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Very difficult to control the car, and it seems to get stuck if you hit the frame border. Poor selection of colors, aliased graphics and rendering isn't very smooth. You do have skid tracks, and that's nice.

Sorry, but I didn't enjoy this game. There are other 4K racing games that are much more impressive, and I can't help but to compare it with others.

Plays well, however controls are a little too sensitive.

AI is a little too good and the graphics are a little bland (mainly due to the standard set by other games).

Not bad but just doesn't hold the attention for long enough.

When playing this game I immediately ran into an issue where you'd get stuck when hitting the edge of the playing field. In that regard it's very unforgiving, although it's fair to say you normally wouldn't steer your car that badly. It's however annoying when trying to master the controls. The graphics are plain and simple, with the rubber trails as a nice bonus.

Nice game! Very challenging. It was difficult for me to get beyond 2000m, it just kept getting too fast for me. I must be getting to old to play fast paced games :)

Procedurally generated levels each time you play increases replay value, and displaying your best score makes you want to try to play again. The shaking effect increases the gameplay immersion making it more believable that you're jumping across collapsing skyscrapers.

Graphics are nicely done, stylish, but I would have liked to see colors. It's also very strangely small, not sure if that matters.

Great homage to the original Canabalt game. The attention to details is great whether it be the birds, breaking glass, collapsing buildings, etc.

Its also very addictive trying to beat your old score.

Easy to learn, hard to master. What else would you expect from a game where you only have one button to control the life of your main character. As with a lot of platformers it all boils down to timing and lightning fast reflexes once your little man picks up speed. Nice details like the crumbling buildings, falling objects, disturbed birds on the roof and the overall grey (dusty) environment add to the athmosphere of this game. The game is downright harsh when you jump straight into a building, when you were aiming for the corridor, but for one thing it adds to the replay value. Although in this genre it's hard to add depth to the gameplay, it would have gotten bonus points for an attempt in that direction.

Very smart game. I like it a lot. The 3D effect gives it a nice touch, although it makes it difficult to control the cube and see the color of all sides, so it can be confusing. Difficult to understand the function of all tiles, especially the ones with only a outline rendered.

Many levels with different type of challenges makes this a superb puzzle game. Nicely designed levels.

Only downside is that it's more of a trial and error game, rather than actually trying to imagine and visualize the solutions, like in Sokoban.

This is very nice and original idea.

The 3d graphics are very nice and suitable.

The puzzles are also pretty well designed.

Probably one of my favourite 4k games this year.

The graphics of this game are plain and simple, but the result is great. You will quickly get the hang of this game, because the gameplay concept is sound and there is a surprisingly intelligent level design. When you advance through the levels not only does it get more interesting, you are drawn into the game searching for the optimal strategy. If there were more levels you'd easily play for hours. It feels polished and it doesn't feel like the 4K restriction really did the core concept any harm.

Interesting game. The description is quite, let's say imaginative :) It's quite challenging, so it's good that you restart at the same level with 3 guys.

The graphics look nice, fine AI, bullets flying, units being controlled, scrollable world. Very impressive technically. I can imagine a full version of a similar gameplay, something like Starcraft marines meet Half Life critters.

I wish I knew what to use this "spawn" for. But nice submission.

nice idea and well done for cramming so much in there. However the game is a little on the difficult. The controls work well but its slightly frustrating to play due to the AI characters getting stuck a little. The graphics are decent but could use some more harmonising.

It's amazing how much RTS gameplay you can actually stuff into 4K. The game feels kinda hard, as the cute little enemies easily do you real harm, while there is no way to heal your soldiers or to gain new troops. Having said that, once you lure the enemy towards you, while running back frantically, you can actually manage to play through most levels. The AI's pathfinding is dirt stupid and is easily taken advantage of, which is a nice balance for the overpowered chickens and pigs.

Ahh... I know a lot of people like these kind of games, but I'm not one of them. It seems to be more about brute force trial and error than the game actually leading you somewhere. And I don't think all my keys work, on my keyboard layout (Icelandic) I couldn't type | (pipe right?), because I have use AltGr in combination with < and > key.

My only enjoyment came from closing the game down. I'm harsh, I know. :(

Text adventure games are very niche. However they do allow you to get away with a lot of criteria that other games are judged on. As a text adventure Before Z is reasonably average. Not being a fan of genre I will give it a respectable 50% score.

Sadly this is a combination of not having time to take more than 5-10 minutes to play each game, and not liking the text based adventure genre in general. I walked around in the game for a bit, picked up some objects, and unfortunately had to leave it at that. Within 5-10 minutes there is absolutely no way to get an idea of what potentially beautiful game lies behind the text interface. I again apologize for this review. I gave it a rather high score as to not have to have too much impact on the final ranking.

Very impressive game. The graphics are amazing, and it's clear you've spent a lot of time making it look nice. The zooming effect where you show the track is nice.

Fun game with lots packed in, physics, collecting coins, and riding a track, and some nice animations and rendering.

Pretty good art style and graphics. Plays reasonably well. The attention to details is pretty good. A little on the easy side but there are smalls parts which are a little challenging. Controls are generally pretty good but fell just a tiny bit stiff. Overall fairly fun to play.

Being a biker myself I'm probably a bit biased towards this game. The physics are simply hilarious for a game that takes itself so serious that it calculates the gears and my cadance. The nice touches are the graphics and the collision detection though. The animation is really smooth and slick, and the wheels and legs rotate at exactly the right speed. It's sad that you make the weirdest crashes from simple dropoffs, but taking it slow normally gets you where you want.

