Interesting. I'm not really a Platformer guy myself, but on my wanderings I did see lots of people doing them. How did this make your list as a 5? What finesses about platformers are super important to you?
And how tight do you like your difficulty levels? In the comments I keep seeing notes between the commenters and devs that the devs misjudge the difficulty quite often, maybe because they intuitively have a feel for how they are involved with the controls and the content, and can make all those tight hops. (But then I never mastered the asdw/arrow controls for games either.)
In my surveys here I tend to enjoy relaxing with a game that others might call too easy, but it means I can at least get solidly into the game before maybe some spot just makes me call it a day and move on.
Corollary, I like watching speedruns! : )
Edit: I just needed a nap!-TaoPhoenix
It's definitely a hard game. In fact, I didn't beat it.
But I rated it as a 5 in all categories because...
Somebody created it from scratch in 48 hours.
The art was pretty good. It all fit a style/theme and worked well together. It looked good.
The game itself was pretty well developed. Text above the player's head, the police chasing the escapee, the helicoptor, the platformer controls were pretty good (though I feel there was a problem with knowing where the player's feet were, which made it easy to fall off the edge just as you press the jump button.
The sounds and audio were well done.
It made a good use of the theme "Beneath the Surface"
It wasn't a worm game or underwater game (good innovation).
Etc.
I think most people, when reviewing games, give a rating based on how much they enjoy playing the game, or seeing the pretty visuals, or hearing the nice audio. I think the LD ratings are (or should be) different. I think the rating should be based on the understanding that time was limited, and developing all aspects of a game is difficult with such limitations on time. In other words, I'm rating not just how enjoyable I feel the game is, but also based on how well developed it is.
Senilescape might not be that impressive of a game compared to something like Super Meat Boy (which I believe also had its origins in a LD competition), but the difference between Super Meat Boy and Senilescape is that Senilescape was made in 48 hours by one person while Super Meat Boy was made over the course of several months by (mainly) two or three people and (IIRC) with grant money and other support from Microsoft.
Senilescape is one of the few games that both impressed me from a technical/completeness perspective and from a fun/gameplay perspective. Really, the only complaint I have about it is that the jumping was a tiny bit off, resulting in falling onto spikes when I felt the jump button should have worked. My guess for this problem is that the physics engine probably sees the character as a thinner rectangle than the sprite would indicate.
That is, if the physics sees the character as the size outlined in pink then the sprite gives the player the impression he has some extra width (underlined in green) that is still standing on the ledge before he has to jump. This means that if the pink area is no longer on the ground, but the green area still is, the player will be unable to jump and will fall.
