There are hundreds of games on the Castle Paradox Game List. Most of them have been forgotten with time. But between now and November, twelve games will be placed into the spotlight.

And these will not be ordinary games. They will not be lumped together in a specific genre. They will not be chosen based on past reviews. They will be chosen by random, and they will take the OHR community by storm.

They will battle for supremacy in the second annual “Covered With Dust” contest, an impromptu contest that attempts to bring popularity back to obscure titles.

This is a HamsterSpeak exclusive contest. The only requirement is that the game had little to no publicity or popularity since its first release.

As I go through the list, I’ll rate each game on Story Potential, Presentation, and Completion Level. Each rating category will have different values:

Story Potential evaluates whether the story is off to a decent start or if it has little to nothing developed.

Finally, each game will be mentioned according to its place on the list. The twelve games have already been reviewed and ranked. This article will cover twelfth place through ninth place.

Now that the politics have been addressed (for the second year in a row) it’s time to return them to the limelight.

-12th Place-
Zach’s Evil Plan to Save Taco Bell
By Erik Krakora
Released: November 30, 2001

Taco Bell has two camps: The people who think it’s the healthiest place on earth, deeming it the Alpha-Eatery of the Survival of the Fittest (according to the movie Demolition Man), and those who think it’s hell on the intestines. This is how it is in the real world. In a world where people walk, talk, and eat, Taco Bell is a polarized place.

However, in a world where egg-shaped lamps walk the earth, Taco Bell is a nation, and one that is clearly infested with nonsensical things. Things like birds that resemble the letter “L.” Things like egg-shaped lamps that kill other egg-shaped lamps by “electrocuting” them. Things that have spells related to bodily functions, but ironically have little or nothing able to contribute to such expulsions. And nowhere in that nation is there a true Taco Bell.

Was he surprised that the villagers were also egg lamps?

There are plenty of houses, though. And inns. And weapons and armor shops. Oh, but the egg-shaped lamps of the world can’t enter any of them, so they shall not have any funny ideas. They’re stuck wandering the garbled mess of trees, wall-maze parking lots, and landscapes I don’t readily recognize.

And yes, our hero is one such egg-shaped lamp. And I believe the egg-shaped lamp has a mission. Through the magic of painted cut scenes (and by painted, I mean broad and splattered), the player is given the chance to decipher the jumble of English words presented in crammed text boxes in an effort to uncover the plot. But once the game gets going and the fourth-grader drawings start attacking every third step, that futile attempt is lost and all that remains is the hopelessness that this game might actually take more than a few minutes to finish.

Fortunately, there is only one map. And the boss, who merely laughs for a battle cry, stands at the edge of it. And when he goes down, the door behind him is frozen, and the land of Taco Bell remains in a perpetual state of uncertainty--as none of us know who he was, why he was there, if our mission was a success--and in the end, victory is lost, because none of us really know who the heck this “Zach” dude is, nor do we know if the day would come that he should enact his “evil plan” again someday.

Story Potential: 1
Presentation: 2
Completion Level: 1

Verdict: Between a nonexistent story line (unless fighting monsters for the heck of it counts as a story line), the confused dialogue, the stock piano BAMs, and the incomprehensible graphics and map design, I think the only thing giving this game any shred of dignity is its wild egg font. Pretty lousy otherwise.

Parting Words: I think this game officially makes me feel bad for the characters associated with it and sorry that they’re stuck in such a wretched looking place.

A creature of sophistocation.

Twelfth Place Comparison:

A Blank Mind (Sept. 2008) vs. Zach’s Evil Plan to Save Taco Bell (Sept. 2009)

While the Taco Bell game is atrocious, it does attempt to give the player things to do like collecting treasures and fighting random enemies. A Blank Mind was essentially a slab of rock with carved out tunnels and a hero plopped in the desolate middle, so A Blank Mind still reigns at the bottom of the “Covered With Dust” barrel.