Interesting game, I like it. Very similar to Sokoban, and I like Sokoban very much.

Two things that bothered me were the artstyle/colors and also the inputs, you seem to only move the box when the key has been released, not when it's pressed. You could have done more with the art style and coloring theme, check the Sokoban game previously submitted on this site, that's an example of nice color and artstyle selection.

Should allow player to skip level he can't finish.

But overall a very nice puzzle game.

Very nice and original idea. The puzzles are very nicely made and the art made out of the puzzles is very nice.

This is a very addictive and challenging game.

This game is a mix between sokoban and a match-two game. It's not really fun by itself, as the levels are rather easy, but the replay value is in trying to take the shortest route possible to the target. This game gets bonuspoints for the amount of levels in the game. It has to be said that the keyboard control felt laggy and often keystrokes were missed by the game.

Wow. I think we have a winner! What an amazing game, I didn't expect much at first, but then I just got hooked. Always new things to try out in each level, makes it a very interesting and exciting game. The cartoonish look and bunny suits the game.

Very nice graphics, gameplay and overall great game.

nicely done graphics effect. The game plays well and does gets tricky as you progress. Some of the jumps require some pretty tight timing. Overall nice and challenging.

The mechanics of this game are reasonably simple and you can easily spend a few hours trying to make the perfect run through the levels. The gameplay isn't really original so most points go to the technical achievement of implementing a software rasterizer within 4K.

Interesting game idea, color mixing! However, it seems very complicated how to play. The rules are difficult to understand, and I did get stuck not knowing what to do. The notion of primary and secondary colors wasn't quite understood by me. And now that I've spent a few minutes tinkering with it, I think a lot of people will just not bother with it.

Nice idea, but difficult to play.

Nice original idea. Some of the puzzles require some thought to be put in. However rather basic. Not a bad game but a general slow paced puzzle game. Could have a used a bit more polish to help liven it up a little.

This feels like a rule-engine turned into a game. While the game concept is certainly original, the rules seem purely mathematical and not intuitive at all. The graphics might have saved this game, but they are kept minimalistic. Some animations could have explained the color mixing process to reduce the learning curve a bit. I had fun with this game, as I'm a bit mathematically inclined, but I can't see this game enjoying many players yet.

Nice looking combat game. I wasn't able to beat Dracula given my limited time for each game, so I do not know if there are more levels. If I'm unable to finish first level in 5-10 minutes then it's clearly too difficult.

But very nice look n' feel, but it did get on my nerves not being able to kill Dracula :(

Pretty faithfully remake of the battle with dracula. Fun to play however is just a boss battle.

The monochrome graphics of this game are perfect and beautifully designed. While there isn't much depth in the gameplay, it's still quite entertaining to hit the 'evil doer' in an awesome combo attack. Unfortunately there isn't much graphical feedback of either hitting Dracula or getting hit. It's also a bit of a bummer that Dracula often spawns right where you're standing. With a bit more depth this game would have gotten a higher score, but in its current shape it was hard to motivate myself playing it for much longer.

I like everything about this game except the ship physics and how it behaves. Pressing the thrust key make the ship jump out of control, hit the cave walls, rotate and whatever. I'm sure if you'd make the ship a bit better to control this would be one of the strong contender this year.

Graphics are pretty nice, particle effects, physics, etc. Overall a good job, but gameplay suffers because of control difficulty.

Really nice game and challeging to play. However the balance is a little off as you can touch the walls alot without much consequence. Also let down a little by being a bit buggy at times by not being able to pick up colonists.

Great particle effects though and very smooth.

It feels like this game is designed on a relatively slow PC, at least... on my PC it feels way too fast and very hard. Saving those poor men in the cave feels more like bouncing around occasionally bumping into those guys by accident. Did I already say it was hard to control? When looking at the graphics it's another story. Quite a bit of effort was put into that and the 'hostile defense system' has some fancy physics engine attached to it, although it barely impacts the gameplay. Although the game is nearly unplayable I give it a relatively high score as there is only a tiny thing wrong with it: thrust sensitivity!

Wow, I'm impressed. Extremely nice retro graphics and a well polished implementation. Animations are awesome and the gameplay is superb. It's fun to play and there's nothing that I can complain about. Great job.

Really well done puzzle game. Enjoyable and well polished. The art and graphics and well done and fit the theme very well. Good job for a 4k game.

There is something about those match-three games that keeps you coming back. It's maybe the simplicity or the constant awards you get for fixing tiny puzzles. Either way, this game can get highly addictive despite its simple looks. At moments it gets quite frantic, but due to the dimensions of the playing field big problems are quickly resolved. While the learning curve is not anywhere near steep enough, you can easily set the difficulty yourself in the menu.

Very nice remake. The AI is quite nice and it's challenging. Graphics are impressive, fonts and the fade in effect of the demons, explosion effects and other animation effects. The only thing that bothered me was that I wasn't able to move the ship all the way to the right and left, so it was difficult to know where it would stop.

Good remake and somewhat fun to play.

Really well put together shooter, really enjoyed playing it. The game gets harder slowly and the enemies get more and more impressive. The art and graphics are well done and the game controls are pretty good. The background is a little bland and could have done with some more attentions. Overall its a very nice experience (especially for a shmup).

Demon Attack is an excellent remake of the Atari version. It is hard. Damn hard, if you will. You can easily see how much of the work is in getting the enemies to behave exactly like they should. Obviously this game scores low in originality, but high in being able to create such a perfect clone within the constraints of 4K.

