Well, the results are in from the MSXdev 25 competition. The verdict? Operation Hibernation was selected as the 16th best of the fifty entries, while Eye Brawls nipped at its heels in 17th place. It's about where Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons landed in the last contest, except not really because that was out of a pool of 31 entrants. So I still lost, but I lost more gracefully this year. Hooray for a more dignified faceplant.
I won't even argue with the results. There were many games in the contest that were objectively superior to my own, including "how the hell did they do this?" polygonal showcase DELTA and the more technologically humble but meatier platforming challenge Chrono Runner. There's also Boobie (Chikubi) Ninja, an arcade-quality platformer where all the characters have naughty anatomy for faces. (Look, I don't get it either, but the gameplay and production values are both terrific. Let the man have his boob faces.)
With the avalanche of quality titles in this year's MSXdev, I didn't have a realistic chance of victory. One of the other contestants made a pretty good point, though... the contest accepts entries for both the prehistoric MSX (just a stone's throw from being a ColecoVision) and the more advanced MSX2 (which gave us Metal Gear Solid 2, among others). Games for both formats are pitted against each other, which makes about as much sense as having a cross-country race between high-performance sports cars and children's sports car beds.
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| Distressingly, this is not a child's race car bed. (image from OddityMall) |
One of the contestants, DavePlunder, expressed deep annoyance that his own game, Space Bash: Contact!, landed in seventh place. He complained that the format of the contest effectively denied victory to entries designed for the less powerful MSX. I have a hard time disagreeing with this... Space Bash is an exceptional game considering the limitations of the original MSX, and those limitations aren't taken into consideration in a contest where games for 1983 hardware are expected to compete against releases for later systems with more RAM, more colors, more clock speed, and (in the case of the Turbo-R) an entirely different processor.
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| It's hard to overstate just how impressive Space Bash looks on MSX1 hardware. None of what you're seeing here comes easily on a system that only lets you draw two colors on a single line, and all the color choices are barf. (image from the Space Bash Itch IO) |
Someone made the counter argument that Space Bash did outperform a good many MSX2 games in the contest, but that doesn't disprove DavePlunder's earlier point. His game got to where it was with a massive technological handicap, the equivalent of getting bronze in a Olympic sprint with a boat anchor clamped to your ankle. Gee, you didn't win! I can't imagine why! Guess you should have tried harder... maybe spend a few weeks in a Dragonball Z capsule with the gravity turned up to max.
Another poster observed that if your game is creative and clever enough, it could overcome all technological limitations, which is either tremendously naive or has the bitter tang of weaponized aspiration. "You can do anything if you just believe!" "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!" "Maybe you can make the next Tetris!" "These excuses make it easier for me to ignore the obvious inequality of a contest featuring three generations of increasingly powerful hardware!" Yeah, whatever gets you through the night, buddy.
I'm... satisfied with my position in the contest. Even if it had been split into MSX and MSX2 categories, my games would have been soundly thumped by Space Bash, Chrono Runner, and Shift. It's too bad those games didn't get their rightful due, though. Splitting next year's contest into two tiers- MSX and MSX2- would go a long way toward addressing this.
Also: Byron is a bear. He's a friggin' BEAR. The game is called Operation Hibernation. He's eating fruit to fatten up for the winter! His bonus stage is a fish ladder! Hello?! "Dog character," geez. How many dogs do you know that hibernate for the winter?
(No, you can't say raccoon dogs! They're dogs that think they're raccoons! Dogs with an identity crisis don't count!)