-11th Place-
To Be a Hero
By Jjkaybomb
Released: February 4, 2004

Jijo wants to be a hero like the ones in her favorite books. Pretty simple premise, I think, something that most kids can identify with. How many of us wanted to be Spider-Man for a day or someone with better luck than us for a lifetime? Hands claw toward the ceiling all over the room. One could hardly blame Jijo for wanting to emulate her stock collection of anime heroes.

Like most girls her age.

The devil and his demons, meanwhile, want to spread confusion among the universe’s heroes so that they can find an easy way to kill them.

How will these two forces meet?

And on a side note, who stole my burrito?

This is where we return to Jijo’s bedroom and see her staring out her window. It is clear that she is oblivious.

First, she explores her mostly empty house, conversing with her scattered family. Her mom wanders aimlessly around the kitchen and doesn’t seem too concerned with her daughter’s random Spacebar activations. Her sister lies on the couch and complains that she can’t watch her anime program because her brother is playing video games, and her brother sits in front of the couch playing video games. It is the perfect model of a nuclear family.

Evil is unaware that a thorn has punctured its side.

Jijo walks outside into the suburbs where the player is given a friendly, albeit casual message about play control, and how “R” will allow the hero to run and “W” to walk if the “plotscripter” did it right. Incidentally, it doesn’t work.

I didn’t notice. I was too busy wishing this game had more to offer.

The neighborhood is small, with a house here and a house there, but offers a few noticeable amenities like intersections and a lemonade stand in the park. As Jijo wanders through the mostly empty neighborhood, a kid with road rage tries to run her down with his tricycle in his backyard. Might be the high point of her journey.

In the park, the “lemonaid” vendor thinks Jijo is too old to have pigtails and a crazy guy nearby turns out to be a hero from the Naruto universe. So Jijo offers to take him back to her room. The player is given no other information about this turn of events. And her pigtails remain.

But I thought I was annoyingly cutesy? Which is it?

Jjkaybomb, the creator, stands omnisciently at the neighborhood’s every dead end and tells the player that a fatal plotscripting error has prevented her from implementing the next hero the way she wanted, so this is all we get until the next release (which allegedly never happened).

And so, we’re left with another hanging story about good versus evil in a sleepy little town where brothers hog video game consoles and possessed children try to run little girls over with tricycles.

So now for the pertinent question. Was this fun? Well, no, read the ranking. There was nothing to fight and not much to do. Words are spelled wrong constantly, even in the selection menu, which shouldn’t seem possible. While the graphics were okay, they didn’t make up for the incredible lack of detail in the areas that still exist, thus there was no real immersion into the scenes. Tie that into a ridiculous plot to pit anime heroes against true evil and, well, it’s clear that this game is trying too hard to do something that it really doesn’t have the legs for.

Are you afraid my game might get rained on?

Could this have gone somewhere? Maybe. But to have been released and abandoned after building two areas doesn’t speak well for its alternate future, so it’s probably better that this one took the dive into the trash can.

Wow, you should be a travel agent.

Story Potential: 3
Presentation: 3
Completion Level: 2

Verdict: For all that it’s missing or does wrong, it’s still a giant leap above the quality of the last ranked game, so at least it doesn’t have to dwell in the same pile as that piece of Taco Bell.

Parting Words: Leading example of why it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the tricks of the engine before you go out making a game you plan to release. This one really should’ve remained hidden in obscurity.

Eleventh Place Comparison:

OHRRPGCE 2000 Time Capsule (Sept. 2008) vs. To Be a Hero (Sept. 2009)

This one’s tricky because it’s truly comparing apples to oranges. However, if I were to rate this based on time an effort devoted to the creation, I’d say that To Be a Hero deserves the better spot of the two.

-10th Place-
The Grim
By Scython Reaper
Released: February 11, 2008

Death applies with job services for a position to become the Grim Reaper. The nasally job coordinator asks him what he’s good at, as any good nasally job coordinator would do. Death, in his perfect shadowy demeanor, explains that his special skill is to kill people (by touching them). The recruiter, Bob, then tells him that he’s qualified, but that he must first kill a kid in a “lazily done room” for him to actually get the job.