Nice Double Dragon demake :) I remember playing Double Dragon II A LOT as a kid with my older brother, it was THE game back in the days, must have finished it 20 times.

This submission is quite fun if you like endless punching and beating up on bunch of women. Quite difficult to know what the progress is and the surroundings don't change much.

I do like the parallax 3D effect, pretty cool, and graphics are impressive for a 4K game.

Nice game, good looking, but sort of limiting in gameplay.

Really nice art style and the gameplay is pretty good too. The enemy AI does a good job. The animation for falling down are nice too.

The game does however get a little repetitive after a few minutes of playing.

Another remake of which I never played the original :o( The core mechanics are quite good, although a bit simple. Once you figure out you need to knock down 'the other guy' immediately after he gets up, things start to get really easy. The logic to get all the enemies moving around move or less intelligently is impressive and I got the impression they actually try to make it a fair fight. The boss characters are only a bit bigger and a bit stronger than usual, giving this game a pretty shallow and linear feeling. But I guess I should blame the original for that!

Haha, I couldn't impress girls with my driving skills even if it meant saving my life! :)

Interesting submission. Seems to be more of a technical demo. It was too difficult to control the car, I kept getting warnings I was driving too slow or went too far away. I just could not do anything to move that impress o meter.

The rotating top-down view gives it a unique style, although I'm not sure if you need to rotate it. The skid effects are nice. Graphics are alright, although it may have a bit too much gray color. Only the car sticks out.

Gameplay wise, it's not much of a game, but still a fine submission.

Nice idea but the physics feels are a bit off and hard to control. This makes it a little frustrating play. The graphics, blur effect and skid marks are nice however.

You can say a lot about this game, but it is original! Reading the instructions made me smile and I was eager to give it a try. Turns out it was really hard to impress Kate, but after quite a few times I nearly impressed her, before I knocked her silly. Sigh. What this game really could have used is sound. It would have added a whole new dimension to it, maybe adding little squeeks from Kate to keep you motivated. Other than that, the physics are way off, but that's not really an issue in such an unconventional game. It was fun to play for a few minutes, but it kinda lacks replay value for me.

Very nice game. I like it. It's well designed and polished, simple to understand and play. Reminds me a bit of Desktop Tower Defense, but instead of towers you're using traps, and that's quite original. It's quite slow paced so it's perfect for casual gamers.

I'd definitely choose this game as one of the top 10 games this year.

Very nicely done, the graphics are very impressive. The game generally works well. Would have been nice if their was more variety of traps and monsters.

This game for once has the roles reversed from your typical dungeon game. You're not exploring a cave with monsters and treasure, you're the one that's trying to design and strategically position the traps to kill those dirt stupid adventurers. The AI's pathfinding is kinda bad, but you could say that's normal behaviour for adventurers: they might be looking for hidden treasure in every corner, burning or not. The game is actually fun to play, although the 'blob' looks quite off, compared to the other characters. It's the bright green ring that moves around hurting the adventurers somehow... well, it hurts the immersion. Another thing is that I didn't manage to restart a level. I have to restart the entire game to continue after I lost all my money. Normally that wouldn't be too bad, but in this case it is, because every level takes quite a long time. For this reason I didn't manage to get past the third level and after 2 tries there I gave up. I think these are minor issues because they are easily fixed. I really liked the game, as the underlying idea is original and properly implemented. Combine that with nice graphics and you've got a seriously enjoyable game.

Looks alright, but is way too easy. Once you understand that the boat will go in a straight line towards the cursor you'll never dent a buoy and slaughter the gators easily.

Could have made it more challenging, e.g. by making the gators move around and allowing them to eat the boat, or something like that.

Interesting, but the fun evaporated quickly.

The Really nice water effect looks especially awesome. The game plays well but ultimately ends up being a little on the easy side. The controls are really accurate. The gators don't do anything and might have been nice if they or the buoys moved to make the game more challenging.

One of the strengths of this game is the intuitive control of the airboat. It really tries to neatly position tiself at the mouse cursor, instead of rushing towards it. This might seem obvious, but I think quite an effort has been made to make it feel so smooth. Initially I shot spears all over the place to kill those cute crocodiles, until I read the instructions. It turned out simply crushing them with your airboat killed them, without wasting money in lost spears. Now because directing the boat around with the mouse was so intuitive, I could effortlessly kill all the crocs by simply sailing around the swamp. It's a shame how that invalidated the use of the spear, which must have taken quite a few bytes to implement. Maybe that space could have been used to make the crocs swim around or dive a bit? That would have added quite a lot to the skill required to quickly clear a level.

Quite fun! I hated when I got killed :( and that was often, always restarted it would seem, and it's easy to get killed when you move so fast up/down, e.g. hitting the walls and such. But it wasn't too bad, you were able to upgrade your weapons again pretty fast.

The visual effects are very nice, the distorted background gives it a nice 3D depth. Good selection of colors, and a overall very well polished.

The parallax art style is really great and the game is really nice and challging. Wish the power ups were slightly more different rather then just making the standard laser more powerful. Well well put together shmup.

