's the results of the survey on favorite mac games. The winners > didn't surprise me a bit. I'm not too surprised either, although I wonder if this polling methodology is really all that valid. Ask people who have played only one game what their favorite game is, and they are unlikely to shock you with their answer. Of course, the respondents to this survey are probably much more experienced than the average Mac user off the street. It is encouraging that some relatively obscure games did so well (and that some relatively common games were denigrated). This reminds me of the mail-in Infocom survey in which people were asked to rate their favorite Infocom games. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe won hands down, not, I think, because it was a superior game, but because it was the game with the most copies outstanding. The most useful thing for me about these surveys is not reading about which games people liked, but about which ones they hated, and their reasons for doing so. The actual comments mean so much more than the numeric ratings; would you be willing to post what people wrote as well as the statistics, Chuq? -------------------- Garth Snyder UUCP: {bpa,liberty}!swatsun!garth Swarthmore College INTERNET: garth@cs.swarthmore.edu 500 College Avenue Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397 "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur." --------------------
chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (05/04/90)
garth@cs.swarthmore.edu (Garth Snyder) writes: >chuq@Apple.COM (The Bounty Hunter) writes: >> Here's the results of the survey on favorite mac games. The winners >> didn't surprise me a bit. >I'm not too surprised either, although I wonder if this polling >methodology is really all that valid. I think so, yes. The respondents are obviously self-selected and so it isn't a random, scientific survey but it was never designed as such. >Ask people who have played only >one game what their favorite game is, and they are unlikely to shock >you with their answer. Since I averaged somewhere around 6 data points per person, the "I only played one game and liked it" problem didn't really occur [and, from typing in all the data into Filemaker for collection, most of the letters really did have a five best and many had a number of honorable mentions. People mailing in a very small number of recommendations were few] >The most useful thing for me about these surveys is not reading about >which games people liked, but about which ones they hated, and their >reasons for doing so. The actual comments mean so much more than the >numeric ratings; would you be willing to post what people wrote as >well as the statistics, Chuq? I'd planned on it, but I didn't think most of the comments really said much. They broke down into broad categories like "buggy" or "I hate copy protection" or "I don't like arcade games" or "I thought it was neat!". There were a fair number of comments, but relatively few that I found were worth pulling out of the messages and schlepping into the database so I finally stopped keeping it. It just didn't seem worth it. -- Chuq Von Rospach <+> chuq@apple.com <+> [This is myself speaking] I regret to announce that--though, as I said, eleventy-one years is far too short a time to spend among you--this is the end. I am going. Good-bye. -- Bilbo