This, of course, is all told in a series of painted cut scenes. So far, so good.

Death enters the room made of red squares and confronts the nerd Melvin. Melvin is actually a demon in disguise and the Grim Reaper thinks that he’s in a pickle, but he attacks Melvin anyway, because that’s his job, and basically annihilates him.

And that’s it. That’s the game. A 2.5 MB download for two minutes of gameplay. And we don’t even get a game over screen. Death is stuck in a room with nowhere to go, and that jerk job coordinator—what was his name? Bob?—won’t even come to bail him out.

So was that giant, unformatted textbox.

That proves Melvin, the nerd demon’s, masterstroke. Though he sacrificed his scaly little life, he was victorious in the end. He captured Death. All because...well, I’m speculating here. The story is too short without my embellishment.

Oh well, let’s review, shall we?

The Grim reminds me in many ways of Gizmog’s late 2009 Terrible Games Contest entry Too Terrible!, in that several cut scenes tell something of a story but the actual gameplay comes down to a single battle. While I’ll admit that The Grim qualifies as a game more so than Too Terrible!, as The Grim offers one level where the player can move freely (though the only place he can go is down the hall toward Melvin) the battle itself takes that one shred of gameplay and tosses it out the window when Death slices Melvin with over a thousand points a hit and Melvin fails to retaliate. So the differences balance each other out, and in the end, The Grim proves that some authors still prefer lame jokes to good games.

In the author’s defense, he does warn the potential downloader that the game is supposed to be a satire. If I were giving it additional thought, I might’ve realized ahead of time that that meant walking through a single room and fighting a single battle. But the file was so large for something so small. For what, I don’t know. The music didn’t sound expensive. And there were only a handful of imported screens. My assumption is that the game was loaded with a bunch of hidden crap that the player is never treated to.

Actually, after opening the game in CUSTOM I saw the problem. It seems the music was expensive. Four OGG tracks to be precise. At least they sound pretty good. If nothing else, this game has a nice soundtrack; couldn’t tell you if the songs are original or not, though.

Story Potential: 4
Presentation: 2
Completion Level: 4

Verdict: Despite the game’s reasonably high numbers, don’t let the score fool you; this is not worth your time. The story could’ve been neat had the author developed it. Instead, he elected to go the joke game route and ruined what could’ve been cool. And he didn’t even bother to “draw” Melvin’s room. He created one red square and used it to lay the walls. Pretty lame.

Parting Words: The only reason this beat out the eleventh and twelfth place games is because it’s technically “complete.” Plus, I can’t honestly claim that I found bugs. In a word, everything that’s supposed to work does, so I can’t gripe about anything other than the gimmick.

Tenth Place Comparison:

Bubble (Sept. 2008) vs. The Grim (Sept. 2009)

Bubble had a lot more content than The Grim had, but it was also ugly, broken, and atrocious. Personally, I think even the eleventh place game on this year’s list is better than last year’s tenth place game, so the victorious one in this battle should be clear.

-9th Place-
Superkat
By Unknown
Released: January 2, 2001

One of the funny things about the OHR is that for every game posted on the main community sites like Castle Paradox, Slime Salad, and yesteryear’s RPG-Online and Operation: OHR, there are probably several that are posted on private sites or nowhere at all.

I suspect that this was the story of Superkat, since it wasn’t attached to any community page until Meatballsub started putting together the Hamster Wheel website. How Meatballsub came to find the game, one could only make a guess, but I imagine it was one of those files that popped up for a day some years ago and was immediately removed from memory. Not even the archive list on Hamster Republic has a listing for it. Very mysterious.

Like some mysteries, this scrambled game probably needed to stay as one. You can see the truth for yourself in the following “Covered With Dust” built-in Terrible Game Review.