This game too belongs in the 'easy to learn, hard to master' category. It's unforgiving at that too. It only takes you one hit, or one bump into a wall to die. What were those spaceship designers thinking! It's sad that for this very reason I couldn't explore the game, because I have way more games to judge. Judging from the screenshot it gets quite fancy in the levels I never reached. Too bad! So I'm just going to judge what I saw of the game and leave it at that: the graphics are nice, there is a sense of perspective/depth although the game is completely 2D. The powerups really give you the idea that you have a powerful spaceship, which quickly annihilates that alien scum, only to be destroyed by a slight bump into the wall. I'm really going to spend some time later on to investigate this game, because it's full of potential.

Nice, reminds me of my 4K game TankZone, but this one has much more stuff in it. I'm impressed, you got AI powered soldiers, tanks, turrets, mines, etc.

My only complaint is the controls, I always found better to make a forward/reverse and turn left/right keys rather than up/down/left/right keys for direction. That's just my personal preference maybe, but still, it was quite strange how the unit somehow danced around when changing direction.

I wasn't able to get very far, very difficult to destroy all obstacles when you can only shoot in 4 directions.

Nice challenging little game. The movement and shooting is a little quirky but its something that can be picked up after a few seconds of play. The difficulty and play sytle brings nice memories of games like Commando. Generally fun to play.

A quite enjoyable game, that has hilarious physics. The car I'm driving really has a mix of superb power steering and magnetic levitation. If it wasn't for the author, I'd have thought somebody epically failed at steering behaviours, but now it just makes me smile, when I make impossible moves to destroy that enemy tank. The bosses are not too hard, again, due to my awesome driving skills. Overall it's quite a simple game with nice sprites which gives it a polished look.

Pretty impressive remake. Many unique levels and always new challenges. It's like multiple games in one game. I'm baffled how you managed to squeeze all those graphics in there!

Fun and impressive.

Top marks for make a pretty good remake of the original. The game plays pretty well and is nice to play. However the game itself is a little shallow by the standard of todays games.

This game is very impressive in that it actually contains four mini games. The levels are so different that I can image it'd be hard to share much code among them, which makes it extremely impressive that it all fit into 4K. Although this was one of the easiest games so far, as I finished it within 3 minutes, it still makes me wonder how so much game-logic was stuffed into this game. The reason the final level was easy, what because of a bug where I could jump while I was still in the air, which allowed me to jump right out of the screen and land way beyond the spear-wielding savages, rescueing that cute girl effortlessly. The graphics are simply yet effective, in that despite the low resolution all items are recognizable and nicely animated.

I like the graphics, very impressive animations and such. But it's not a game I like playing. Even if I capture the crook the level just restarts, it would seem, or at least it looks very similar. So, it has a limited replay value. Maybe it's just me, I never liked those games where you had to go between floors.

But still a great accomplishment.

Very faithfully clone of the original game. The game is pretty cool. The only thing missing from being a perfect clone is sounds (beeps) that were in the original and might have been possible to implement in the 4k version. Excellent effort though.

Yet another pixel perfect remake of a game I never played! No points for creativity, but boy this is a fun game. The replay value is definitely there as you try to out smart the thief and the levels get more and more insane. The amount of work to get this game, trying to be a perfect clone, within 4K must be staggering. It still gives me this weird sensational feeling when I'm catching up to the thief. Sad as it may be, I can't give any points for the actual gameplay as it's a clone. This high score is purely based on the skills required to pull this off.

I remember playing Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo back in the days, the music haunts me even till this day.

Your implementations seems technically nice, and the graphics are there. But the gameplay and fun factor are distant. Roaming around in a maze, getting killed, looking for a sword that cannot be found is no fun.

Kudos on the implementation, but gameplay suffers.

This is amazing, you fit so much into 4k. The game is enjoyable and well done. Nice gameplay and graphics.

This is by far the most impressive 4K game I have ever seen. It is a real RPG in the sense that you fight monsters, collect items, use them and depend on them while you explore the world. As with all zeroone's games the spritesheet is huge and detailed. There is really nothing negative to say about this entry. It does what it is supposed to do and although I don't really like the RPG genre, the technical skill involved in fitting this game within 4K is mindblowing.

The problem for judges when it comes to multiplayer games is that it's very hard to review them properly, or appreciate them.

It looks very cool. What's not to like when it comes to a 3D game that is 4096 bytes or less?

But I'm a little bit confused over the gameplay, it looks like some sort of deathmatch game. I was able to quickly kill all the "wizards", and that was it?

Technically a great acheivement, not often you see a 3d multiplayer 4K game!

Brilliant 3d graphics for a 4k game.

However it is let down by poor gameplay and AI of the enemy wizards.

Not something that holds the interest of players very long as game.

From a technically stand point probably the best best 4k game this year.

This is the only game in this year's Java4K that supports multiplayer. It deserves some credit for taking the risk of spending quite a few bytes on that, while knowing hardly anybody will notice. This game has some other hidden gems, like how this software renderer manages to render grass as geometry. First I thought it was z-fighting along the edges of the dunes, but then I looked closer... such a shame that it is hardly visible, but it's really impressive. It's actually disappointing that so few bytes were left for actual gameplay, as it is linear at best. The AI is rather quick and dirty, by allowing it to just fly over obstacles (well, you can call it magic if you want). Despite the lack of gameplay, I think with this Java4K entry the technical achievement is most important.

Very neat. Is a bit confusing to play, because it's really a puzzle game like Sokoban, and hence the first level is too difficult, preventing players to give it it's deserving playtime.

Fun game that deserves a good try.

Really nice remake, the game is enjoyable and works well. However the difficulty can be a little frustrating but overall it plays pretty well.

