|
We've dealt with the WINNER and the LOSER, but in this section we must examine those who can be considered Highly Commended, or given a Dishonourable Mention.
 John Connolly, who was last year's host, probably wanted to pay me back for submitting all sorts of weird and wonderful entries for computers other than the ZX80-ZX81-Spectrum trilogy, forcing him to install and test new emulators. I gave him the QL and SAM Coupé, he paid me back with an entry for the Jupiter Ace, the first since 2008, which fortunately contained loading instructions. But even this was nothing compared to the bombshell that was Ricky Gervais' Simon. Simon games are crap, so it fits the ethos of the competition. But in the past such things have been made on the Spectrum. For this to have been achieved on the 1K ZX80, including an actual PCM sample of Ricky Gervais' raucous laugh that took up most of the available space, is a phenomenal achievement. It would have been enough just to do it with beeps and twiddles, sent through the MIC socket, and that'd have been enough. But this went so far above and beyond the call of duty that it met my criteria to be awarded the Jewel of Ankhel - which was supposed to override all the other prizes. I didn't put this award in as a joke, it was more that I considered it so overwhelmingly unlikely to happen that it didn't matter what extra prize it carried. I'm going to have to do something special now. Certainly John will get his own packets of Rolos and a copy of the competition tapes - but maybe I should, for instance, call round his house - it's not a trivial journey, either - and actually make him a corned beef sandwich in person. Maybe I'll even buy him a lawnmower. What would a 19-year-old need with a lawnmower? Well mown, anyway.
 "Hedge1970", who only wants to be known by that username, was the early leader for the Least Crap game Of The Year stakes, and held that position until Andy Jenkinson knocked him off his perch in July. Mono-Rail Simulator was released at the end of January and looked daunting initially, but I soon got the hang of it and even if nothing else this year had met the five-mask standard, I wouldn't have complained - unless he tried to wriggle out of being next year's host! It's still taken second (...to last?) place overall.
Don Crawford and Dave Spinnett, two Americans who only post on Sinclair ZX World, asked for Zonkey Kong to be included in the competition. As it wasn't a CSSCGC exclusive, I should have turned it down - but I'd have been doing the competition, and everyone who followed it, a disservice. It's the Least Crap ZX81 Game by some considerable margin, has taken third (...to last?) place outright, and after bugs were reported in the version I reviewed, these were fixed and the final version is even less crap.
Jamie Bradbury also deserves recognition, for bouncing back from the demerited ZX Chuntey Inspector to bring me two Z88 entries, the first time that's ever happened, and I don't mind that they were two versions of the same game - Z88 Boggle, and its heavily revised (and debugged) version, Zoggle. I also rather enjoyed Herman Tissies 1D Golf. I hear he has more Z88 action to come next year.
Salvador Camacho deserves extra recognition for helping me achieve a specific target - to get ten or more entries for the ZX81. He was responsible for seven of the final total of eleven, and even gave me something for the ZX80. Those that were written in C and compiled with Z88DK had a sense of "samyeness" about them, and unfortunately confused Paul Farrow's ZX81 emulation cartridges for the Interface 2, so that they couldn't be shown off on the RZX page - but at least these have shown a viable route to more ZX81 entries in the future.
Steve Poole, likewise, was responsible for 60% of the QL entries this year. That there had only ever been two in the past, one of which was mine, means that Steve submitted more entries by himself than there had ever been in the entire previous history of the competition. Steve's entries were deliberately simple so that they might encourage outsiders to try QL programming, even if interest on the QL Forum petered out midway through the year - not for the lack of encouragement on my part.
Enrique Pimpinela Santos, in other years, might have found himself crowned as the next CSSCGC host at the last minute, and there is likely to be some debate about whether I should have rated Dragon Tale ahead of Zombie Dice. Either way, Enrique should be proud of it - and use it as the starting point for a CharAde-based remake, to get it complete and make it the game it always could and should have been. Oh, and... ULAplus!
 Giannis "Firelord" isn't a villain as such, but ends up in this section as the entrant with the most collective demerit points - a pantomime villain, maybe. Giannis is, after all, a veteran of 12 previous entries between 2008 and 2011. But his brand of careless lack of text wrapping, cynical recycling and "does this even count as a game at all?" scored him four demerit points - more than half of the total of seven for the entire year! At least he had a sense of humour about it, because he knew exactly what he was doing all along - and I was glad of that 60th entry in the end, in which there is a very obvious and blatant reminder that it had all been so different...