A random cat appears in one of Wandering Hamster’s random alternate universes (with music from Legend of Zelda) and talks to blobs. The creatures don’t discuss their similarities to hamsters and plips, which is probably helpful for their credibility as unique characters—something they clearly have to struggle for, as nothing is truly original in RPGs these days—but they do discuss the cat’s exiting strategy, which one blob tells him he that can leave the area through the tower, and another, and yet another tells him the same. As I said, there’s nothing truly original in RPGs anymore.

Will I look forward to discovering this kingdom?

Before leaving Wandering Hamster Town, Superkat enters the tower of Joey and Boey. Now, this would seem like a good idea on the surface, to enter a stranger’s private home without a summons, but Superkat discovers the hard way that some things just aren’t trustworthy. Joey attacks our feline hero and Boey asks him not to take anything from his house. Little does Boey know, however, that there is nothing in his house to take.

Upon visiting the second tower (the one where Bobbie lives), Superkat asks him if he wants to go around killing people with him. Bobbie seems nonchalant about the proposal when he agrees. The mark of a true hero, no doubt.

To your heart’s content, buddy.

With nothing left to do in the grassy plains of Wandering Hamster Rip-off land, Superkat exits through the south tower (as the blobs suggested) and instantly warps to the big city. There, he buys some smokes from a greasy guy in the streets to the sounds of Christmas music. When Superkat sticks the cigarette in his mouth, all his stats increase. Then he buys a gun and some Pepsi from same pink ball with shades.

Another pink guy with equal rudeness tries to hit him up with the same crap across the street.

A few yards up the block, past the insane number of trashcans, Superkat enters a house full of human heads and encounters ANOTHER pink guy who tries to hock his same old junk onto him. I started running a tally after that.

Hey, Bobbie. I think there’re some decapitated heads in the next aisle. Wanna see?

In the empty room behind the in-store pink ball with sunglasses, a hostage cries for help. Superkat enters the room, beats the hostage up, and steals his money. His heroics will never cease to amaze.

With the “Big City” being nothing more than a highway with passing automobiles and a couple houses and a landfill of trashcans, it’s easy to find the one unique pink guy who isn’t trying to sell Superkat crap. Instead, he sells him a key to a “Spooky House.”

And can anyone guess what the spookiest thing is about the house? That’s right, it plays X-Files music.

To reach the Spooky House, Superkat has to travel south into the annex of trashcans and climb down a manhole. Then he drops into this basement full of tombstones, zombie-ghost things, blood puddles and portals. There are also construction workers wandering around the room searching for their missing friend.

Reviewer’s Note:

Did I mention that there was a construction worker topside who opened up a portal from a sidewalk fissure and fell in? No? Did I mention that Superkat had an indirect mission to find this lost construction worker? I must’ve forgotten about it.

Smart enough to make the hole, but not enough to stay out of it.

Back to Game:

So, in the middle of the house, Superkat finds a tile branded with a doll imprint. Of course, there is no doll in the house. Or in any of the places that Superkat can freely travel from Wandering Hamster Land to the Spooky House. And enemies don’t die when they’re beaten (part of the story), or attack unless prompted.

Reviewer’s Note:

Okay, I stand corrected. There was a doll. But I had to search every tombstone to find it. And when I found it, the whole tombstone disappeared. I am one mighty Superkat.

Back to Game:

Superkat returns topside to discover that the construction tape is broken and that he can now step past it to investigate the vortex. Well, he steps into that vortex, and you know where it drops him?

Yep, into another Wandering Hamster universe.

After stepping through yet another vortex, Superkat wanders through an annoying overhead forest with some high treetops that allegedly marks his path, but doesn’t do a very good job, and ends up inside a castle where Fred the construction worker is waiting to join the party and walk out sideways like a crab.

The heroes bring Fred back, his brain dead coworker still thinks he was gone, and the other coworker tells the heroes to go check out Happy Town. Superkat leaves Fred behind and goes to Happy Town.

Reviewer’s Note:

Felt like victory to me—time well spent.

Back to Game:

In Happy Town, they find a cave in the earth, so they jump in. They’re not too bright themselves.