A nice and simple game but basic rules, that mostly relies on its clever level design to make it entertaining. Good news that the levels are actually quite well designed, which easily makes you play this game and forgetting your surroundings. Obviously once you finished a level there is little to no replay value, but that's a given in most puzzlers. The graphics are kinda pale. It may have looked better with slightly/drastically different colors. The green color (grass!) of the ground initially made me think it was a top-down game, so my first few moves were a bit confusing. Ladders going straight into the ground didn't help much either. There is a nice motion-blur effect, that makes it look like an even older game (or older monitor). All in all a nice puzzler that can be quite enjoyable for 10 minutes.

I'm a big fan of Galcon and Starbaron, so I was hoping for a similar gameplay. But I was mistaken, instead I got a confusing UI, and like two pages of gameplay manual that's hard to digest.

What looks like a great game with a very detailed and complex gameplay really turns into a unplayable game. Perhaps an example of what happens when you try to make a too complex game in 4K.

At first glance the bland graphics and menus had me thinking not another poor 4k game. However once i started playing noticed the depth and strategy of the game. Actually played it for a while. Really enjoyable and deep. You should consider a full blown version some day. Nice work.

At first glance it looks like yet another galcon inspired game, where you move forces among planets to capture and defend them. When you read the instructions it turns out to be a game with much more complex game mechanics. Surprisningly it's a turnbased game instead of realtime. This makes all actions happen in the same turn (you instantly capture a planet) and taxing a planet in one turn prevents you from doing anything else in that turn. There are a lot of options in this game, but due to the 3 computer players there is little time to explore the game, as you'll be dead before you quite grasp how everything interacts. There are always four players in a game, so the alternative to getting blown away by the AI while learning the game, is setting three of them to 'human', which sadly makes the game unplayable due to having to control three players at once, which is a lot to take in, when you're learning a non-trivial game. I would have probably liked this game a lot more with a 1-vs-1 mode, to get the hang of it. Now I can solely judge it on how little of it I have seen (keep in mind I have limited time to review each game) and what the intructions tell me should be possible.

There is unfortunately way too much clicking menus for this game to be fun. It feels like running the administration of a small shop while being under constant attack of thieves. In a realtime game this wouldn't have been such a problem, but in a turnbased game you really need to get as the most out of your turn to be able to win. It is however appreciated that an attempt is made to squeeze a whole lot of logic into such a tiny game.

Why not use UP key to jump, or space? That's a lot more natural.

It looks pretty good, I like the out of this world clouds. Gameplay is pretty limited and it's difficult to control the player unit.

This could have been a better game.

Nice effects with the rocks in the background. However the sprites in the foreground could have used some more attention. The game generally is lacking and doesn't hold ones attention for too long. Still nice effort.

This game is solely justified by its backing story. If it wasn't for that, I'd have wondered what the heck we were jumping for. Glad to know there is something up there to save us. Maybe it's me, but I prefer games with a little more gameplay than 'jump to the next platform'. While in Java4K there are reasons to cut down on features, this one left too few in it to make it enjoyable. The graphics are certainly setting a good scene and are nice enough for the duration of the game.

One of the coolest 4K racing game out there. Alternating terrain and environment makes this game fun to play.

Brillient work with the road effect which is pretty impressive. The game generally plays well and the variety of the backgrounds and levels are really nice. Also nice effect with the details in the environments. The enemy car AI is a bit annoying when they come in a line to block your path as it feels a bit unnatural. Overall though very nice.

This game is finished, polished and fun. It uses the algorithms from a few decades ago to project this madness onto the screen and it does it extremely well. The further you advance, the more rude the other drivers get. It's a nice touch to add to an already perfect game. You barely have time to look at the carefully procedurally generated trees as you try to rush to your next checkpoint. Very few games are able to make you forget about the graphics, turning you into a frantic keyboard basher. The only downside may be the lack of sound, but seeing how few games actually managed to include sound this year, that's forgiven.

What a cool, cute and bloody game :)

Pretty inevitable to see the poor penguin get squashed, almost countless of times. Oh the gore!

Pretty easy to play and fun on the eyes. Great simple game that's challenging enough. A good example of a great 4K game.

Pretty brutal game for the poor little penguin. Its a nice idea and plays well. However there are some frustrations, the top part of the ice is a little hard to see and to spot the gaps there because it blends in with the sky behind it. Other then that a nice and original idea once you get the hang of it. Also can be hard sometimes to estimate the size of the gaps as they might look like the penguin will fit but doesn't. Good job though.

Everything in this game is about the first few seconds. You're looking are your cute little penguin and the next moment its blood is splashing on the ice. Absolutely not as much fun the second time around, but so damn cruel, it's worth a lot of points! The penguin looks really good and its animation is just right for this game. After the first level it's obvious that it's simply an inverse-pattern-match game (find the mismatch), which I haven't seen before. After a while it gets kinda boring, as it doesn't seem to get much harder. It would have been great to have found some variation in the gameplay, but as said, for me the sole reason I kept playing was that first moment of terror and hoping for more.

Oh my. My eyes are bleeding, and the sound makes me deaf. But seriously, it's a really a strange game that gives me a mild creeps. :)

I think there's also some audio bug, the music keeps playing even after I leave the page.

But still, it looks alright and not too bad.

Nice homage to the original game.

The horse animation is very nicely done however could have used some color and details to the actual sprite.

Bonus points for having sounds/music which is lacking in most 4k games and surprisingly it sounds fairly decent.

