uDevGame 2001 is a Macintosh game programming contest. All the entries have been submitted and voting is underway. You can vote for the four games you thought were the best. There are 24 entries, about half of which are Mac OS Classic only. I downloaded the Mac OS X games and tested them. Quite a few that use GL for 3d graphics locked up my machine -- maybe there's a problem with my system. Of the rest there were some that were pointless or that weren't anywhere close to completed. In the end there were four games that I thought were at least good enough to keep. But first a review of the bad games I tried.

GL Fighters -- some kind of 3d Mortal Kombat game which locked up my machine (screen went to black and stayed that way, couldn't force quit). Can You Find It? -- find the five mistakes in two identical pictures. Didn't work on my machine. Skimmer -- GL-based hovercycle game. You navigate hills and try to touch all the markers. Too hard, I couldn't get the hang of climbing the cliffs and kept ending up at the bottom of the valley off in the corner. Nice graphics though. Chapter One -- some sort of Space Invaders game. Also OpenGL based and locked up my machine. GL Thrill -- a first person shooter. Nice graphics again but I could only move forward and sidestep left and right, which is not conducive to getting around in a maze.

Astro -- the smallest Commodore 64 program I had took up 3-lines of BASIC code. In it you had falling rocks and your cursor at the bottom of the screen trying to dodge the hailstorm. Astro is much like this, except way too easy, though with nicer graphics. Although a complete game, I also didn't decide to keep it. Ultra Blast 6 -- you stare out the cockpit of your ship and shoot pulses and missiles at another ship, also staring at you. Maneuvering solely consists of sliding up, down, left and right while remaining facing the same direction. Despite how interesting it sound, I didn't get the hang of the gameplay and it looked kind of pointless. But it is only 66 kb, which is quite impressive. Trash -- reminiscent of Crystal Quest, this game also crashed or didn't run on my machine.

The four best games, in my opinion. Smash Boom Bash -- you have a 2.5-d view of the game. You control a green tank and must save little green running people from the red spiders. You can run over the spiders or lob bouncing grenades at them, but the grenades damage the surface. There are also holes in the surface and you can fall of into the holes and off the edge of the map. This is a relatively easy game since it doesn't matter if people die, other than you don't get points for them, and the only way to lose is to fall of the map. But it's nice game play and is somewhat original. It has potential.

Number 3: Zed Nought -- a Defender-based game, including the confusing controls (well, confusing if you're using a keyboard, ever try to play Defender on MacMAME?). Big and bright graphics, a bit slow on my machine. Almost looks like it was done on HyperCard, the graphics are so big and obvious (and don't bring up Myst, it ran on HyperCard, but it was a version with lots of extensions). Very easy to die in this game.

Number 2: Evolution. This and the number one game were both very close. Evolution is a two player game (or you can play the computer). You have a grid and each turn you add one of your tokens to an empty grid square or a square that already has your tokens. If you overfill the square (a square can hold # tokens == # sides adjoining other squares) then that token remains while the others spread out to the adjacent squares, converting them to your color, and possibly also overfilling them causing a chain reaction. This is one of those games where just because you have most of the board doesn't mean you're going to win, as the computer wiped me out after I had him to his last two or three squares. Nice graphics, good soundtrack, pretty good gameplay.

Number 1: Hunter Card. You have a stack of cards and a playing surface. Each round you deal four cards out. Pick one and put it on the playing surface, throw the rest away. Repeat 11 times. The object is to form combinations that score points. Each card has an animal, a sun or moon, and a season. Like cards can be grouped together to score some points, like animals with opposite others can be paired and you get bonus points, hunters can be grouped with prey and you get bonus points plus multipliers. Great pictures and smooth gameplay, the only glitch is that sometimes when you move the cursor over a card it doesn't give you the card stats (animal, day, season, whether it's a hunter or prey and what it eats or eats it). Some animals are rarer than others. I picked this as number 1 because it's original and fun.