Don’t even need a flashlight.

Some creature gnashes its teeth in the middle of the cave so out of the way from any travel path that to encounter it would be unnecessary and foolish. Superkat steps on it and gets hurt pretty badly. Lesson learned. The cave is empty otherwise. There are several branches leading to nowhere and a couple exits in the eastern arteries. Superkat takes the southeastern exit first and finds a troll mountain outside. There, the sun shines, the earth smells like dew, and the tension between two camps lingers.

Superkat encounters the blue trolls on the western side of the mountain. They have big heads and look like they belong on the tip of a pencil. They tell him not to mess with the “red trolls.” Inside their houses he finds treasure boxes containing mostly equipable trinkets like necklaces and vests. The stats they offer are ridiculous.

Across the mountain, Superkat beats up a gang of red trolls and steals their “undies.” Mark of a true hero number three.

That’s no way to talk to a redheaded stepchild.

Inside the red troll camp, Superkat enters a house with a bloodied wall and is told that he has to fight a ninja for a spaceship key. Then that ninja transforms into a redheaded troll before Superkat’s very eyes and commences the awkwardly skewed battle in Superkat’s favor. (And I don’t think he gave him a spaceship key. Oh wait, yes he did. It’s tiny.)

The spaceship, in the backyard, is also tiny, and it doesn’t take Superkat anywhere that he can’t go on foot. Anywhere except to one plot of grass that has a lone treasure box. And that treasure box? Contains a map to a secret island that requires a pirate crew to sail to.

From there, Superkat flies the spaceship (could’ve just as easily been a hot air balloon) to the mountain path, exits, and returns to the cave. Then he travels to the northeastern exit and emerges onto a ledge overlooking the sea. There is also a boat waiting on the side of the dock.

Superkat and friend travels to Dockz town, after deciding that none of the trolls are worth recruiting into the crew, and encounters a pirate town full of bugz.

Yes, doors to shops drop Superkat back into the cave. The tavern keeper talks his ear off in an endless loop, and the pirate who agrees to join the party multiplies before his very eyes (and he looks like Superkat!).

So yeah, the player is convinced this game is unfinished.

And that’s Superkat in a nutshell. It’s bland, kind of a rip-off, and not planned very well. It does take some time to reach the pirate town, so it does have length in its favor, but my least favorite movie of all time is longer than my favorite movie of all time, so length means nothing in the long run.

To go back to the mysteriousness of its unveiling, I think there’s a reason why it was never released (not officially anyway). The author clearly understood that he had little to show and probably didn’t want to burden the community with such a dismal title. Because so many others fail to acknowledge the lack of readiness and release a canker sore into the community anyway, I think whoever made this game, while not thinking through the design, at least considered the marketing problem, and for that I think he deserves some kudos.

Story Potential: 2
Presentation: 3
Completion Level: 2

Verdict: For the most part this game is senseless, aimless, and pointless. Nothing about it screams “winner.” But it does attempt to be an adventure, so it’s better than most one-map demos. What it implements, however, it does so badly.

Parting Words: Again, Meatballsub found this game somehow, but if it takes a treasure hunter’s skills to accomplish that, then this author can’t really be blamed for its position today. He deserves to outrank the other titles before his just because he didn’t release a five-minute demo or subject the community to a mass release at all. While still a terrible effort, at least the author made an effort, and that counts for something.

Ninth Place Comparison:

The Fallen Knight (Sept. 2008) vs. Superkat (Sept. 2009)

Once again we have a clear lead in quality this year than we did last year. The Fallen Knight was quite short and had maybe one or two places worth exploring (if “worth” is not too strong of a word). Superkat had plenty of places to explore—it just presented them in muddy, ripped ways. One cannot praise quantity over quality, but I think in this case, both lack quality, so quantity wins by default.

And that concludes the first part of 2009’s edition of Covered With Dust and part four of the entire series. Next month, we’ll see the mid-list results, so come on back and pull up a chair.