Sadly the game is let down massively by buggy jump controls which make it difficult to play. You can die in mid air even though your about to land a perfect jump on

I actually played the '2010 classic' a few days ago, and it helped me appreciate this weird game. The fact that the melody is included in this 4K derivative is worth bonus points. The game controls are really really bad, as is the collision detection. Still it mainly thrives on the good memories of the original. The animation of the unicorn is pretty nice, taking into account the code limitations, but the code that does the double jump really needs a second look. I often die in mid-air with no obstacles in sight, which is quite frustrating when I'm quite far into the level. The silly messages and instant reload of the level are the only things that keep me playing this weird little game for a few minutes. It would have been nice to have reviewed a polished version of this Java4K entry. It could have ended up in the top 20 solely because it ranks absurdly high on the surrealism scale.

Extremely simple, but yet effective game. Did get a bit predictive, but challenging.

Fun little game clearly made with minimum effort :)

Simple game, plays ok, however gets frustrating quickly due to having a rather slow pace which makes it a little boring. Not something that keeps the attention span for long.

Also pretty simple and bland graphics considering the standard set by other games this year.

However nice effort.

It's always hard to judge games that are inherently simple at their core. Most of the time it takes either slick graphics, a cunning level design or it must provide an interesting concept. Unfortunately this game does none of the above. While it may seem a good idea to make the new dots / rectangles appear on the axis where the mouse-pointer is, it's actually the main weakness of the game. You can easily play this game forever, by simply moving to the center when a new dot is about to appear, a few moments after that you move diagonally a bit and see all the dots fly by at a safe distance. Repeat. You'll see a nice red cross that will not do you any harm for the next 10 minutes. This game could have been a lot more frantic with randomized spawning positions of the red squares. It feels more like a proof of concept than an actual game. A few tweaks here and there could have saved it from this harsh score!

Hey, the holidays are over! :) Looks pretty nice, the theme is fine and gameplay too. You got multiple levels implemented and overall it looks like a fully implemented game.

One thing that really bugs me and that is the strange jumping behavior of the Santa. You should fix this and the game would become much more convenient to play.

Fine game but I imagine many shying away from playing fully because of strange jumping.

Nice art and look of the game. The small touches like the snow and lights on the trees is nice. The platforms and enemies are suitable for what the game is. The theme works pretty well. The jumping however is a huge let down, something to do with the gravity being too strong once you jump. Ultimately the poor controls effect the overall game experience make in hard to enjoy. With a little more tweaking could end up being nice.

Unfortunately santa claus suffers from this weird bounding box and physics. Jumps that seem very doable fail spectaculairly. It feels like rolling the dice when jumping from platform to platform. You often bounce off of ceilings that are not even close to you, ruining your otherwise perfect jump. Ahem. Maybe it's just me, but I find this game very hard to control. The graphics aren't spectaculair either, but it's nice to see there are actually more levels in the game, which makes you curious what's there to explore. Sadly I couldn't reach that far into the game, because there isn't a way to get rid of the enemies. A tad slower moving speed of the 'grinch' would have helped the game a lot. A game so unforgiving should have something to pull me back in and sadly I can't find it.

Oh, too bad I'm all alone playing it :( But I can easily imagine myself playing it with someone else 20 years ago.

It does seem a bit rugged. If bullets hit the top of the frame they seem to somehow freeze there for a second and then fall down. Angle accuracy of 10° is too much, should be 1°, when adjusting it, same with power. You're not able to fine tune it enough. Rendering speed seems quite slow as well, because bullets travel looks very jerky to me.

Otherwise very well done, I can imagine it being quite complex as well. So, hats off for you guys.

Can be enjoyable to an extent as two player, graphics are pretty basic compared to the current java4k standard. The terrain and background could have used some more details and colours. Again tanks could have improved in the look too. Second player is mandatory otherwise not enjoyable so an AI might have been nice.

One of the nice features of the original Scorched was that you could (try to) aim accurately. You'd win a game by launching a few shells exactly where you wanted them. I think this game has a simple yet crucial design flaw, in that it makes the adjustment of the power of your launch and the angle you're aiming at way to coarse to accurately control your cannon. I found myself in situations where I simply couldn't hit the target with a small shell and had to grab the biggest shells to blow away the surroundings, hoping the enery would drop to a lower level, where I could shoot it again. When the enemy is really close to the edge it's sometimes impossible to hit it, as the shell will just disappear. Further, for some reason the shells somehow interact with the top edge of the level, as they lose their ballistic trajectorary the moment they hit the top. That's just wrong in this kind of game! You might think I'm overly explaining what's going wrong here, but this is the core of the game and in my opinion it needs some work. Being able to adjust the angle of the cannon with five degrees instead of ten would have helped a lot. Having said that... the game certainly gets points for not being a clone, being multiplayer, explicitly mentioning there is no wind, all the time and having the guts to change all the game mechanics you're expecting!

Looks very nice. But it's so difficult to play. You can either choose to evade and survive, or try to shoot something and definitely get killed. So, it gets quite pointless to play even after a short while. I also think there's some bug, after playing for some time I kept pressing ctrl and space, and then UP, but the ship went DOWN. Not sure why.

Few suggestions, slow it down, make the gameplay area wider, let the bombs drop directly down where they were dropped. That should fix some gameplay issues.

Seems like a great implementation, but I just did not find myself enjoying it because of minor flaws.

Plays well but gets repetitive quickly. Its pretty tricky to get get the fuel. The choice of red for the background is a little strong on the eyes. However the game is reasonably enjoyable and challenging.

