Same goes for me in that it's been a while since I've played any of the 5th quest entries. I went back and read the reviews I've previously posted to get a refresher. I didn't want to assign subcomponent scores for this round, but I'll likely be inclined to do so for the finalists. (In my previous reviews I usually included comments about difficulty/consistency, NES-authenticty, and intangibles/fun-factor). I'll keep the following comments about each quest relatively short but include links to my longer reviews.
In case it's not obvious from my scoring scale, just to be clear, I think BigJoe's and MischaPetya's quests are what I'd label the "first tier" quests, and the "second tier" would include the quests by Chris Miller, Nightmare, LoveForFire, and HeroOfFire. For sake of comparison, I'd say that my 0-10 rating scale is intended to roughly match the IMDB scale (per their top 250 list, the 250th best movie has a score of 8.0, and the top scoring movie has a score of 9.2).
BigJoe
Overall Score: 9.0
Review in quest thread: http://armageddongames.net/showthrea...l=1#post900450
This quest is at the top of my list for many reasons. The pacing is excellent throughout the game, which I feel is one of the most important parts of getting a good "fun factor" score. The review in the above link is the longest review I wrote for any of the 5th quests, so I don't think I have much more that is new to say.
MischaPetya
Overall Score: 8.8
Review in quest thread: http://armageddongames.net/showthrea...l=1#post900472
Oh man, the dungeons in this quest are great. Super-intricate-mazey dungeons all the way through level 6. I see that the difficulty was toned down a bit since I played this quest; there were previously a lot of firerobes and that made level 6 pretty difficult; I think it was a wise choice to tone it down a notch.
Chris Miller
Overall Score: 8.5
Review in quest thread: http://armageddongames.net/showthrea...l=1#post900350
Reasonably challenging in levels 7-9 (the earlier levels are a bit easy imo), but fun throughout. This is the only quest on my list that I didn't finish (I got to Ganon's room with the red ring, but I could not find the silver arrow).
Nightmare
Overall Score: 8.3
Review in quest thread: http://armageddongames.net/showthrea...l=1#post899519
This was the first of the 5th quests I played (the link above isn't much of a review but it does contain a number of my post-game thoughts and reflections.) The endgame (levels 7-9) is very fun to play, and it's definitely one of the more creative endgames that I played.
LoveForFire
Overall Score: 8.2
Review in quest thread: http://armageddongames.net/showthrea...l=1#post900451
This quest has a clear beginning-game-difficulty (levels 1-4), middle-game-difficulty (levels 5-7), and end-game-difficulty (levels 8-9); if you're not ready for them, levels 5 and 8 will kick your butt. Lots of fun to play. Loses some points for questionable uses of small keys (see my review for more details). Along with Nightmare's quest, this quest has one of the more creative final dungeons.
HeroOfFire
Overall Score: 8.1
Review in quest thread: http://armageddongames.net/showthrea...l=1#post900353
This quest has great pacing and is a lot of fun to play through level 7. The changing shutter script is a nice feature for diversifying the dungeon exploration. Unfortunately for this quest, levels 8 and 9 just didn't do it for me (those levels were too easy and too fast for endgame dungeons), and since they're at the end of the quest, that left a bad taste in mouth upon completing the game.
QuestWizard
Overall Score: 7.6
Review in quest thread: http://armageddongames.net/showthrea...l=1#post899901
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this quest's dungeons had a similar feel to the 4th quest's dungeons, which I thought was great. I should mention that I didn't find the magic key, so I sort of broke level 9 by arriving with enough small keys to unlock only the doors that needed unlocking.
Overall, all of the above quests were very fun to play; I completed all quests on this list except for finding the silver arrow in Chris Miller's quest. I'd say +1 to most of what Nightmare wrote regarding the difficulty of developing games; I've tried several times over the years to make my own quests, but I could never muster the patience to see a project through to completion. Mad props to all of you for making some fun games.
I should admit that I exercised some selection bias in the quests I chose to complete. Since there were a lot of quests from which to choose, I didn't invest the time in those quests that I suspected would be disqualified (for hopefully obvious reasons); in particular, the quests of CJC and Shoelace come to mind. I completed the first 2 levels of both of those quests. Had there not been so many other 5th quests to play, I could easily see myself having committed the time to continue both of these quests, as what I had played was quite enjoyable.
Scootaloo - I made it to the power bracelet in level 3 of your quest, but I didn't finish level 3. Sorry I didn't get to play more of it. Fwiw, I didn't think the tileset was DQ-worthy (it's still the standard ZC set for the overworld, dungeons, and enemies, but a few sprites [Abei, Ama, some items] are changed to Zelda2 sprites). I remember being impressed by the few dungeons I had explored, but I was turned off by your eliminating a lot of overworld caves.
I also played (and completed with 0 deaths) an early version of Travster's quest that was much easier than the current difficult version.
I like the idea of combining levels from different quests to make a "super 5th quest". (Off the top of my head, I'd at least nominate a level with HeroOfFire's changing shutter script [probably level 2] and Nightmare's level 9).
Assuming we narrow the entries to a top 3 (or top X), I'll probably plan to re-play (or play for the first time any quests not in my list) those finalists and post my thoughts.
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