The Red Challenge didn't go at all well. Retrospectively, I think some of the Challenges were a bit too easy to enter (Cyan, Yellow and Green, for instance) - but the one I thought was far too difficult (the original Blue Challenge v1.0), resulted in a technical exercise that blew my head clean off. (I got better.) But I cannot fathom why there was only one entry for the Red Challenge - Paul E. Collins' ASMR Eye Examination, in January. Were the people of the Sinclair world so guarded that they didn't want me knowing what YouTube channels they watched? Is my taste in internet-viewing completely off the radar? It's not as if I didn't drop enough hints. And it's not as it I haven't already led by example. What went wrong?
The Spectrum Next goes AWOL: maybe I should have anticipated this, given that there has never been a Next entry for the CSSCGC amongst those who own an Issue 1 model, or who have worked out how to use CSpect. I thought - we all thought - the Issue 2 Nexts were going to be delivered in August 2021, and had that happened, I'd have been pushing a lot harder for a Next entry. As it is, there are worldwide problems that have wrecked the supply of components, and it's worth waiting for it to be made properly, rather than having it built by the lowest bidder in China. (This is a cracking read.) And with CSpect baffling even the finest brains in the Sinclair community, it looks like Next entries would have to be written and tested on real hardware. So it could never have happened. One day, though... it will. It just wasn't on my watch.
But by far the biggest bum note of the year came in the final week of the competition, when a certain someone who will remain nameless finally tried my patience one time too many. This is someone who had announced his entry into the competition with a completely broken ZX80 snapshot in a 16K ZX81 container that I had to fix manually, only to find the "game" was a trainwreck. This was followed by six similar entries, all of them attached to a forum post rather than emailed to me the way I'd specifically asked - five were for the ZX81 and one was for the Spectrum, and all of them showed a complete lack of understanding of the fundamentals of programming, beyond a series of PRINTs and INPUTs. For instance, "what to do with a variable after defining it" was an alien concept. Testing, debugging, did not happen; I don't think the programs were even RUN once before being dumped on the forum, waiting for me to notice them. I would usually call these entries "bits of pre-alpha code that were the ZX81's answer to Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing" (or whichever computer it was written for), but this is someone who I genuinely do not think has any concept of "pre-alpha" or "release candidate", let alone that there is a difference between the two. I would say these seven entries were absolutely savaged in the reviews, although the reality is that what I wrote was milquetoast in comparison to what a fair few previous hosts would undoubtedly have written. I went to a lot of effort to write 600-900-word reviews for all of them, even though there was very little of any substance to write about (which wasn't just this user's doing, at least). Some time after all these reviews had been publicly available, our perpetrator took exception to the reviews, cried to a mod, and I was told that I would have to edit out all the mean and hurty words otherwise it would be done for me - and it should be repeated on all the forums I was posting on. That didn't just involve me, it dragged the admins of two further forums into the mire, those where I couldn't edit my own posts after more than a few hours, and I had to make edits all the way back to August in order to keep the peace. (The admins were absolutely over the moon at this development.) Rather than falsify the seven reviews, to make them less scathing (and therefore misleading), I chose the drastic option. These seven entries - with a total of eight demerit points - were cast into the wilderness, and 20 reviews from mid-August onwards had to be renumbered and altered to remove any references, changing hundreds of links and image URLs, in a way that wouldn't have looked out of place in George Orwell's 1984. Winston Smith had to do this for his job at the Ministry of Truth and O'Brien would approve of the extent to which the perpetrator's legacy was erased. I do not approve of such actions, normally, but in this case I was prepared to make an exception. The competition as it is now, with 62 entries instead of a potential 69 and with less than half the previous total number of demerit points, has objectively been improved by the fallout. Who knows - some of these programs might resurface in later years, and I have already absolved myself of all responsibility if they get torn to shreds a second time. The evidence hasn't completely disappeared down the memory hole the way it would do at the Ministry of Truth, and if I think I can trust you, I might let you see the deleted reviews.
|