It really brings you back to the old days where mindless killing foreign technology was considered good measure, while searching the skies for extraterrestrials. Considering that, after reading the instructions, I was trying to evade the rockets launching and attempting to land near fuel stations, or trying to grab some fuel while flying past them. Needless to say I was wrong and simply needed to bomb them to gain the fuel I needed. That does not compute. Once I got past my headache, I found this game particularly entertaining in that it was well designed, with different types of enemies in the different levels. As there isn't any mentionably penalty for shooting, I decided to continuously drop bombs and fire bullets, which got me through most of the first part of the game without much thinking. For an arcade game within 4K it's nearly perfect, in that all the corners that were cut, are easily fixed and a slight graphics overhaul could turn it into a nice flash-game alike (that is a compliment).

Ok, I'm a bit lost. No seriously, I'm flubbergaffled. What am I supposed to do? How does it play? Not very natural to play this.

I wasn't able to grasp the rules after a quick read, and it seems like you need to understand them all very well to play this game.

Sorry, too complex for player.

Must say very impressed by this. The art style is very nice, the 3d making it even nicer. The rules are a little tricky first and a bit unintuitive as they require reading to actually pick up. The object that you control could have had a better look (rather then just a pick spot) but does the job. However the game is really enjoyable once you get the hang of it. Really nice effort.

When reading the first part of the instructions, I got more and more confused. What do those cubes do, why are they rolling, and what is a Super Shrink!cube, of which there can be only one? Eh, many, and why would I want to activate them. I was hesistant to even press the spacebar to start the game. I tried to learn this game by trial and error, but clearing the board doesn't seem to do me any good. I don't have the time to focus on learning the rules in this game, as there are more reviews to be written. Therefore the score is solely based on the the logic complexity and graphical appearance. The controls were properly designed and the camera was nicely positioned, giving you a good view of the playingfield.

Simple, yes :) This really looks like a Desktop Tower Defense game, only something like what was hacked together in a hurry. Could have bee much better, like a smaller grid where you had "creatures" coming from any sides, and you could place towers on only certain tiles.

Is playable, but graphics are just not there, and gameplay is as limited as it can get. Sorry, can't give you much for this.

The general presentation is a little poor. The graphics are very basic. The turrets are buggy and for some odd reason shoot in a random direction making them useless. Although commendable effort the game falls far short of the excepted standard of 4k games this year.

This game truely lives up to it's name. It's a simple strategy game, where you can, as always, quickly take advantage of its rules. Wait for a diagonally blowing wind, build three or four green rectangles at the top or bottom and put white rechtangle in front of them for defence. Piece of cake, you're done, you won!

This quick mockup really needs some work, but for now I rate it as I rate all games that never left the 'proof of concept' phase. Pitty! It could have been an enjoyable tower defence game.

Interesting game, original and looks fun. I'm sure if you had more time on it it could be a very strong contender.

I must have gotten obliterated by the red blobs hundreds of times and it was at times pretty difficult to jump between blobs. Needs to be better balanced and levels better designed. Not sure if the goal of the "least time" is good, I'd rather split it up between multiple levels, and you go to next level when you've "discovered" all the blobs.

Good idea, could be made into a fine game.

The game idea itselve is very impressive.

The art is a little bland due to just being circles that use the standard java2d colors.

Bonus points for well done music (very impressive for 4k).

Very nice, original and enjoyable though.

Space explore is certainly exploring new territory with it's own interpretation of gravity and interaction of large masses moving through the universe. Although the game looks simple, it's surprisingly hard at times. It's also very forgiving by having half a dozen savepoints to return to when you are hit by a ball of lava. You can see the author had some sense of humor when he placed one savepoint at a dead end in the game, from which you then have to spawn over and over. In every part of the 'galaxy' the challenges are quite different, which makes it interesting to explore what's beyond the next few stars. The generated music is actually bearable for longer than a few minutes, which gives it yet another boost in points.

Woohhaahh!! I feel like I'm back fighting the evil empire! :)

Pretty awesomely impressive fighter game. But it's a bit more of the same level after level. A bit more balancing would have made it a pretty interesting game, e.g. only having the smaller walkers in first level, and then slowly introduce the badder larger walkers as you progress.

This is really fun to play. The game really captures the feeling off the movies. It feels good to fly the ship.

You forget about the technical bits and play the game. Just wished you could have crammed more goodness in here to make a good game truly great. Something like a grappling hook to trip up the walkers.

But then again still pretty good.

Visually one of the most impressive 3D games this year. It's clear that for this entry, most of the bytes were spent on the graphics, which absolutely look superb. I understand that the gameplay is fairly linear given the looks, but to be frank there's not much to do, except shooting aliens. While shooting the laser makes your ship fly at half the speed might sound like a punishment, it's actually much easier, because you have longer to shoot before you reach your enemy and those poor bastards never seem to hit me either way. Retaining your speed while firing your laser may have made this beautiful game much more of a challenge to complete.

Looks very cool. I'm not sure though if my mind can quite grasp how to play this :)

I think the levels are too complex. I could finish the first level, but the 2nd just looks like a unsolvable confusing puzzle.

Should make simpler levels to begin with, people just surrender when they get slammed by complexity.

This game is genius and plays really well. The puzzles and levels are really well designed and work really great.

The game is fun, addicting and really pushes the boundaries of whats possible with 4k games.

Well done.

