Guess the Roman Number (1-500)

Post date: 17-Feb-2016 20:29:06

Game by: Simon Ferré

Reviewed by: Gabriele Amore

Well well well here is my very first review for a crap game: how thrilling! In fact this is my very first review for any game whatsoever (well, if you don’t consider those I wrote for my own games a while ago) and from the look of it (boy it is harder than I anticipated) it might very well be the last one in a long while.

Garish loading screen showing blocky attribute-clashing Romans walking in front of a Roman style building

Anyway, ”Guess the roman number”, so here it goes. Simon couldn’t have done a better job to get me back to my school years during the latin class hours: the same dizziness, confusion and uneasiness. Something like what you experience when your undershirt comes out your pants in a wet Winter school morning. In other words, this is truly the work of an (evil) genius. Just have a look at the presentation screen:

Horrid font with dithered background providing difficult to read instructions with no word wrapping.

Are you still complaining about how eye-watering is the color scheme of our new website? I have been squinting for about XV minutes at the screen in my emulator to try to figure out the instructions. And I don’t even dare to think about how this must look on real hardware!

Anyway after some additional X or XII minutes I finally felt confident and ready for the real game:

Still in the garish font, the game asks you to guess a number. It tells you how many lives you have left.

Looks familiar? Well I bet it does: Simon did make no effort to make your game experience any easier (or varied) by having the font to stick up a bit. Good job! This looks exactly as fuzzy as my Latin-to-Italian translation tests (“versioni” as they called them) from back in the days.

But wait: what about a victory screen for when you finally guess what the number is (speaking of which, I thought I had only three lives but it seems I have many more. Maybe I didn’t read the instructions carefully. I wonder why)? Well this is where Simon really excelled himself (look for yourself):

After guessing correctly, the game tells you how many lives you had left, and how many moves you took. Not that you can read any of it,

So in the end what can I say: “Guess the roman number” is clean good fun for the whole family and nothing in this game could have been done better than it was, or maybe wait: Simon could have written this directly in latin, so there is room for improvement (or worsening) after all!

Score: XC (if that is in fact a roman number)

Have fun!