It's amazing how your brain adapts to the changing environment in this geniusly designed game. The level seems to radically change with the blink of an eye and you immediately adjust to your new surroundings. The design of each level is both brillant and disappointing because it leaves very little room for the player to make mistakes, other than to miss a jump. There is nearly always one way to go, whether you want it or not. Still this game leaves little to improve on, as it's so radically new and cunning that it boggles the mind to be even able to come up with it.

Nice style of this Mario clone and seems to be fully playable, and you don't seem to have forgotten the details, like flowers coming up the pipes and such.

Didn't have time to rescue the princess :) but I'm very impressed still.

Wow you fit a lot in there. It plays really well.

Loss of some points for inaccuracy of the clone such as no small mario (one hit kill) and being able to jump through blocks that should just hit your head or break.

Super Mario Land 4K is a nice clone of Mario, that has a smooth gameplay not seen in many other games in Java4K. The levels are long and interesting, making it a fun challenge to beat every level. Lucky the game isn't nerfed by a limited amount of lifes, forcing you to start all over, so you can always restart the current one. The graphics and animations are detailed and convincing, making it feel like a real (oldskool) game. The high score is for the polish and technical achievement of including so much content in the little space available.

Very fun and fully implemented and large trains puzzle game. Very convenient to play and after few moments I realized how to play. You could easily spend hours in this, and that's a indication of a good game :)

Nice and enjoyable game. The puzzle element is pretty nice. Visually though the game could have done with some more work. Nice effort though.

This is the perfect example of a game that is stripped to the bare minimum, while retaining all it's addictiveness. It gives the player an initially simple problem and a simple rule set. I found myself trying to make the cleanest solutions at first, but once the problems got more complex I discovered how to create entangled loops that feed off of eachother, being released by some artificially delayed train. It's just like programming in VB: use GOTO until it gets the correct-ish result and never look back. I actually had to force myself to stop playing. This game is way too much fun and I can totally see myself playing it for many rainy afternoons.

Cute looking game that brought a smile to me :)

Is a bit difficult to control the player, and you can't control the player whilst in air which makes you die more often.

Nice game nonetheless.

Nice effort, the graphics generally are pretty nicely detailed for a 4k game, however the backgrounds could have used a little detail to break the blandness. Main problem with the game is the controls. The movement is too slow and jumping frustrating. Inaccurate collision detection with spikes can be annoying. Also rather odd that you can't move in the air but if you hit a ledge you bounce back. However the theme and general presentation is good.

Unfortunately, there is an obvious flaw in this game and it's called the boundingbox. Never have I been so annoyed by it as in this game. I bounce down, left and right, while I have room enough to spare to make that jump. I managed to deliver the flowers in level 1, but I couldn't bring myself to continue. It's such a shame that one slightly altered variable could have made Valentino a much better game. Sorry. Points for graphics and technical achievement.

Galcon is great and your game looks very nice, very polished.

However, the red player isn't doing much, the AI is bad and makes this otherwise good looking game rather dull.

Nice attempt, plays well and the general presentation is good. However the AI is a little weak, played straight through it with no problems or difficulties. Generally though nice job.

With an improved menu, this game would simply be finished and would nicely fit among others in the strategy corner of casual game portals. In the first four levels the AI provides little resistance, but it slowly gains more and more intelligence, until in level five you have to pay some attention to win. I would have loved more levels, as the learning curve went up radically and I am curious how far the AI algorithms could have brought this small game.

Totally amazing. Wolfenstein in 4K! Who would have believed it!! :) My only complaint is that if you hit the wall you stop moving, sliding seems more appropriate.

But totally playable and cool.

Nicely done, the game plays well. Could have done with wall slide. How does get a bit bland and repetitive after a while. But generally a decent game. Good job.

What we have here is a small clone of Wolfenstein 3D, which is surprisingly identical, except for the corridor layout, as far as I can tell. Just like in the original, it's a bit hard to aim, as your keyboard arrows often make you rotate just a tad too far. It is not flawless though, due to collision detection issues, causing you to get stuck in, and look through walls.

Took me a while to figure it out. I'm a bit dyslexic on instructions, simple words like "like tic-tac-toe" would have given me a clue. Not sure what the turtle creature is doing or what it's role is.

But I think it's a neat puzzle game, and better than I initially expected.

Pretty difficult though :)

Oh the AI is brutal hard. Played a few times and couldn't beat it even though I'm a fan of the original physical game.

Very nice and cute presentation.

Nice effort but damn hard AI.

This simple implementation of four-in-a-row, lets you play against th AI. It's rather smart, so you really have to leave it no other choice than to make a bad move. The game is fun to play, but lacks the depth and complexity we're getting used to in Java4K entries.

Ahh... zombie games, gotta love them. But, very limited gameplay. The graphics are neat though.

Probably works best in cooperative mode, but cannot play it with another person. Singleplayer is very pointless I think.

Lovely graphics and art style. Really like how the bits start piling up. Two player is nice too. Lots of fun for a quick burst of play. But would be nice if their was some sort of penalty for falling of or breaking the jumping combo/chain (like the zombies eating you). Overall nice effort.

This is without a doubt the most absurd game of the bunch. The noise/grain effect adds to the athmosphere the game tries to create. Whoever came up with the idea for this game should have a checkup though. It's a mix of jumping on (zombie) springs and nice fireworks going off as a reward. After a few bounces you forget the ridiculous background story and try to pump up the bonus-multiplier. The only downside of this game is that its gameplay is barely linear. I'd say it's constant as best!